That's nice.
The problem is,
two doesn't seem to do it. So, we had
forty-five hundred, we had sixteen, we had two, can I get a five, the five factor model of personality.
Five factors. I've been talking about this a little bit. I talked about it in
mnemonics. If you remember we talked about
ocean. The big five. Openness, conscientiousness, extraversion,
agreeableness, and neuroticism.
Those are ones I said before but the mnemonic spells ocean.
My son once pointed out to me it also spells canoe.
So, if you want to put a canoe on the ocean
when you're looking at at a test item that talks about five factors of personality
you better see five things that begin with "O" "C" "E" "A" "N".
But let's go a little bit deeper than that openness.
What is that as a trait? Well, it's a bipolar trait to
extremely open to extremely closed,
rigid, not open to new ideas.
The opposite of it. You could be too open couldn't you?
Too open minded? They say don't be so open-minded that your brains fall
out,
right? You don't take every new idea and just assume it has validity and run with it.
You should be critical and evaluate it. On the flip side you don't want to be closed
to every new idea.
You want to be able to receive new information and evaluate it. Maybe
use it. Of course, most people are not extreme.
They lean a little conservative. They lean a little liberally.
They lean a little neophobic or infophobic and a little bit neophilic or infophilic,
right?
Open to these kinds of new ideas or kind of closed to new ideas based on their
predispositions. Well, these predispositions are traits.
They're not good or bad. They're just different ways humans could be.
Look at consciousnesses. Well, that's rule bound. Really,
being able to be organized, disciplined, dependable,
well the opposite would be unconscientious.
Somebody that you can't rely on because they're not dependable because
rules, be they social rules, work rules, laws, whatever,
they don't really value them. Now,
very few people are extremely unconscientious and very few people are
extremely conscientious. Extreme conscientiousness
could also be a problem. You can be so rule bound that you can't make exceptions
when they need to be made,
right, that you have no flexibility because you're so
rigid about following the predetermined order
that you can't see any other opportunities for change or flexibility.
Extraversion, we've already talked about. So, look at there.
Well, extraversion was Eysenck's idea
as well as Cattel's idea as well as Alpert's idea as well as
Aristotle. What do you know, Aristotle got one right. Go Aristotle, right?
So, we have that seems to be a case, that that is a
verifiable trait in humanity and we've already gone over the extremes of those.
Now we've got agreeableness. That has to do with your ability to get along with
other people.
You can be disagreeable. You all probably know somebody who is disagreeable in your
life, right?
Everything is negative. Everything is a controversy. Everything is an
argument. Everything is disagreeableness with them. But you probably don't know
that many people
like that because it's unusual be extreme on any dimension. As we get to
personality disorders, we'll see that when you get to the level of disorder, we're talking
about extremes,
not some kind of unique and new dimension that never has been seen before.
But the flip side to that
is agreeableness meaning you'll go along with anything anybody says at any time
to get along.
The person who is so conflict avoidant that they
are now put upon in ways that makes them very uncomfortable but they can never tell
anybody because they wouldn't want to be disagreeable.
Know anybody like that? They will not cause a controversy no matter
what.
They just can't bring themselves to do it. So, you can see that being too agreeable
might be problematic. Being too disagreeable might be problematic. But most
people aren't extreme.
They lean a little this way or they lean a little that way, right?
And then we have the fifth, which is neuroticism. So Eysenck
wins again. He's still there. He's still in there. So, we've still got this tendency
towards being anxious, hostile, insecure, vulnerable versus the other side of it,
where you have
rigid stability, an inability to really express
or experience emotions. So stable
that emotion seems to be absent, and as human beings we value emotion
collectively, right? We experience emotion
and it's a key part of being a human being. You've got
on Star Trek, you've got your Mister Spock and you've got your mister
Captain Kirk, right? Mister Spock and Captain Kirk as extremes. One is
overly rigid with the emotions and the other one is overly emotional
and they both come together and form complementary teams
because sometimes each of these could be an
advantage and each of them can be a disadvantage depending on the situation.
But that's where most people are flexible. Personality disorders are
inflexible. They're maladaptive. They're extreme
and they don't adapt well to situations. Most people can adapt their personality
to the situations. Evidence for cross-cultural validity is what really
bolsters this model.
It does seem to occur in almost all cultures studied.
Now, certain cultures tend to lean one way or another collectively versus
other cultures but the traits themselves seem to be present.
So, in that sense, it doesn't settle the argument as to what is personality.
When you start looking at unconscious constructs, those are very hard to operationalize.
When you start looking at people's human potential, those are very hard to operationalize.
When you look at behaviors,
well, those are easy to operationalize and easy to verify but they don't quite give,
you know, credence to the depth of human experience that we all know that we have.
And so you look at this as just another perspective
on human personality but one that has a lot of
validity because it's highly measurable
and that's just to reinforce for you.
"Ocean" or "canoe."
So openness, imaginative, practical,
right? Are you open or closed?
Interested in variety or interested in routine?
Independent or conforming? Conscientiousness,
highly organized or disorganized? Really careful
or really careless? Really disciplined or really impulsive?
Extraversion, and that's where you would've found psychoticism of Eysenck
being subsumed right but it's broader than just
impulsiveness. Extraversion, sociable
retiring? We know this one. Agreeableness. Soft-hearted,
ruthless ? Trusting, suspicious? Helpful,
uncooperative, and then out here on emotional stability,
really calm, really anxious? Really secure, really insecure?
Self satisfied or self-pitying? Where extremes are the problem and the middle
is the norm.