Are personality types a statistical mirage? (with Colin DeYoung)
Colin G. DeYoung, a professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota, discusses the scientific definition of personality, its stability over the lifespan, and the empirical evidence for the Big Five traits. He also explores the relationship between personality and mental health, advocating for a shift from categorical diagnoses to dimensional spectra.
Deep Dive Analysis
16 Topic Outline
Defining Personality: Scientific Perspective
Stability of Personality Traits Across the Lifespan
Impact of Psychotherapy on Personality Traits
Understanding Personality Through Behavior Patterns
The Person-Situation Debate in Behavior
Trade-offs and Costs Associated with Personality Traits
Genetic and Environmental Factors Influencing Personality
Specific Life Events That Predict Personality Change
The Big Five Model of Personality Traits
Mapping Personality Traits to Mental Health Problems (HiTOP)
Gender Differences in Personality Sub-Dimensions
Limitations of the Big Five: What It Doesn't Capture
Categorical vs. Dimensional Models of Personality
Factor Analysis and the Robustness of Personality Structures
The Hierarchical Nature of Personality Traits
Advocating for Dimensional Mental Health Diagnosis
9 Key Concepts
Personality
Personality is defined scientifically as any persistent pattern of behavior and experience an individual has, encompassing emotional patterns, behavior, cognition, and motivation. It refers to something about a person that allows others to consistently identify or describe them over time.
Characteristic Adaptations
These are specific ways individuals have adapted to their own life circumstances, such as habits or beliefs. Unlike broad personality traits, characteristic adaptations tend to be more specific and can change more often throughout a person's life.
Rank Order Stability
This refers to the consistency of an individual's personality relative to other people over time. For example, if someone is the most extroverted in a group at one point, rank order stability measures if they remain the most extroverted compared to the same group later.
Mean Level Stability
This describes the average change in a personality trait across a population over time, indicating normative trends in how personality traits evolve with age. An example is the general dip in conscientiousness and agreeableness observed during adolescence across many individuals.
Person-Situation Debate
This is a long-standing discussion in psychology about how much of an individual's behavior is determined by their inherent personality tendencies versus the specific situation they are in. The consensus is that both the person and the situation contribute, often through their interaction.
Big Five Model
A widely accepted framework describing personality through five broad dimensions: Extraversion (sociability, positive emotion), Openness to Experience (imagination, intellect), Neuroticism (negative emotions), Conscientiousness (organization, self-discipline), and Agreeableness (altruism, cooperation). These dimensions capture major patterns of covariation among more specific personality traits.
Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology (HiTOP)
An empirically derived system that organizes mental health problems into major dimensions based on patterns of symptom co-occurrence, rather than traditional categorical diagnoses. Its goal is to provide a more data-driven and accurate classification of mental health conditions, with five of its six dimensions corresponding closely to the Big Five personality traits.
Factor Analysis
A statistical method used to identify underlying dimensions or clusters of items that vary together within a large set of data. In personality research, it helps to uncover broad traits like the Big Five by finding groups of individual adjectives or questions that tend to be correlated.
Unidimensional Facet Level Trait
A relatively narrow and distinct personality trait that is part of a broader dimension within a hierarchical model of personality. For example, irritability or anxiety are considered facet-level traits that fall under the broader Big Five dimension of Neuroticism.
13 Questions Answered
Scientifically, personality is defined as any persistent pattern of behavior and experience an individual has, encompassing emotional patterns, behavior, cognition, and motivation, which allows others to consistently identify or describe them over time.
Personality traits become more stable with age, with rank-order stability (relative position among peers) increasing steadily, while mean-level stability shows normative changes, such as a dip in conscientiousness and agreeableness during adolescence.
Yes, meta-analyses show that psychotherapy can lead to changes in personality, with the most significant and reliable change being a reduction in neuroticism.
Both personality and the specific situation contribute significantly to behavior, with roughly as much variability in behavior within a person (responding to situations) as there is across different people (due to stable traits).
Yes, almost universally, there are trade-offs for any personality trait; for example, high extroversion may lead to more joy but also more risky decisions, while high neuroticism may offer safety but also increased stress.
People high in neuroticism not only perceive situations as more stressful but also tend to end up in more objectively stressful or challenging situations, as measured by other people.
Personality traits are influenced by both genetics (estimated 30-70%) and environmental factors, though specific environmental influences often lead to individual differences in how people react to the same events rather than uniform changes.
