Autonomy And Extraversion

Over the first few weeks, this course has mostly studied ideas around personality psychology. In life there are so many decisions we have to make and a huge question that we all ask ourselves before me make one of these decisions is, what would everybody else do or what is everyone else doing? In the world, some people are leaders but most are inherently followers. A lot of the time we make decisions based on what others around us are doing, even if we know they aren’t the best decisions. I wanted to look at factors that could possibly answer or support this question. The two variables that I looked at the correlation between were autonomy and extraversion. Extraversion was on the Big 5 Aspect Scale measure which includes the enthusiasm and
By correlating these two attributes the study could show that enthusiasm and assertiveness have the ability to affect the self-determination and independence of a person. Before I started the study I assumed that these two variables would be related to eachother in some way or another because people that are usually assertive don’t tend to change sides on a topic very often. This study relates partially to Soloman Asch’s Line experiment on page 519-20 of the Gleitman textbook. Their study had to do with social pressures and a subjects ability to reject social pressures of giving the wrong answer over the right one. This conformity study relates to autonomy because autonomy is a personality trait which focuses on personal independence and being different from the population. So autonomy would change the likeliness of a certain person conforming to the main croup in society, even if the bigger group is wrong. This all relates back to the idea of social influence and how much we can affect the people around us and how humans don’t like to be in the out-group. Humans always want to be accepted and the more common ideas one has, the more he or she will be accepted into the larger
The data also shows that this correlation is significant as it is .036 which is less than 0.05. Although it is positively correlated, the correlation is a small one so only about ¼ of the time a person who is highly extroverted is also highly autonomous. But the correlation means that these two factor in a persons personality do affect the way they act in certain situation and may make it more likely for them to stick up for what they believe in. This is like the recent line study done at UC Davis where they interviewed people before the test and many people said that they prided themselves on being different and not conforming, but when the time came only ¼ of them stayed true to their word. Just as we saw in the video when the subjects gave in to their natural instinct of conformity. The results from this study could affect the way people look at influence and and branding also. The more you say a large group of people is doing this certain thing, the more people will accept that