by Lone Frank
At the moment, however, the five factors rule. Several studies have shown the factors to be surprisingly stable, meaning that when measured against the Big Five, a person’s personality does not fluctuate up and down, like the stock market or average rainfall curves. For instance, over six years the dynamic duo of Costa and McCrae followed a group of people who sat down at regular intervals for a tête-à-tête with a NEO-PI-R test. The researchers found that an individual’s score varied very little over time and, in fact, the difference between two measurements taken six years apart was no greater than that between two measurements taken six weeks apart. Later analyses and meta-analyses have found the same thing – but with the addition that it looks as though there are overarching, long-term patterns in the five factors of personality. Over the course of a lifetime, levels of neuroticism, extroversion, and openness go down, while levels of agreeableness and conscientiousness increase a little. An observation, in other words, that fits very well with the old maxim that we mellow with age as “the rough edges wear off.”
Another indication that the model captures reality is the ease with which it lines up with distinct personality disorders. This is supported by an interesting study conducted by the American researchers Lisa Saulsman and Andrew Page. They asked individuals who had been diagnosed with one of ten categories of clinical personality disorders to take a Big Five personality test. When they analyzed the results, they found that they could accurately predict how the patient would score on the test solely from his or her diagnosis.
So far, so good. But the ultimate test of a theoretical model is whether it is able to predict practical conduct and life as it is lived. Remarkably, it looks as though the Big Five can say something, statistically, about the course of human life.
Extroversion is a good example. People who score high on this dimension, who are typically outgoing and sociable, and who have easy access to positive feelings, also appear more likely to be employed in extroverted jobs. To a higher degree than average, they work as salespeople, and hold positions of staff responsibility. Extroverts also consistently have more sexual partners than the average person, just as they have more marriages over the course of their lives.
In turn, we can say something about how a marriage works if we get information about spouses’ scores on the personality test. Statistically, divorce is far more likely if either the man or the woman has a high neuroticism score. A man with a high conscientiousness score is an indicator that the marriage will last, though interestingly, the woman’s conscientiousness score seems to make no difference to the relationship. You have to wonder if this pattern reflects the fact that most of these studies were done years ago, with long-married couples of a generation in which the husbands were still the providers.
Certainly, your conscientiousness level is a strong indicator of how you will perform in school – no matter what your sex. You might believe that the most important ingredient is raw intelligence but, as psychologist Maureen Conard of the University of Connecticut reported in 2006: “Aptitude Is Not Enough.” Conard reviewed the personality scores and the classroom marks of American university students and found their level of conscientiousness was a better predictor of future grade average than the entrance examinations, known as aptitude tests, that the students had taken before being accepted.
Conscientiousness also says something about how people do after their happy-go-lucky student days. A 1991 meta-analysis by the American researchers Murray Barrick and Michael Mount, who considered personality tests of more than twenty-three thousand subjects following a great many different professions and positions, established a clear and straightforward connection between a person’s conscientiousness and his or her job performance. No matter the performance criteria, the more conscientious among us did better on average than the less conscientious – regardless of other qualifications.
Even though many of these personality analyses have involved Americans, it appears the five factor model is quite culturally robust. Its concepts and questionnaires have been translated into numerous languages and the findings hold up across the globe. It is even the case that, across cultures, you can see the same patterns of sex differences. Everywhere, men on average score higher in extroversion and conscientiousness than do women, while women on average score higher in neuroticism and agreeableness. Indeed, women’s scores on agreeableness run so high that the average man will score lower than seventy percent of women.
“REMEMBER TO ANSWER quickly without thinking too much about it,” was the instruction from the research head as I prepared to haul myself through the full version of the NEO-PI-R. I followed orders, making my way through statement after statement, knowing that after I had finished the test would be analyzed and scrutinized by the psychologist Henrik Skovdahl Hansen, who is an expert in just this sort of personality interpretation.
As the director of the Danish publishing house Psychological Publishers, he has not only translated and taught generations of psychologists about the NEO-PI-R, he also wrote his PhD thesis on the use of personality tests. I have only spoken briefly with Hansen on the phone, but when I meet him at his offices, he matches my expectations for a business psychologist quite nicely: no shaggy hair or penchant for Indian scarves. He is wearing a discreet, dark navy suit and sports short-cropped hair and narrow steel-framed spectacles. On the other hand, his handshake is more hesitant than I had anticipated.
“You’re Lone?” he asks, looking at me in a slightly noncommittal way before he shows me into his brightly lit office. A secretary efficiently places glasses of coffee and some mixed chocolates before us. I immediately grab a bite-size Snickers bar. Hansen touches neither food nor drink. Instead, he folds his hands in front of him on the table and begins the session by professing his faith in the five factor model and its anchoring in a “scientific paradigm.”
