I think you are laboring under a slight misapprehension about personality research. Myers-Briggs isn’t solid science. The eneagram isn’t solid science. Astrological personality models aren’t solid science. I think you have correctly noticed that “psychological traits” are a ripe area for epistemically unsound belief systems that appear to bear on something people hold near and dear (ie understanding other people) so you’re justifiably suspicious of a mention of personality, which is laudable.
But you’re asking for a defense of “all that crazy stuff”, and a good defense of “all that crazy stuff” can’t honestly be provided, because most of it really is bunk, or at least it has so much bunk mixed in that its only good for psychoceramic data or maybe to pan for gold that might be hiding in the crazy. The big five personality model is an attempt to do actual science in the same space in order to produce reasonably valid and reliable dimensions of human “personality” variation. The point of the big five is that there is solid research and a deep literature and so on, in contrast to all the crackpot stuff.
If someone uses the big five and you’re suspicious and ask for a defense of personality systems in general, that’s like someone using geometry and you being suspicious because you’re only aware of a lot of crackpots who keep trying to square the circle and so you ask them to defend the squaring the circle stuff, (which was proved to be impossible in 1882) before you’ll accept analysis of evidence that legitimately makes use of a “suspiciously geometric” concept like the triangle inequality.
Unfortunately, defending established science quickly is hard because the content of science generally involves real inferential distances. If you want to start reading in this area, two useful keywords are Psychometrics and Trait theory.
In practice, “Openness to new experience” is the weakest part of the big five personality model. It can be measured reliably and predicts various things you’d expect it to predict and relatively naturally falls out when you settle for using 5 dimensions rather than 3 dimensions or 18 dimensions. However, when researchers tried the same thing on other cultures to see if this was a human universal, it turned out that the other four (Extraversion, Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism) were relatively universal but in some cultures (if I remember correctly it was things like agrarian peasant societies?) basically everyone is pretty low in Openness relative to measurement norms derived from Japan or the US or whatever.
I think you are laboring under a slight misapprehension about personality research. Myers-Briggs isn’t solid science. The eneagram isn’t solid science.
Your understanding is consistent with mine. Myers-Briggs is really frustrating, because some of its ideas are anecdotally compelling (Introversion vs. Extraversion, Thinking vs. Feeling), while others are esoteric (Judging vs. Perceiving and Sensing vs. Intuition). At least on the types, INTP probably refers to a real phenotype (which is common on LW), but I don’t know if any of the other type combinations are real.
Interestingly, the MBTI seems to almost reduce down to the Big Five according to this study.
Big five personality traits are kind of like that. From what I’ve read, they’re better understood as mostly-orthogonal surface regularities with causal explanations from many different levels and sources rather than as fundamental causally coherent essences. Lots of people seem to expect human traits to coherently cause human behaviors, so it is worth emphasizing how liable such thinking is to produce error.
The way I’ve heard it explained goes something like this: “you don’t like art because you are high in Openness. You are high in Openness because you like art.”
Of course, since the Openness scale has reliability, you can make predictions about how someone would respond to one question from the scale if you know what they would respond to another item. Whether that’s because of one underlying trait, or because of a bunch of converging traits, is an empirical question.
At least on the types, INTP probably refers to a real phenotype (which is common on LW), but I don’t know if any of the other type combinations are real.
Just wondering, are you generally classified as INTP? I’ve noticed that people consistently put in one of the types are more likely to think that their type is real.
Like wedrifid, I test as an ENFP on online tests, but if I answer questions like I would have if I hadn’t learned social skills, I come out as an INTP. The INTP profile I mentioned is freakily accurate, and not just in a horoscope type of way.
No. It compresses into 4 bits plus a whole bunch of extraneous knowledge of humanity and the environment. Sure, you can say it compresses down to four bits so long as you consider the language itself to already know all the basics about humans and the difference between the this and the other 15 combinations.
Some parts more than others I expect. Each of the details is supposed to be considered separately and with an “are more likely to” attached rather than a strict conjugation.
