Firstly, many argue that the Big 5 personality traits don’t provide a thorough description of the true complexity of personality. It’s a good overall range, but what about humor? Or tendency to religion or superstition? Or temper? Critics suggest the Big 5 are more indicative of “outward” personality; all those traits can be observed by another person, whereas much of personality is internal (humor, beliefs, prejudices and so on), taking place largely inside your head and not necessarily being reflected in behavior.
We’ve seen evidence that personality types are reflected in the configuration of the brain, suggesting they have biological origins. But the brain is flexible and changes in response to what it experiences, so the brain configurations we see could be a consequence of the personality types, not a cause. Being very neurotic or extroverted means you end up with distinct experiences, which could be what the arrangement of your brain bits is reflecting. This is assuming the data itself is 100 percent confirmed, which it isn’t.
There’s also the manner of how the Big 5 theory came about. It is based on factor analysis (discussed in Chapter 4) of data produced by decades of personality research. Many different analyzes by different people have found these five traits repeatedly, but what does this mean? Factor analysis just looks at the available data. Using factor analysis here is like putting several large buckets across town in order to collect rain. If one persistently fills up before the others, you can say the location of that bucket gets more rain than elsewhere. This is good to know, but it doesn’t tell you why, or how rain forms, or the various other important aspects. It’s useful information, but it’s just the start of understanding, not the conclusion.
The Big-5 approach has been focused on here because it’s the most widespread, but it’s far from the only one. In the 1950s, Friedman and Rosenhan came up with Type-A and Type-B personalities,6 with Type-As being competitive, achievement-seeking, impatient and aggressive, and Type-Bs not being these things. These personality types were linked to the workplace, as Type-As often end up in management or high-flying positions due to their characteristics, but a study found that Type-As were twice as likely to suffer from heart attacks or other cardiac ailments. Having a personality type could literally kill you, which wasn’t encouraging. But follow-up studies suggested this tendency towards heart failure was due to other factors, such as smoking, poor diet, the strain of screaming at subordinates every eight minutes and so on. This Type-A/Type-B approach to personality was found to be too generalized. A more subtle approach was needed, hence the more detailed interest in traits.
Much of the actual data that trait theories emerged from was based on linguistic analysis. Researchers including Sir Francis Galton in the 1800s and Raymond Cattell (the man behind fluid and crystallized intelligence) in the 1950s looked at the English language and assessed it for words that revealed personality traits. Words such as “nervous,” “anxious” and “paranoid” can all be used to describe neuroticism, whereas words such as “sociable,” “friendly” and “supportive” can apply to agreeableness. Theoretically, there can be only as many terms of this kind as there are personality traits to apply them to—the so-called Lexical Hypothesis.7 The descriptive words were all collated and crunched and the specific personality types emerged from it, and provided a lot of data for the formation of later theories.
There are problems with this approach too, primarily as it depends on language, something that varies between cultures and is constantly in flux. Other more skeptical types argue that approaches such as the trait theory are too restrictive to be truly representative of a personality: nobody behaves the same way in all contexts; the external situation matters. An extrovert may be outgoing and excitable, but if they’re at a funeral or an important business meeting they wouldn’t behave in an extroverted manner (unless they’ve got deep-seated issues), so they would handle each occasion differently. This theory is known as situationism.
Despite all the scientific debate, personality tests are common.
Completing a quick quiz, and then being told you conform to a certain type, is a bit of fun. We feel we have a certain type of personality, and completing a test that says we do have this type validates our assumptions. It might be a free test on some poorly assembled website that keeps asking us to sign up for an online casino every six seconds, but a test is a test. The classic is the Rorschach test, where you look at an unspecified pattern of blobs and say what you see, such as “butterflies emerging from a cocoon,” or “the exploded head of my therapist who asked me too many questions.” While this might reveal something of an individual’s personality, it isn’t something that can be verified. A thousand very similar people could look at the same image and give a thousand different answers. Technically, this is a very accurate demonstration of the complexity and variability of personality, but it’s not scientifically useful.
But it’s not all frivolous. The most worrying and widespread use of personality tests is in the corporate world. You may be familiar with the Myers-Briggs Type Inventory (MBTI), one of the most popular personality-measuring tools in the world, worth millions of dollars. The trouble is, it is not supported or approved by the scientific community. It looks rigorous and sounds proper (it too relies on scales of traits, extrovert–introvert being the most well-known one), but it’s based on untested decades-old assumptions put together by enthusiastic amateurs, working from a single source.8 Nonetheless, at some point it was seized on by business types who wanted to manage employees in the most effective manner, and thus it became globally popular. It now has hundreds of thousands of proponents who swear by it. But then, so do horoscopes.
One explanation for this is the MBTI is relatively straightforward and easily understood, and allows sorting of employees into useful categories that help predict their behavior and manage them accordingly. You employ an introvert? Put her in a position where she can work alone and don’t disturb her. Meanwhile, take the extroverts and put them in charge of publicity and engagement; they like that.
At least, that’s the theory. But it can’t possibly work in practice, because humans are nowhere near that simple. Many corporations use the MBTI as an integral component of their hiring policies, a system that relies on the applicant being 100 percent honest and almost as clueless. If you’re applying for a job and they make you do a test which asks, “Do you enjoy working with others?,” you’re unlikely to put, “No, others are vermin, only there to be crushed,” even if you do think this. The majority of people have sufficient intelligence to play it safe with such tests, thus rendering the results meaningless.