With these five measurable factors and their facets, scientists have finally constructed a model of personality that is so well founded that it reaches beyond pure psychology. They can study the connection between personality traits, biochemical processes in the brain, and the genetics that lie beneath them all. “Of course, biology is not exactly my field, but it is the future,” predicts Hansen.
Before we concentrate on my test, there is one thing in particular he wants to impart. “The five main traits or dimensions themselves, on which the model is based, are not particularly interesting, because in the very nature of things most people lie somewhere in the middle. It is only a minor portion of the population who are extremely neurotic or very extroverted, but from the more specific aspects of each dimension, you can really say a lot about a person.”
I don’t know whether this is good or bad in my particular case. So I smile to be on the safe side. Hansen then stresses that, while personality traits are quite stable statistically, this applies across the population; anything can happen as far as the individual is concerned. The professionals who work with the test, he explains, know from sheer experience that when people take these tests again and again there are some who change radically. A person may even encounter things in life that push him or her far off the normal distribution.
“Let me be more precise,” he says. “A person who is very introverted does not suddenly become very extroverted, but sometimes you see significant changes.”
“Does this typically occur after major life-altering events?” I ask, thinking of accidents, illnesses, death. “Or is it rather because they themselves have decided to do something?”
“You quite often see that psychotherapy makes for changes in personality. On the other hand, you typically see that major life events do not influence personality. It is rather your personality that colors the way such an event affects you. Grief, for example. I believe that personality largely determines how grief over losing other people plays out in the individual.”
I sense this could lead us too far astray, so I inquire whether we should look at my test. Without further ado, Hansen pulls it out and point
s to a green schematic diagram cluttered with boxes and numbers, brutally dominated by a zig-zagging graph that cuts through them.
“This graph is made from your scores on the 240 questions and a comparison of this score to the norm. A score of ten or twenty is in itself meaningless; you have to know where you are situated within the different dimensions and facets in relation to a comparable group of people to get any knowledge from it. In your case, we have chosen an overall norm for businesswomen. That is, hundreds of Danish women who are employed at all levels from top to bottom.”
Hansen points to the boxes where the five dimensions are broken down into their six facets. “Here, you get higher resolution. You can typically see that people score in the middle of the general extroversion dimension, but this middling value may reflect the mean of a high score in the facets of gregariousness and warmth and a low score, for example, on excitement-seeking.”
I understand but want to know what sort of person appears in the curves on my graph. What sort of person I am.
“Yes, yes,” Hansen replies, looking as though he is considering his answer carefully. I guide him to a sharply declining line, which falls far off the norm indicated by a transverse green band running across the middle of the page.
“It looks as if I’m scoring pretty low on agreeableness.”
“Yes,” Hansen says gently. “You are. In fact, you can’t score any lower.”
This fact hangs in the air between us for a moment.
Hansen now admits that he had not been looking forward to our meeting, once he had analyzed my data. “But let’s look at it. You’re part of an experiment that touches on depression, and let me tell you that your test does not provide any basis whatsoever to talk about a depressive personality. You see, it is crucial to distinguish between a condition and a personality trait. Depression is a condition that you have a disposition for if you score high on the trait of neuroticism …”
I feel it is necessary to break in. It may be that I am no more neurotic than the average Danish working woman, but I must emphasize that, after all, I have had three episodes of clinical depression. Clinical depression requiring treatment.
“Yes, you told me,” Hansen responds, remarkably level. “But from your relatively average score on neuroticism, one wouldn’t say that you are especially inclined toward depression.”
I inspect the graph, and it is true enough that my neuroticism is just lying there, resting on the upper boundary of the normal area. That is unexpected. Then, Hansen pulls the paper toward him and points to a facet of neuroticism that is actually labeled “depression”.
“Here, too, you are somewhere in the middle. That is, all the people you are being compared with on the average have answered exactly the same as you with respect to having a dark view of things. If you are to interpret it, you would say that, when you react with sadness and depression, there is usually an external reason for it. On the other hand, if you score high on depression, this sadness would have a life of its own.”
To me, this sounds exactly as if Hansen is describing the difference between what psychiatry used to call melancholy, which comes from within, and reactive depression, which is provoked by external circumstances or influences. At the same time, I also sense that he is prodding my self-image. Because, quite honestly, I have always considered myself an incurable melancholic. Someone who suffers because she is naturally predetermined to suffer but, by virtue of some inner strength, nevertheless bears it more or less stoically. But is this a lie, a self-deception? Am I really just a weakling who cannot tolerate the small jolts of life?
“Well,” says Hansen, getting me back on track, “if you look at all the facets of the neuroticism dimension, it appears that you don’t worry more than other people. On the other hand …”
He clears his throat. Twice.
“… your threshold for when you become irritated …You get there much faster than other people, and you can get really angry and have difficulty controlling your anger.”
