Almost everyday we describe and assess the personalities of the people around us. Whether we realize it or not, these daily musings on how and why people behave as they do are similar to what personality psychologists do.
While our informal assessments of personality tend to focus more on individuals, personality psychologists instead use conceptions of personality that can apply to everyone. Personality research has led to the development of a number of theories that help explain how and why certain personality traits develop.
Components of Personality
So what exactly makes up a personality? As described in the definitions above, you would expect that traits and patterns of thought and emotion make up an important part. Some of the other fundamental characteristics of personality include:
Consistency - There is generally a recognizable order and regularity to behaviors. Essentially, people act in the same ways or similar ways in a variety of situations.
Psychological and physiological - Personality is a psychological construct, but research suggests that it is also influenced by biological processes and needs.
It impacts behaviors and actions - Personality does not just influence how we move and respond in our environment; it also causes us to act in certain ways.
Multiple expressions - Personality is displayed in more than just behavior. It can also be seen in our thoughts, feelings, close relationships and other social.
Same But Different
In some ways we are all the same. We all have the same human nature. We share a common humanity. We all have human bodies and human minds, we all have human thoughts and human feelings.
Yet in other ways we are all completely different and unique. No two people are truly alike. No two people can ever have the same experience of life, the same perspective, the same mind.
Even identical twins are unique in this respect: twin number 1 will always be twin number 1 and will never know what it is actually like to be twin number 2, to experience life and see the world through number 2’s eyes.
Somewhere between these two — our common humanity and our unique individuality — lies personality.
Personality is about our different ways of being human. How we are all variations on the same themes. How the human nature we all share manifests in different styles of thinking, feeling and acting.
Talking About Personality — Four Types v. Five Factors
In ancient times it was thought that all people could be divided into just four personality types — sanguine, choleric, melancholic and phlegmatic. This was supposedly something to do with the dominant fluids in their bodies (blood, yellow bile, black bile or phlegm). This idea was briefly revived in Renaissance Europe and there are some modern versions of it around today.
But when you actually look into it, trying to fit all the world’s people with their amazing range of differences into so few boxes is not easy. For example, ‘sanguine’ people are supposedly extroverted, creative, sensitive, compassionate, thoughtful, tardy, forgetful and sarcastic. But in fact there is no evidence that these characteristics go together at all. You can certainly be creative without being extroverted. You can certainly be compassionate without being sarcastic. So what does ‘sanguine’ really mean, if anything?
Dividing people up into a few types may be a nice and simple way of looking at the world, but in reality it doesn’t get us very far.
An alternative approach used by modern psychologists is to look at the words we actually use to describe each other’s personalities. This is called the lexical approach.
When we describe someone’s personality, we use words which characterise whatever makes that person distinctive and perhaps even unique. This is partly because we tend to notice people’s most outstanding characteristics (as opposed to ways in which they are just average). For instance, just as we might describe someone as ‘very tall’ or ‘totally bald’ based on their physical attributes, we might also describe them as ‘very shy’ or ‘totally domineering’ based on their personality.
We also want to remember what it is that distinguishes one person from another — being very tall and totally bald is an unusual and distinctive combination, as is being very shy and totally domineering. We remember, and talk about, the things that stand out the most.
So when we look at the words most often used to describe human personality, we find that they describe the extremes rather than the averages. (Similarly, there is no word in the dictionary to describe people of average height, only people who are distinctly above or below average in height: tall v. short.) Also, these extremes can be organised into pairs of opposites — shy v. outgoing, impulsive v. cautious, dominant v. submissive, and so on.
Moreover, when you take all the personality-describing words in a dictionary and analyse how people use them, you find they can be separated into a certain number of sets or ‘clusters’. The words in one cluster all have a b-r-o-a-d-l-y similar meaning, but mean something different from the words in other clusters. And what psychologists have found again and again is that there are just five clusters. In other words, there are just five sets of words (including their opposites) which contain pretty much all of the words we might use to describe personality.
These are known as the ‘Big Five’. We could simply call them Factor 1, Factor 2 and so on, but they have been labelled as follows:
EXTROVERSION — the tendency to be outgoing, energetic and sociable
OPENNESS — the tendency to enjoy variety, novelty, challenge and intellectual stimulation
NEUROTICISM — the tendency to experience unpleasant emotions
AGREEABLENESS — the tendency to be friendly, compassionate and cooperative
CONSCIENTIOUSNESS — the tendency to show self-discipline and self-control
Each of these five factors is actually a sort of mega pair of opposites: extroversion v. introversion, openness v. closedness, neuroticism v. emotional stability, agreeableness v. hostility, conscientiousness v. spontaneity. For example, we find that there is one whole set of words which describe either aspects of extroversion (‘outgoing’, ‘energetic’) or its opposite, introversion (‘shy’, ‘withdrawn’).
