PSYC2101 Personality Assignment z3284618 Yan Qiu (Ken) Liu Wednesday 12pm Anna
PSYC2101: Assessment and Personality Assignment: Case of Richard Branson
Sir Richard Branson is the founder of the famous Virgin brand, and a legendary
international icon of success. His influence felt not only to those that live in UK,
elsewhere in the globe, the Virgin companies expanded to nearly 50 distinct
businesses arms across all five continents.
As an international business icon, his success story became a role model for those
who wants to excel in life. Trait theory and Learning theory can be used to interpret
the personality of this great entrepreneur in an attempt to decode the origin of his
accomplishment. Richard Branson’s (2002) autobiography was used as the data
source for this study.
From the Trait theory perspective, Richard Branson’s success should be confirmed at
a very early stage, which was supported by Richard Branson’s show of talent by
publishing student magazine during his teenage years.
He scored highly in the five major personality trends that determine a person’s
personality in relationship to behavior (Betz & Borgen, 2010). First being his
openness to experiences, generally refers to the person’s attitude to new experiences,
width of their interests and in terms of behavior, imaginative and creativity. Richard
made it a company policy to always listen to new ideas from not only the managers
and employees of the firm but also public’s opinion, especially those that have got
PSYC2101 Personality Assignment z3284618 Yan Qiu (Ken) Liu Wednesday 12pm Anna
backing from other agencies, a reflection his personal emphasis on creativity.
‘A business has to be involving, it has to be fun, and it has to exercise your
creative instincts.’ (Branson, 2002)
Richard’s interests are wide and wild, he is a passionate entrepreneur, in the same
time, he is also an adventurer by any standards. Today he still holds some of the world
speed boat and hot air balloon world records, statement below shows some correlation
between the interest of Branson and those of his family members:
‘Both my parents had a love of adventure’ (Branson, 2002)
In terms of extraversion which describes outgoingness and sociability, Richard
Branson by any standard is classified as extremely extravert. His frequent public
appearances and high turnout rates to cocktail dance parties indicated the high degree
of his extraversion
Richard Branson was widely considered being an extremely agreeable person, scoring
high on the for the agreeableness trait, which generally describes a person’s trusting
nature, cooperative and friendliness. From a simple event in which Richard took off
his glove in freezing cold just to shake hands with a youth shows the agreeable and
friendly side of Richard.
PSYC2101 Personality Assignment z3284618 Yan Qiu (Ken) Liu Wednesday 12pm Anna
The other two traits, conscientiousness and neuroticism, are not extremely apparent in
Richard Branson. Mixed information exists on either side of the scale (Shavinina,
2006). For simplicity purposes we can balance out the results and obtain a milder
score for these two traits on Richard.
From the other perspective, Learning Theory (Social) considered that people learn
new behaviors through observation and that personality are basically products of
environmental, social and self ethic interactions (Lent, Brown & Hackett, 1994).
From a retrospective perspective, Richard Branson will not get to where he is without
the family environment which he grew up in, his relatives provided him with much
needed resources, guidance and support. Richard’s values and ethics were developed
at a very early stage, stressed constantly by his parents:
‘My parents had always drummed into me that all you have in life is your
reputation’ (Branson, 2002)
The family environment was considered to be extremely healthy for a child’s
development: loving, supportive, caring, fair and motivated,
‘I was lucky. I always felt that I could speak to my parents as if they were my
closest friends’ (Branson, 2002)
PSYC2101 Personality Assignment z3284618 Yan Qiu (Ken) Liu Wednesday 12pm Anna
People that Richard met later in life also had a profound effect on his goals and values.
Richard’s mother and aunts stressed heavily on the importance of being ethical and
rigorousness, which he still adopts as his core values even at today. Richard’s relative
and friends also provided him with some much needed support, such as financial aid
received from Aunt Clare and inspirations from her which one might argue that it
contributed to his ultimate success:
‘I decided that when I grew up I wanted to be like Aunt Clare’ (Branson, 2002)
Fundamentally, trait theory differs from learning theory in that trait theorists believes
that a person’s personality traits are biologically originated and pre-determined
(Eysenck, 1985), whilst learning theorists believe that the person’s personality are
determined by the interaction of the person’s environmental and social factors in
which the person live in (Marjoribanks, 2002).
