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A review of correlations between big five personality types and life outcomes

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Re: A review of correlations between big five personality types and life outcomes

#231

Post by dTal »

edejong wrote: post #215
roenxi wrote: post #213

The author is making a subtle mistake; evolution doesn't mean like-parent-like-child. Evolution is likely selecting for, eg, people who have children at a certain ratio of introverted-extroverted. Introverted, disagreeable, high-contentious types make, for example, great scientists. A population (call it A) that produces a reasonable number of such people is at a huge advantage compared to the alternative that only p…

I came here to say essentially this. But what is the name of this process where groups of people select for variety instead of optimal individuals?

It's a type of natural selection called "group selection", and it's taboo, because it's very tempting to invoke it to explain away all sort of apparent paradoxes - but it requires very tricky circumstances to work at all, if it even can, and it's rare for the explain-away-ers to bother to show why it works in their particular instance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_selection

Re: A review of correlations between big five personality types and life outcomes

#232

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

jaredsohn wrote: post #152
tikhonj wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if this question is an example, but people intentionally include "obvious" questions in surveys to check whether people are actually paying attention to the survey. There's a name for these, I just don't recall it at the moment—which shows you I don't have any survey-design experience myself :).

According to a Google search, "Attention check questions" sounds like the right term

Also known as lie scales and have been around since at least the 50's. (Eysenck was first, I believe).

Re: A review of correlations between big five personality types and life outcomes

#233

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

anbende wrote: post #52
jawns wrote: post #20

I think a lot of this analysis is tautological -- meaning that when you boil it down, you're just saying that things are as you have defined them to be. For instance, take a Big Five trait such as agreeableness. How do we know that a person is agreeable? Because we define agreeableness in a certain way and then measure the degree to which someone conforms to the definition. If that measurement includes questions such…

While this is true for a lot of common psychological constructs, the Big Five were not defined according to agreement or consensus. The definitions were driven by the lexical hypothesis whereby the wide variety of personality descriptive adjectives in human language were factor analyzed and found to cluster into 5 distinct factors. So this isn't tautological in the way that you've described, though it is certainly re…

To be fair, Costa and McCrae did a lot of great work on the Big 5, but they really didn't like it when SEM/CFA didn't really support their theory.

In fact, they liked it so little that they invented Procrustean rotation so that they could make the factors come out the "correct" way.

Once I discovered that, I paid a lot less attention to the Big 5.

Also, I haven't checked the source papers, but that all blue stuff could come from a general tendency to agree with the questions/put a positive spin on that. I do know that not all personality measures are balanced on positive vs negative questions, to remove this bias (life satisfaction methods are almost certainly not balanced in this way).

Re: A review of correlations between big five personality types and life outcomes

#234

Post by dTal »

roenxi wrote: post #217
edejong wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I came here to say essentially this. But what is the name of this process where groups of people select for variety instead of optimal individuals?

I'm confident that it is evolution. People don't evolve, populations evolve.

You're confident, but evolutionary biologists largely don't agree with you. I strongly recommend you glance over some of the reasons why at the Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_selection

In a nutshell - "The problem with group selection is that for a whole group to get a single trait, it must spread through the whole group first by regular evolution... a group where altruism was universal would indeed outcompete a group where every creature acted in its own interest, so group selection might seem feasible; but a mixed group of altruists and non-altruists would be vulnerable to cheating by non-altruists within the group, so group selection would collapse."

Re: A review of correlations between big five personality types and life outcomes

#235

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

vlovich123 wrote: post #85
anbende wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While this is true for a lot of common psychological constructs, the Big Five were not defined according to agreement or consensus. The definitions were driven by the lexical hypothesis whereby the wide variety of personality descriptive adjectives in human language were factor analyzed and found to cluster into 5 distinct factors. So this isn't tautological in the way that you've described, though it is certainly re…

Humorism was a field of academic study for two millennia before germ theory demonstrated how laughable the entire field was. It’s always important to remember that doing research in a field doesn’t necessarily mean that the field itself is on a solid foundation that maps to reality. Psychology and psychiatry really do struggle to demonstrate statistically meaningful results behind most therapies (CBT is perhaps a not…

> Neuroscience has a bit more behind it because it’s actually rooted in quantifiable measurements somewhat and even there it’s difficult.

The problem still remains of how the physical measurements (even assuming we could measure them perfectly, which we definitely can't) relate to the internal experience.