It’s as if everything we have to say about personality falls under one of these headings. This is one of the most robust findings to come out of decades of research into human personality. [Ref 3]
So in contrast to the ‘types’ approach, many psychologists now understand personality as how we all vary on these five dimensions or five factors. It’s not that the world is divided into (say) sanguines and cholerics and so on. Rather, we are all variations on the same five themes, and these variations define our personality traits. We each have our own scores on the same five scales. An introvert, for example, is simply someone who scores low on the extroversion scale.
The five factors are not etched in stone, however. Many studies show that we can include a sixth factor, called Honesty/Humility (or the H factor). This is essentially a dimension of character maturity, ranging from high selfishness to high integrity. [Ref 4]
The number of factors we “find” also depends on how strict or how loose we are with our statistics.
To get down to five factors you have to accept fairly loose connections between words. This means that, for example, we get lots of surprisingly different traits lumped together under ‘extroversion’ (such as dominant, outgoing and passionate), which is kind of reminiscent of having lots of different things attributed to the ‘sanguine’ type.
We could, however, be very strict with the numbers and look for tight clusters between words which are strongly connected. When researchers do this, they can identify 20-30 factors, or “facets”.
We can think of of the big five as a big, fuzzy “cloud” of traits, each one covering four, five or six specific traits. This seems to give a much richer description.
So … how many personality traits are there? The answer is: how many do you want? If you want to view people in very broad brush-strokes, then the answer is five (or six). If you want a more “high resolution” picture, then you can use 20-30 or so.
Nature and Nurture
Between all these one-sided views lies the general consensus: that our personality is built on a combination of conscious (voluntary) and unconscious (involuntary) factors. To some extent our genes and environment play a role, and to some extent our free will plays a role. But probably the greatest role is played by the interaction of these two — how we learn to cope with life using the resources we’ve got.
Overall, personality is about nature interacting with nurture. Or to put it another way:
Personality = Temperament + Character
Temperament refers to our nature — our inborn characteristics, our ‘factory settings’, how we are wired. Even at birth one can see individual variations on the human theme. Some infants, for example, are naturally timid while others are naturally bold.
Character refers to our acquired (or nurtured) characteristics, our ‘custom settings’, how we have learned to deal with life since we were born. Our character is also the sum of our virtues and vices. A person of good character, for example, has high integrity; a person of bad character does not. It helps to be a good judge of character.
It has been said that temperament is something we share with other animals, while character is, perhaps, uniquely human.
A Spiritual Perspective
I have been interested in personality for as long as I can remember. What makes people tick? In what ways am I different from other people? Are we all the same under the skin? These questions have always intrigued me. This is one of the reasons why I became a psychologist.
But in additon to the psychological viewpoint, I also hold a spiritual view of personality. This view is something I want to communicate with my website.
From this perspective, personality is the vehicle through which the self (the spiritual self, the soul) operates in the world, particuarly in social interactions.
Overleaves
If the essence of you is like a source of pure white light, then your personality is like a set of filters overlaying the source, creating colorful patterns. In other words, your essence is pure potential and your personality represents those aspects of potential which are actually manifesting. (See Over leaves: the structure of personality.)
So in a sense, personality is a selective filtering of who we truly are. Some portions of our inner light, by which I mean much of our true being and true potential, are sharply focused into life while other portions are filtered out. And we do this for good reason.
Having a personality that emphasizes, say, one’s capacity for aggression and filters out one’s capacity for peaceful acceptance enables one to really experience the pros and cons of aggression. The same goes for all aspects of personality. They are all, from the perspective of the soul, learning tools.
So what is personality? It depends upon which perspective you take on human nature.
From my perspective, fundamentally accepting the existence of the soul and free will, the personality is the lower self while the soul is the higher self. Personality is the ‘costume’ worn by the soul as it operates in the material world in human form.
But I also think it is important to have a multi-layered view of the personality itself. There is a deep, inner part of the personality — that ‘selective filtering’ I talked about — which is the framework specially adopted by the soul for a specific human lifetime. This ‘deep’ or ‘true’ personality reflects our soul’s purposes in life.
Then there is a more superficial part of the personality which is simply all of the habits and traits instilled in us during our formative early years. This ‘false’ or ‘artificial’ personality is merely the baggage we pick up along the way. It is how our parents trained us to be, how our school friends wanted us to be, how we came to believe we ought to be.
A major turning point in life occurs (usually around 35-45) when we try to let go of these false ways of being and discover our real personality, our true character, the person we set out to be from the start. This emergence of a real self is something of which, I suspect, the majority psychologists have no inkling. But it is something I have experienced for myself very clearly, and it is, I believe, an important aspect of life.
