Personality tests are popular across academic disciplines and across the world of organizations. However, test scores are not as straight forward as they might seem when drawing conclusions about people and how they might respond in a variety of scenarios. If two people have the same personality score, do we experience these two people as the same? This would be unlikely. What other factors then, if not personality, differentiates one person from another?
One of the most used personality tests in Psychology is the Big Five model (Cobb-Clark, Schurer, 2012). The Bog Five model scores five traits of personality, which we’ll list below-
Negative emotion- how much negative emotion or not does a person experience?
Openness- How open to new ideas and variety is a person?
Extroversion- How social is a person? Introversion is represented by a low extroversion score.
Conscientiousness- How important is it to a person to hit deadlines and complete tasks?
Agreeableness- How important is it to a person for relationships and social encounters to go well?
Henriques (2003) has observed that if two people score the same across all five traits, we would not experience these two people as the same. This is because having traits is only part of how someone makes sense of the world. A more insightful part is character, and character can be explained as this: how and how effectively does someone fit their traits to situations (Hovhannisyan, Vervaeke, 2022)?
This question leads us back to Aristotle. Crudely put, Aristotle believed that matter took on the shape of forms (Apostle, 1979). Bricks and cement are matter, and they could take on the form of a house, or they could take on the form of a wall depending on the cause. Four causes take matter into a form, which are listed below-
Material cause – what is something made of?
Efficient cause – what brings something about?
Formal cause – what characteristics does an object have?
Final cause – what is the reason for something’s existence?
If we imagine a person’s personality traits as matter, then it is the person’s character which fits this matter to situations to produce a form. A person’s form is something which we experience as their character. For example, does an extrovert shape their trait for social interaction into attention seeking behaviors (extreme sports activity shared extensively on social media for example) or do they more simply seek out people to talk to at every opportunity?
A person’s experiences will have shaped how they apply their traits to situations. And this brings us back to the subject of the last post, visiting the extremes. Extreme situations provide us with insight into ourselves. This is achieved by providing an opportunity to apply our traits effectively to challenging circumstances. When we return from an extreme situation, we have greater knowledge over what works, what doesn’t work, and a sense of what to try again, and what we would avoid. In other words, extremity is character building because we get feedback on applying our traits. If we do not grow as result of our experiences and refine our traits, it reflects on our character.
In organizations, we may look at two identical Big Five scores, and ponder that the two people these scores belong to could not be more different. If we have no prior personal knowledge of these two people, we may impose these scores upon them, and constantly look for similarity, explaining away anything to the contrary by reference to the score. Perhaps, a better approach would be to examine and engage with the score from a more Aristotelian perspective.
Exploring how someone has applied their traits to a challenging situation could provide insight into their character. A guide to this exploration could draw from Aristotle’s causes. This approach is explained below-
Material cause- we have our starting detail in the form of the personality score (assuming a Big Five Score).
Efficient cause- a example of a challenging situation which required the person to fit their traits effectively.
Formal cause- what did the person do in this situation. What did they see as relevant? How did they act on this relevance? What went right and what went wrong?
Final cause- what was the person’s priority in this situation? To return to our frequent example, if the challenging situation was delivering bad news, did the person prioritize kindness or honesty? And why?
The above is a potential way of working with a Big Five personality score through a recognition that traits are a form of psychological material. The form these traits can take when exposed to challenging situations (visits to the extreme) can provide us crucial insight into character.
Reading
Apostle, H., 1979, Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Grinell, Iowa: Peripatetic Press.
Cobb-Clark, D.A. and Schurer, S., 2012. The stability of big-five personality traits. Economics Letters, 115(1), pp.11-15.
Henriques, G., 2003. The tree of knowledge system and the theoretical unification of psychology. Review of general psychology, 7(2), pp.150-182.
Hovhannisyan, G. and Vervaeke, J., 2022. Enactivist big five theory. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 21(2), pp.341-375.
