Personality
 Personality
o Theory that there are important, stable differences between people,
across all kinds of situations
o THIS IS A THEORY
o Many Approaches
 “Overall” personality:
 Big Five
 HEXACO
 Myers-Briggs
 Specific aspects of personality:
 Risk-taking
 Machiavellianism
 Type A / Type B
o Can be useful to understand things like:
 The different ways people like to work
 The different ways two people might think about the same
problem
 How the same situation might energize one person and make
another person uncomfortable
o Warnings about personality
 “Personality” explanations often overused or exaggerated
 People are subject to the fundamental attribution error
 This is when we tend to attribute other peoples behaviors
to their personality
 Tend to attribute our own behavior to the situation
 Big Five
o Lexical hypothesis
 We can look at natural language to see what the important
personality dimensions are
 They looked at different words for personality and used factor
analysis to put those words in as few dimensions as possible
o Personality Dimensions
 Openness to experience Curious and original
Consistent and cautious
 Conscientiousness Dependable and responsible
Easy going and impulsive
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Extraversion
Agreeableness
Neuroticism
Sociable and talkative
Solitary and reserved
Supportive and cooperative
Challenging and exacting
Sensitive and nervous
Stable and easygoing
 Myers-Briggs
o Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI, Myers-Briggs Personality Test)
o Used by many companies to provide people insight into personality
differences
o 4 paired psychological preferences
o Categorizes people into one side of each pair
o Assigns 4 letters that describe your entire personality
o 4 Pairs are:
 Extroversion (E) vs Introversion (I)
 Outgoing, talkative vs. Reserved, likes to work alone
 Sensing (S) vs. Intuitive (N)
 Tangible, concrete vs. Imaginative, creative
 Thinking (T) vs. Feeling (F)
 Reason and logic vs. emotions
 Judging (J) vs. Perceiving (P)
 Order, rules vs. Flexible and adaptable
o If you retake the test after only 5 weeks, there is a bout a 50% chance
you’ll fall into a different category
o The Big Five doesn’t have this problem
o Not necessarily useless, if it gets people to pay attention to what
they’re like and what other people are like, and talk to each other
o But know its limitations and how it can hide actual similarities
between people
 MBTI vs. Big Five
o MBTI categorizes people into types
o Big Five places people along continuous dimensions
o If there are actually two types of people, introverts and extroverts,
what should we see if we give a bunch of people a test about
extraversion
 We should see that there is a clear distinction between
extroverts and introverts
 However, what we see is that most people fall near the middle,
so they’re just barely on one side or the other
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This is why if you retake the test you can score on the other
type