Any real theory of psychology/neuroscience needs to be able to explain that, and currently I'm not aware of any that do.

> Psychology and psychiatry really do struggle to demonstrate statistically meaningful results behind most therapies (CBT is perhaps a notable exception, although even there results can be mixed)

So it's incredibly difficult to do good studies of therapy, because there is no simple placebo. All of the research I've seen suggests that there's huge amount of provider-level variance, which swamps the theoretically meaningful defences. I would suggest that this is because we don't really have a good understanding of how to interrogate our own (or others) psyches, which is definitely not something that neuroscience will help with (given the current state of the field, at least).

Re: A review of correlations between big five personality types and life outcomes

#236

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

anbende wrote: post #82
jawns wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But isn't that just tautology with an intermediate step? You might have Personality Descriptive Adjective X that is found to cluster into what we call a Big Five trait. But Adjective X has its own definition, and it's likely that the tautology (at least insofar as these life satisfaction correlations are concerned) happens at that level.

Tautology implies that the definition we give is redundant, but none of these things were defined in this way. This is because none of the research relies on this kind of dictionary definition. Instead, they literally ask people hundreds of questions of the type: "To what extent would you consider yourself to be [adjective]?" (0 - 'not at all' to 5 - 'complete') Then they factor analyze the results to see which adjec…

> Then they factor analyze the results to see which adjectives tend to be highly related to each other. Factor analysis builds on correlation to find shared variation among large groups of indicator variables.

The big problem with these results (and god knows I've analysed enough of them) is that the extent that they map to other characteristics measured without surveys is pretty much unknown.

If you want to create a new measure of extraversion, then you use the older methods (i.e. other surveys), and this only really tells you that the new measure correlates with the old.

I vaguely recall Eysenck doing physiological tests for extraversion/introversion which would avoid this problem, but I'm not aware of any more recent research in this area (mind you, I've been out of the field for a decade now).

Re: A review of correlations between big five personality types and life outcomes

#237

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

anbende wrote: post #104
dr_dshiv wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose they asked 1000s of different questions, each representing a different personality characteristic. After factor analysis, some arbitrary number of factors were found to account for most of the variance. Why did they settle for 5 vs 8 vs 12?

There are a number of metrics that are commonly used to settle on a number of factors to extract. There's some judgment in it to be sure, but you are looking at data-driven phenomena as well like percentage of variance explained, a precipitous drop in new added value, and etc. Essentially you come to a point where extracting another value isn't explaining much more variance or producing a factor that's meaningful (e.…

Like pretty much every unsupervised learning problem, there is no data which can tell you what N should be. If there was, you could trivially use that measure to convert it to a supervised learning problem.

More generally, all of those metrics are pretty fluffy (the scree plot is probably the best, as it doesn't give you a p-value).

In order to actually do this right, you need multiple studies and CFA, but the standard in the field is to refit your exploratory model as a CFA on the original dataset, which is almost certainly causing overfitting in most cases.

Re: A review of correlations between big five personality types and life outcomes

#238

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

planet-and-halo wrote: post #157
dr_dshiv wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose they asked 1000s of different questions, each representing a different personality characteristic. After factor analysis, some arbitrary number of factors were found to account for most of the variance. Why did they settle for 5 vs 8 vs 12?

Other models actually did settle for higher numbers of factors, but higher numbers were usually found to have categories that could be reasonably collapsed into one of the Big 5. Fwiw, my understanding is that most psychologists believe that with further study, these categories will map to actual functioning of the brain and nerve systems. For example, "Neuroticism" will somehow map to the excitability of certain ner…

That's a belief that's a long way from being testable though.

Re: A review of correlations between big five personality types and life outcomes

#239

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

infogulch wrote: post #94
HPsquared wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My (lay) understanding is that personality data tend to be clustered such that it's best explained by five factors, with the names of the factors (Openness, Conscientiousness, etc.) having been added later.

Wikipedia states it pretty well, "When factor analysis (a statistical technique) is applied to personality survey data, it reveals semantic associations: some words used to describe aspects of personality are often applied to the same person." [1] The Big Five are a statistically-derived groupings of phrases that are reasonably stable when measured from different angles. I think it would be fair to call it a "modest…

Wildly successful is a term that would be better applied to item response theory models, the Big 5 (and personality psychology more generally) are at the leeches stage compared to them.

That being said, it's much much harder to develop measures when you rely on other measures of the same type to validate them, which is where personality testing is right now.

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