The interesting question is how many compressed bits the 4 bits convey. I’m guessing about 3.
Just wondering, are you generally classified as INTP? I’ve noticed that people consistently put in one of the types are more likely to think that their type is real.
At a guess yes, Hugh strikes me as someone who is naturally ‘INTP’ like. But the thing with the way the Myers Briggs test questions is that personal ideology and learned skills have rather too much influence. ie. Last time I did one of those tests I came out as ENFP. Which I’m definitely not, and wouldn’t have got if I didn’t answer the questions strictly literally.
At least on the types, INTP probably refers to a real phenotype (which is common on LW)
Myers-Briggs ultimately derives from the psychodynamic theories of Carl Jung, who was himself an INTP. Thus, it makes sense that INTP roughly corresponds to an actual personality type; Jung simply described himself, and then turned to his existing theories to explain away why he was the way he was.
Of course, since the Openness scale has reliability, you can make predictions about how someone would respond to one question from the scale if you know what they would respond to another item.
And this is the central point of the whole thing. They aren’t meant to represent a deep meaningful biological reality. Just clear correlations that are useful.
@JenniferRM—“However, when researchers tried the same thing on other cultures to see if this was a human universal, it turned out that the other four (Extraversion, Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism) were relatively universal but in some cultures (if I remember correctly it was things like agrarian peasant societies?) basically everyone is pretty low in Openness relative to measurement norms derived from Japan or the US or whatever.”
I would note that the very framework of personality traits can be questioned as WEIRD bias. But personally, I’m fond of explanations of personality like trait theory. There is an attractive elegance to such models and the research is immense. On the other hand, defenses still can be made for trait theory, even for openness. One would predict that agrarian peasant societies, with above average rates of pathogens and parasites, would measure as below average specifically on openness. That precisely fits the point made in the above piece.
it turned out that the other four (Extraversion, Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism) were relatively universal but in some cultures (if I remember correctly it was things like agrarian peasant societies?) basically everyone is pretty low in Openness relative to measurement norms derived from Japan or the US or whatever.
Why is that a problem? ISTM it simply means that it’s not a fixed-at-birth sort of trait. (i.e., like the others, it’s learned to at least some degree.)
Lack of universality isn’t a problem if you understand that the concepts are tricky to use for inference and should regularly, step-by-step, be checked against reality to make sure you’re still tracking reality. For example, Openness may actually be the most heritable trait in populations where twin studies were done despite being the least likely to be a human universal (recent mean heritabilities: Openness=57%, Extraversion=54%, Conscientiousness=49%, Neuroticism=48%, Agreeableness=42%).
But if we’re talking about something that is “not a fixed-at-birth sort of trait” then lack of heritability is one of the things I would have naively expected of the trait, you know? Its hard to shoot from the hip in this area—the terminology is stable and meaningful, and there is a relatively deep literature, but each new claim will require confirmation by experiment to extend your conclusions with any kind of rigor.
Water and milkshakes are both “arrangements of drinkable matter” and I can buy both sorts of matter in a cup at a fast food restaurant in the US. I can also expect to find water on Europa… but if I tried to use the fact that water and mllkshake were both “arrangements of drinkable matter” to predict finding milkshake on Europa as well, I’d have gone wrong in my thinking. It turns out that “arrangements of drinkable matter” isn’t a very useful category for naively deploying in sweeping extrapolative predictions.
Big five personality traits are kind of like that. From what I’ve read, they’re better understood as mostly-orthogonal surface regularities with causal explanations from many different levels and sources rather than as fundamental causally coherent essences. Lots of people seem to expect human traits to coherently cause human behaviors, so it is worth emphasizing how liable such thinking is to produce error. That doesn’t mean trait theory and the big five are bunk, it just means that you have to use the concepts with a measure of care, and some traits require more care than others. Openness is one of the tricky ones.
Lots of people seem to expect human traits to coherently cause human behaviors,
LOL. (ok, more like I went “bwahahahaha.. seriously?”) Wow. Yeah, I guess I can see why people might think that way, and I guess I must have thought that way at some point in the past. I can’t think that fuzzily about people any more, I’ve spent too much time inspecting behavior at lower levels.
In other words, when I saw the big five, I simply assumed they were summaries of behavioral patterns, and that it’d be daft to treat them as really predicting anything.
That is, saying someone has one of the five traits doesn’t explain anything, it just says, “this person is likely to do these things, because they’ve done these other things that seem to go together”.
(Or at least, if the big five are claiming to do anything more than that, I’d certainly be skeptical.)
[Edited to add: I suspect the downvoters have confused my LOLling at an instance of Fundamental Attribution Error with LOLling at JenniferRM’s comment. That is, they have probably failed to notice I am actually laughing with her, not at her.]
In other words, when I saw the big five, I simply assumed they were summaries of behavioral patterns, and that it’d be daft to treat them as really predicting anything.
Call me “daft”, then, because I still don’t get it. Does the “big five” model have any predictive power at all ? Does knowing the approximate position of a person in this five-dimensional space help us discover anything else about the person—specifically, something that we can verify empirically ? I’m not singling out the “big five” model for criticism; I’d ask the same question of Myers-Briggs, or enneagrams, or horoscopes. If your model has no predictive power, then it’s not very useful, regardless of how elegant it is.
Does the “big five” model have any predictive power at all ?
Sure, but only in the same sense that terminology like “rubes” and “bleggs” does. I more specifically meant that it has no explanatory predictive power—i.e., it doesn’t really tell you that, say, “Openness” is a valid physical construct in people’s brains, and not an accidental byproduct of some combination of other factors that are harder for us to notice.
...it doesn’t really tell you that, say, “Openness” is a valid physical construct in people’s brains...
I think this all depends on what your model predicts and with what accuracy. To use an analogy, a thing like “temperature” doesn’t really exist—it’s just an illusion caused by the motion of particles—but it’s still a very useful concept. In most cases, we can close our eyes and pretend that “temperature” is a measurement that really does refer to some physical quantity out in the real world.
So, is “Openness” (or any other of the Big Five axes) like “Temperature” ? Can we even measure a person’s “Openness” value reliably ? If so, what does it tell us ? What verifiable predictions can we make based on it ?
In the case of Myers-Briggs, AFAIK, the answers are “no”, “nothing much”, and “none”. In the case of temperature, we can definitely answer “yes” to the first question, and list a whole bunch of things like melting points and specific heat values etc. in response to the other two.
I think you are laboring under a slight misapprehension about personality research. Myers-Briggs isn’t solid science. The eneagram isn’t solid science. Astrological personality models aren’t solid science. I think you have correctly noticed that “psychological traits” are a ripe area for epistemically unsound belief systems that appear to bear on something people hold near and dear (ie understanding other people) so you’re justifiably suspicious of a mention of personality, which is laudable.
But you’re asking for a defense of “all that crazy stuff”, and a good defense of “all that crazy stuff” can’t honestly be provided, because most of it really is bunk, or at least it has so much bunk mixed in that its only good for psychoceramic data or maybe to pan for gold that might be hiding in the crazy. The big five personality model is an attempt to do actual science in the same space in order to produce reasonably valid and reliable dimensions of human “personality” variation. The point of the big five is that there is solid research and a deep literature and so on, in contrast to all the crackpot stuff.
If someone uses the big five and you’re suspicious and ask for a defense of personality systems in general, that’s like someone using geometry and you being suspicious because you’re only aware of a lot of crackpots who keep trying to square the circle and so you ask them to defend the squaring the circle stuff, (which was proved to be impossible in 1882) before you’ll accept analysis of evidence that legitimately makes use of a “suspiciously geometric” concept like the triangle inequality.
Unfortunately, defending established science quickly is hard because the content of science generally involves real inferential distances. If you want to start reading in this area, two useful keywords are Psychometrics and Trait theory.
In practice, “Openness to new experience” is the weakest part of the big five personality model. It can be measured reliably and predicts various things you’d expect it to predict and relatively naturally falls out when you settle for using 5 dimensions rather than 3 dimensions or 18 dimensions. However, when researchers tried the same thing on other cultures to see if this was a human universal, it turned out that the other four (Extraversion, Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism) were relatively universal but in some cultures (if I remember correctly it was things like agrarian peasant societies?) basically everyone is pretty low in Openness relative to measurement norms derived from Japan or the US or whatever.
Your understanding is consistent with mine. Myers-Briggs is really frustrating, because some of its ideas are anecdotally compelling (Introversion vs. Extraversion, Thinking vs. Feeling), while others are esoteric (Judging vs. Perceiving and Sensing vs. Intuition). At least on the types, INTP probably refers to a real phenotype (which is common on LW), but I don’t know if any of the other type combinations are real.
Interestingly, the MBTI seems to almost reduce down to the Big Five according to this study.
The way I’ve heard it explained goes something like this: “you don’t like art because you are high in Openness. You are high in Openness because you like art.”
Of course, since the Openness scale has reliability, you can make predictions about how someone would respond to one question from the scale if you know what they would respond to another item. Whether that’s because of one underlying trait, or because of a bunch of converging traits, is an empirical question.
Just wondering, are you generally classified as INTP? I’ve noticed that people consistently put in one of the types are more likely to think that their type is real.
Like wedrifid, I test as an ENFP on online tests, but if I answer questions like I would have if I hadn’t learned social skills, I come out as an INTP. The INTP profile I mentioned is freakily accurate, and not just in a horoscope type of way.
Wow! All that compresses down to just four bits!
No. It compresses into 4 bits plus a whole bunch of extraneous knowledge of humanity and the environment. Sure, you can say it compresses down to four bits so long as you consider the language itself to already know all the basics about humans and the difference between the this and the other 15 combinations.
I can’t see 16 such highly detailed descriptions covering more than a small fraction of humanity.
Nu, with horoscopes each of 12 descriptions cover all of humanity!
Some parts more than others I expect. Each of the details is supposed to be considered separately and with an “are more likely to” attached rather than a strict conjugation.
The interesting question is how many compressed bits the 4 bits convey. I’m guessing about 3.
At a guess yes, Hugh strikes me as someone who is naturally ‘INTP’ like. But the thing with the way the Myers Briggs test questions is that personal ideology and learned skills have rather too much influence. ie. Last time I did one of those tests I came out as ENFP. Which I’m definitely not, and wouldn’t have got if I didn’t answer the questions strictly literally.
Myers-Briggs ultimately derives from the psychodynamic theories of Carl Jung, who was himself an INTP. Thus, it makes sense that INTP roughly corresponds to an actual personality type; Jung simply described himself, and then turned to his existing theories to explain away why he was the way he was.
And this is the central point of the whole thing. They aren’t meant to represent a deep meaningful biological reality. Just clear correlations that are useful.
@JenniferRM—“However, when researchers tried the same thing on other cultures to see if this was a human universal, it turned out that the other four (Extraversion, Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism) were relatively universal but in some cultures (if I remember correctly it was things like agrarian peasant societies?) basically everyone is pretty low in Openness relative to measurement norms derived from Japan or the US or whatever.”
I would note that the very framework of personality traits can be questioned as WEIRD bias. But personally, I’m fond of explanations of personality like trait theory. There is an attractive elegance to such models and the research is immense. On the other hand, defenses still can be made for trait theory, even for openness. One would predict that agrarian peasant societies, with above average rates of pathogens and parasites, would measure as below average specifically on openness. That precisely fits the point made in the above piece.
https://benjamindavidsteele.wordpress.com/2022/02/06/weird-personality-traits-as-stable-egoic-structure/
Why is that a problem? ISTM it simply means that it’s not a fixed-at-birth sort of trait. (i.e., like the others, it’s learned to at least some degree.)
Lack of universality isn’t a problem if you understand that the concepts are tricky to use for inference and should regularly, step-by-step, be checked against reality to make sure you’re still tracking reality. For example, Openness may actually be the most heritable trait in populations where twin studies were done despite being the least likely to be a human universal (recent mean heritabilities: Openness=57%, Extraversion=54%, Conscientiousness=49%, Neuroticism=48%, Agreeableness=42%).
But if we’re talking about something that is “not a fixed-at-birth sort of trait” then lack of heritability is one of the things I would have naively expected of the trait, you know? Its hard to shoot from the hip in this area—the terminology is stable and meaningful, and there is a relatively deep literature, but each new claim will require confirmation by experiment to extend your conclusions with any kind of rigor.
Water and milkshakes are both “arrangements of drinkable matter” and I can buy both sorts of matter in a cup at a fast food restaurant in the US. I can also expect to find water on Europa… but if I tried to use the fact that water and mllkshake were both “arrangements of drinkable matter” to predict finding milkshake on Europa as well, I’d have gone wrong in my thinking. It turns out that “arrangements of drinkable matter” isn’t a very useful category for naively deploying in sweeping extrapolative predictions.
Big five personality traits are kind of like that. From what I’ve read, they’re better understood as mostly-orthogonal surface regularities with causal explanations from many different levels and sources rather than as fundamental causally coherent essences. Lots of people seem to expect human traits to coherently cause human behaviors, so it is worth emphasizing how liable such thinking is to produce error. That doesn’t mean trait theory and the big five are bunk, it just means that you have to use the concepts with a measure of care, and some traits require more care than others. Openness is one of the tricky ones.
LOL. (ok, more like I went “bwahahahaha.. seriously?”) Wow. Yeah, I guess I can see why people might think that way, and I guess I must have thought that way at some point in the past. I can’t think that fuzzily about people any more, I’ve spent too much time inspecting behavior at lower levels.
In other words, when I saw the big five, I simply assumed they were summaries of behavioral patterns, and that it’d be daft to treat them as really predicting anything.
That is, saying someone has one of the five traits doesn’t explain anything, it just says, “this person is likely to do these things, because they’ve done these other things that seem to go together”.
(Or at least, if the big five are claiming to do anything more than that, I’d certainly be skeptical.)
[Edited to add: I suspect the downvoters have confused my LOLling at an instance of Fundamental Attribution Error with LOLling at JenniferRM’s comment. That is, they have probably failed to notice I am actually laughing with her, not at her.]
Call me “daft”, then, because I still don’t get it. Does the “big five” model have any predictive power at all ? Does knowing the approximate position of a person in this five-dimensional space help us discover anything else about the person—specifically, something that we can verify empirically ? I’m not singling out the “big five” model for criticism; I’d ask the same question of Myers-Briggs, or enneagrams, or horoscopes. If your model has no predictive power, then it’s not very useful, regardless of how elegant it is.
Sure, but only in the same sense that terminology like “rubes” and “bleggs” does. I more specifically meant that it has no explanatory predictive power—i.e., it doesn’t really tell you that, say, “Openness” is a valid physical construct in people’s brains, and not an accidental byproduct of some combination of other factors that are harder for us to notice.
I think this all depends on what your model predicts and with what accuracy. To use an analogy, a thing like “temperature” doesn’t really exist—it’s just an illusion caused by the motion of particles—but it’s still a very useful concept. In most cases, we can close our eyes and pretend that “temperature” is a measurement that really does refer to some physical quantity out in the real world.
So, is “Openness” (or any other of the Big Five axes) like “Temperature” ? Can we even measure a person’s “Openness” value reliably ? If so, what does it tell us ? What verifiable predictions can we make based on it ?
In the case of Myers-Briggs, AFAIK, the answers are “no”, “nothing much”, and “none”. In the case of temperature, we can definitely answer “yes” to the first question, and list a whole bunch of things like melting points and specific heat values etc. in response to the other two.
Well yes, but the average kinetic energy does exist. So it just turns out that temperature didn’t quite mean what we thought it means.