The
Dimensionality of Personality
We
all have a friend who is happy go lucky, fun, and bounces around the
place. We may have a reasonable basis to assign an 'optimistic trait'
to this person. However, I am sure that you have seen this exact same
person have an 'off day' where they are down in the dumps and
melancholic.
We
might ask what has happened to this optimistic trait?
Clearly,
our description is not relevant every second of the day, and our list
of traits may not necessarily describe someone at a particular given
point in time with any accuracy. Basically, we are looking to a more
fluid dimension to peoples behaviour rather than a fixed immovable
aspect. We are subject to the vicissitudes of our ever changing
fortunes, successes, and failures. As a result our behaviour is
dynamic and adaptive to the circumstances we find ourselves subject
to.
The notion of strictly categorising traits is problematic because
we see this 'dimensional' aspect to ones personality. Categorising
someone as 'optimistic' is too rigid, when really they operate on a
dimension where they are more or less optimistic at different times.
This has been traditionally considered a problem to our simple notion
of assigning traits, since our descriptions may not be coherent with
a persons behaviour.
An
Attempting at Solving This Paradox
One
such theorist who sought to explain this problem was called Eysenck
in the 1960s. He challenged the orthodox stimulus-response model by
claiming 'the organism' intervenes in the stimulus-response chain
(Butt,
2012).
For this intervention Eysenck looked towards the physiology of the
brain in explaining these differences in behaviour.
Eysenck
acknowledged
that nature and nurture were interrelated and that both of these
forces influenced the traits we developed
(Butt, 2004). In this sense, he was trying to say that personality is
partially determined by nature but also shaped by nurture.
Eysenck's
research suggested we had a default range of cortical arousal in the
nervous system which determined whether we were introverted or
extroverted. Introversion and extroversion were viewed as fixed,
although we have somewhat revised our concept these days.
We might
allow that this has a degree of fluidity although we will show that
this conception is problematic later.
Eyesenck then looked to
autonomic nervous responses which determined emotional stability
(Butt, 2004). This allowed him to suggest that our personality traits
were determined by a mixture of genetics and classical conditioning.
He claimed personality was a biological function that imposed limits
on our abilities, but he also allowed there were malleable aspects of
our neurophysiology which could change over time (Butt, 2004).
In
this respect he could point to different arousal states in the
autonomic nervous system, as causing the differences in our
behaviour, and could explain why someone optimistic could have an off
day. On Eysenck's account then, it was simply a matter of
neurotransmitters, triggered by the nervous system, that caused a
fluctuation in our behaviour.
Eysenck's
methodology
There
are many words describing traits and if
we take the notion of 'melancholic' we could use a variety of words
indicative of this disposition e.g. pessimistic, moody, etc. If a
group of us were asked to observe a melancholic, we may come up with
different words describing this same disposition.
In order to capture
a detailed enough description, Eysenck based his theory on a 'factor
analysis'. This involved people observing subjects in a laboratory,
who rated them according to a questionnaire.
From this, he conducted
a statistical analysis that grouped certain traits together and thus
derived a personality index, where the traits were arranged on the
axes of stability and how introvert/extrovert someone was. In this
way, he removed the overlap of certain descriptions of traits, and
managed to group multiple descriptions to a particular trait, as in
our melancholic example above.
By looking
at each of the traits in the diagram, I'm sure you can come up with
multiple ways of describing someone exhibiting some of these
behaviours. In this sense, Eyesenck was looking for uniformity in our
descriptions of traits and whittled the list down to 32 traits.
On
the face of it, this appears to be a satisfactory explanation, and an
objective way of carving up the psychological domain of traits.
Furthermore, this is what scientific orthodoxy tells us, and it also
conforms to our natural use of language.
We all intuitively
understand what these traits refer to and mean when we describe
someone.
Naturally, there are specialists who appear under the branch
of 'personality psychology' who have taken this idea and had
developed it much further. There are many tests and variations of
quizzes, which claim to determine our own personality traits by
answering a set of multiple choice questions. Given that this is
accepted as a meaningful science among the general population, then
we can
ask are there any grounds to question such an assertion?
It
turns out that we can level multiple challenges against these lines
of thinking. Welcome to the myth of the enduring personality…
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