Sorry, but give me a break. Doesn’t the man realize how stupid other people can be?
“When it comes to traits we know are involved in depression, it is the anger component that is most pronounced in you,” he says, examining me through his narrow glasses.
“You see this prominently in the test?”
“I do. And I wouldn’t be surprised if most people you know said the same thing about you.”
They probably would; people are so quick to judge. But I sense we’ve become stuck on a single issue and try to move the conversation to other subjects. There must be something encouraging to latch onto.
“I actually think it’s a little strange that my score on extroversion is down in the low area, below the average. Can that really be the case?”
In my reading of the literature on personality, I’ve fallen a little in love with the extroverts, who sound like they experience a lot more pleasure, all around. They get more sex, and get it with many more different partners. They also rake in a higher salary.
“I can’t understand it. Because one of the things I really think is fun is speaking in front of large audiences. That must be extroverted, right?”
Hansen smiles indulgently.
“You still haven’t quite grasped the dynamic involved in a personality. I’ll say it again – it’s no good to stare blindly at individual dimensions. Another element that is interesting in precisely this connection is your very low score on social anxiety. You say that it doesn’t bother you to get up in front of an assembly?”
“No, I actually like it.”
“That is your social robustness coming through, and that is quite excellent. But on the minus side, it can make you quite insensitive to how you affect others.”
Suddenly, a lot of things make sense.
“But your social robustness has to be compared to another score, in your openness dimension, on what we call depth of emotions. It is high, above average, as you see, and it tells me that your openness to your own feelings and those of others and your ability to empathize is actually high. So, here, I see a conflict,” Hansen says, sounding as if he enjoys it. “How does it actually work, with you being easy to irritate and, maybe, even to piss off royally, and not to catch the signals from others even though you actually have the antennae to be able to catch them?”
What can I tell him? I could break down and confess that I frequently get into quarrels with people; that I have a habit of saying something I know is going to upset them but, for one reason or another, I can’t stop myself. I could disclose my tendency to fire off rude e-mails, which I later regret but have difficulty pulling back. “When I look at my upbringing,” I say, instead, “it had to do with never worrying about what others might think or say about you. My father taught me never to doubt that I was right and to just go out into the world and do what I thought was best.” In fact, that part about doing what I thought best was very important.
“That corresponds quite well to the profile you show in the test: what I hear you saying I can see on paper,” Hansen comments. “Your agreeableness couldn’t be lower, and your compliance is rooting around down at the bottom – that is, there is a desire to debate things and some competitiveness. Then, there is your low score on altruism and sympathy. This does not mean you can’t feel empathy, but that you have opinions and stand by them and that you don’t shy away from making unpopular decisions,” he says, making me wonder whether I should have considered a career in management.
“It is no accident that you are interested in science. That is typical for people with a low sympathy score. If you had been high up, you would probably have done something in the humanities.” He hesitates a moment. “In fact, you have some quite masculine traits for a woman.”
Funny how many people – unbidden – seem to want to enlighten me about that.
“Quite honestly, you must really get at loggerheads with people.”
All the time, as it happens.
“This is something
that nourishes your personality; you need struggle to keep yourself going, it drives you,” analyzes Hansen. “But if you want to talk about development, here is where you’d grab hold, because you can also see that you can take things hard and be quite sad. Your sensitivity to stress, which is a vulnerability factor, is high, and you also have a depth of emotions that makes you vulnerable. You are not cold but …”
“Combative?”
“A fighting machine, I would say. If you want to say something positive, these things keep you from getting into situations where you can really step on other people’s toes and not notice it.”
“You mean that, without sensitivity to stress and depth of emotions, I would be a really unpleasant person?”
“You could interpret it that way.”
We sit silently for a bit, and I allow myself another candy from the bowl. Then, I focus on what Hansen just noted about development, which is, after all, my true mission in meeting with him. I want to find out how much our genetics defines personality, and how much of it we can develop as we choose.
“As I said, personality is normally quite stable. And that is why the five factor model says, at heart, that you need to make peace with your personality. Accept it and try to shift it around a little,” he begins. “I don’t think you can make a frontal attack on your personality, but you can refurbish it a bit and, maybe, become better at what you think you’re bad at or, at least, cover it up.”
He offers me an analogy, comparing personality to a sports team. If you have a team with a weak player in one position, you can’t simply go out and acquire the world’s most expensive player to replace that person – even a top-level professional club has to make the budget work. Instead, to accommodate your weak spot, you switch around your players or try new tactics. The same idea applies to developing personality.
When it’s time for me to leave, Hansen gives me the decorative test graph as a souvenir and supplies me with a computer-generated report of my test answers, as well as an accompanying personality analysis. There are diagrams galore, but it also contains some good advice. I take special notice of the conclusion on the last page and carefully highlight it in yellow to give to my boyfriend back home: