What Makes You What You Are
Personality: What makes you the way you are? - Science News - The Independent
At some point in your life, you 've probably filled in a personality questionnaire ("Do you see yourself as....?"), and wondered as you ticked the boxes if there can really be any validity to such a simplistic way of assessing people. Surely the scores just reflect your mood on the day, or what you want the investigator to think. Surely everyone gives the same answer, which is "it depends". Or even if the scores measure something, surely it is how the person sees themselves, rather than how they actually are. In a new book, I examine what the extent of the science underlying personality psychology really is. The answer is: more than you would think. While it has always been popular in business and pop psychology, and within academic psychology, personality research has been a poor relation to the parts of the discipline with experiments and hard objective measures. However, this is changing fast. The field of personality is undergoing a renaissance. The reasons for the renaissance are several. Academics now have some really good long-term studies of the same individuals, and it turns out that those brief, simplistic, pencil-and-paper questionnaires have surprisingly useful properties. They produce a wide range of selfdescriptions. The responses are fairly repeatable over intervals of many years. They also correlate quite well with ratings of the person given by their spouse, friends or colleagues. Much more importantly, though, the responses turn out to predict objective events. For example, in a famous cohort of gifted Californian children recruited in the 1920s, and who are elderly or deceased now, personality "scores" – numerical representations of answers to questions – are significant predictors of life expectancy. In another long-term study, this time of American married couples, the quality and duration of the marriage is predicted by the personality scores of both parties prior
At some point in your life, you 've probably filled in a personality questionnaire ("Do you see yourself as....?"), and wondered as you ticked the boxes if there can really be any validity to such a simplistic way of assessing people. Surely the scores just reflect your mood on the day, or what you want the investigator to think. Surely everyone gives the same answer, which is "it depends". Or even if the scores measure something, surely it is how the person sees themselves, rather than how they actually are. In a new book, I examine what the extent of the science underlying personality psychology really is. The answer is: more than you would think. While it has always been popular in business and pop psychology, and within academic psychology, personality research has been a poor relation to the parts of the discipline with experiments and hard objective measures. However, this is changing fast. The field of personality is undergoing a renaissance. The reasons for the renaissance are several. Academics now have some really good long-term studies of the same individuals, and it turns out that those brief, simplistic, pencil-and-paper questionnaires have surprisingly useful properties. They produce a wide range of selfdescriptions. The responses are fairly repeatable over intervals of many years. They also correlate quite well with ratings of the person given by their spouse, friends or colleagues. Much more importantly, though, the responses turn out to predict objective events. For example, in a famous cohort of gifted Californian children recruited in the 1920s, and who are elderly or deceased now, personality "scores" – numerical representations of answers to questions – are significant predictors of life expectancy. In another long-term study, this time of American married couples, the quality and duration of the marriage is predicted by the personality scores of both parties prior