From trait theorists, Richard Branson’s high scores in personality traits are a direct
result of the genes that he inherited from his family, not only he showed
entrepreneurial talents as a teenager, most of his family and relatives also showed
strong performances in the their personality traits. And having all the right personality
traits guaranteed his success, the question is only a matter of when and in which area.
The question can be answered by testing how much of each of the big five traits that
PSYC2101 Personality Assignment z3284618 Yan Qiu (Ken) Liu Wednesday 12pm Anna
the person possess, and that can serve as a predictor of accomplishments that the
person might be able to achieve (Walsh & Eggerth, 2005). Most of Branson family
members and immediate relatives possess the gene for these traits and as a result most
of Branson families are considered to be successful in their own rights in various
areas that they engage themselves in.
Learning theorists on the other hand, take in a vast amount nurture information into
account, such as the condition of Richard’s family environment, the amount of
attention, support, love, communication and parental status into account, plus
Richard’s relatives, the type of friends and school he went to are all experiences
shaping his personality (Shavinina, 2006). His success is extremely dependent on
environments that he finds himself in and it’s interaction with previous experiences
that shaped his personality. In another word, Richard Branson will not get to where he
is today with a different family environment, different types of relatives, or even by
making friends with the wrong people.
With trait theory, NEO-Personality Inventory Revised (NEO-PI-R) assessment is
widely used in all aspects of trait theory psychologists. It is an assessment method
consists of a series of questionnaires that can be administered to the person him/her
self for a self-rating as well as peer ratings from those people who know the person
well to measure the Big Five traits of personality (Hartman & Betz, 2007). The beauty
of NEO-PI-R is that it can be administered to anybody and obtain a standardized
PSYC2101 Personality Assignment z3284618 Yan Qiu (Ken) Liu Wednesday 12pm Anna
result that enables comparisons of this particular person to the rest of the cohort. If
Richard Branson can take the questionnaire, his results can be used to compare
relatively to other similar age grouped male data. If the prediction that Richard’s
successes are due to his unique personality traits then we should see a noticeable
difference between his NEO-PI-R score to the rest of his peers. However there are
downsides to this test, as our understanding to the factors causing personality
differences are not complete, there might always be a sixth factor in play that affect a
person’s accomplishment that might not be accounted for in the five trait found in
NEO-PI-R (Borgen & Betz, 2008).
In Social Learning theory, Factor analysis is the most commonly used assessment
method to test on the correlation of data. This method involves developing new scales
to measure the degree of family members, relatives and friends affects a person’s
personality and values (Nangle et al, 2010). In Richard Branson’s case, a set of scale
should be developed to measure his social environments, such as his family
environment, relatives and friends, and the degree of correlation between the
behaviors of these groups of people to Richard’s personality and ethical values
(Marjoribanks, 1976). If social environment which Richard grew up in did shape his
personality and values, then we should expect to see a high degree of correlation
between his personalities and value to those of his social environment. A drawback of
this approach is that, correlation cannot be used to draw causation.
PSYC2101 Personality Assignment z3284618 Yan Qiu (Ken) Liu Wednesday 12pm Anna
References:
Betz, N. E., & Borgen, F. H. (2010). Relationships of the Big Five personality traits
and facets to dimensions of the healthy personality. Manuscript in preparation.
Borgen, F. H., & Betz, N. E. (2008a). Career self-efficacy and personality: Linking the
Career Confidence Inventory and the Healthy Personality Inventory. Journal of
Career Assessment, 16, 22-43.
Branson, R. (2002) Losing my virginity: the autobiography (London, Virgin Books).
Eysenck, H. J., & Eysenck, M. W. (1985). Personality and individual differences: A
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Hartman, R. O., & Betz, N. E. (2007). The Five Factor model and career self-efficacy:
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Shavinina, L. V. (2006) 'Micro-social factors in the development of entrepreneurial
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