Getting into a first serious romantic relationship and getting a first job are two events found to reliably make people more conscientious and agreeable, leading to a more mature personality profile.
The Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology (HiTOP) identifies five major dimensions of mental health problems (detachment, internalizing, disinhibition, antagonism, thought disorder) that correspond closely to the Big Five personality traits.
At the broad Big Five level, gender differences are small (e.g., women slightly higher in agreeableness and neuroticism), but when broken down into sub-dimensions (facets), more pervasive and distinct differences emerge across all five domains.
While the Big Five captures major dimensions of covariation among traits, it is not exhaustive; aspects like religiosity, spirituality, and sexual motivation are examples of things not easily or fully captured by the Big Five alone.
A dimensional system, like that proposed by HiTOP, better reflects the continuous nature of mental health problems, allowing for more nuanced assessment and treatment tailored to specific symptom elevations, similar to how internal medicine manages conditions like blood pressure.
People often get different MBTI results because they are typically near the average on many dimensions, and small fluctuations in their responses can cause them to be categorized differently by a system that forces continuous traits into binary categories.
9 Actionable Insights
1. Adopt Dimensional Thinking
Shift away from viewing personality and mental health problems as fixed categories (e.g., ‘you have ADHD’) and instead embrace a dimensional perspective, recognizing that traits and symptoms exist on a spectrum. This approach can reduce stigma and provide a more accurate understanding of individual differences, similar to how blood pressure is monitored on a continuum rather than as a binary diagnosis.
2. Psychotherapy Reduces Neuroticism
Engage in psychotherapy if you experience high neuroticism (tendency towards negative emotions and mental health challenges), as studies show it can lead to significant reductions in neuroticism levels. This improvement is not merely about better functioning at the same level, but an actual shift in the underlying trait.
3. Understand Personality Hierarchy
Recognize that personality is best understood as a hierarchy, with broad traits like the Big Five (extroversion, openness, neuroticism, conscientiousness, agreeableness) at the top, breaking down into more specific facets. For greater accuracy in understanding yourself or others, delve into these more fine-grained personality descriptions, as they offer more predictive power than just the broad traits.
4. Acknowledge Personality Trade-offs
Understand that almost all personality traits, including seemingly negative ones like introversion or neuroticism, come with inherent trade-offs. For example, while introverts may experience less joy, they might also make fewer risky decisions, helping to reframe self-perception and foster acceptance of diverse personality profiles.
5. Leverage Key Life Events
Be aware that certain major life events, specifically getting into your first serious romantic relationship and securing your first job, reliably predict positive personality changes. These experiences tend to make individuals more conscientious and agreeable, fostering a more mature personality profile.
6. Consider Individual Responses
When evaluating the impact of life events, remember that people react to the same events in individually different ways (e.g., having kids makes some more conscientious, others less). Avoid generalizing effects across the population and instead focus on how specific events uniquely influence different individuals.
7. Explore Personality Correlations
Utilize resources like personalitymap.io to explore over a million human correlations between various personality traits and behaviors. This can help deepen your understanding of how different aspects of personality relate to each other and to real-world outcomes.
8. Take Gender Continuum Test
Visit clearerthinking.org to take the free ‘gender continuum test’ to learn about the data-driven relationship between gender and personality. This test provides a personalized analysis of your personality based on data from over 15,000 people.
9. Recruit Study Participants Efficiently
For researchers, marketers, and product developers, use Positly.com to recruit high-quality study participants quickly and affordably from over a hundred countries. This platform addresses common pain points in human subject research, enabling better results.
5 Key Quotes
Any persistent mental health problem is, by definition, part of your personality.
Colin G. DeYoung
With any of these personality traits, there are usually trade-offs.
Colin G. DeYoung
People who are high in neuroticism, not only perceive situations as more stressful, they also end up in more stressful situations.
Colin G. DeYoung
Most people are near the average. And so I always ask people like, well, how many of you have done the MBTI? Like, do you know your type? And like, how many of you have done it more than once? And if you did it more than once, did you end up with a different result? And people very often end up with different results from one time to another.
Colin G. DeYoung
So many human errors that we make, whether it's making mistakes, thinking about mental health or racism, are like category problems of like, we're bucketing things that shouldn't be bucketed.
Spencer Greenberg