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.
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.