Part I of the series here

Conclusion

Having outlined the notion of personality traits here, it seems that many new questions are raised. One of the first ones that may appear is why I've gone to the trouble of highlighting Eyesenck's flawed personality trait studies. 

Surely I could be accused of constructing a strawman argument from 1960s research and launching an attack against that? Furthermore, you may be wondering why I have written such a lengthy mini series and how this is relevant. Well, I will spell out why I went to the trouble of doing this semi-academic piece, and highlight what it might achieve.

It is of little surprise that Eyesenck's ideas have caught on. The basic ideas behind his argument have formed the basis for much on going research. It is only within the last 10 years that the voices of critics like Mischel have been heeded in the mainstream. 

 Meanwhile, the mainstream has had to try and fight off the eliminative materialist claims that we should be abandoning the folk theory and trying to form a proper theory of mind over the past 30 years. 

 It seems we are at the stage where we have to pay attention to the way in which we have carved up the psychological domain. This means we're going to have to re-evaluate the categorisations that we have traditionally imposed. 

 The endurance of Eyesenck's theory bears testament to the fact that he appeals to common sense and appeals to the way in which we have been carving up the psychological domain.

The main problem with trait theory centres around the assumption that traits actually exist. There are newer, and presumably better, personality theories around these days but they all make the assumption that we fit in to categories or types. 

As I have stated in this discussion, we do conform to predictable patterns of behaviour at times and we certainly do not need to deny this. Nor do we need to deny that categories have practical use. We have also admitted that we have a cultural assumption that traits exist built right in to our language. 

It is the tendency of the human mind to divide the world in to categories and using traits is one way in which people in our social worlds become intelligible.

Implicit in this view is that these traits are independent from our agency. That is, we have no control over our tendency to get angry, be pessimistic etc. In this sense we are referring to some kind of mechanism that we have no control over. Interestingly enough, we identify strongly with our personality traits and we believe them to make some kind of statement about who we really are. 

We might be tempted to identify other aspects of our body which we have no control over, like being ginger or being optimistic. We may identify with things that we consciously choose, like being a raver or whatever it is the kids call themselves these days (Yes, I'm not down with the kids anymore!). However, it is usually just the case that we utilise circular logic to form a web of deceit, which masquerades as our identity, that prevents us from entertaining the truth about the illusory self.

The notion of self hood is reliant in part on the multiple “I am 'a', I am also 'b', and 'c'” modes of identification. E.g. I am ginger, I am optimistic, I am a raver. It is likely that during your phenomenological investigation in to the self you will try to say that the self is identical to x, y, or z. 

E.g. The self is the brain, the self is the body, The self is memory and so on.

Nobody ever takes the time to look behind what these concepts refer to in real life, as these modes are representative of the constraints in which we think.

This is why it is not a logical endeavour to realise Anatta.

The trick to getting this Anatta insight is in part exposing the emptiness of those a, b, c labels, and then refuting the assumptions that the self is x, y, or z. 

Once these notions have been smashed to pieces, then it is a simple case of honest looking. I am going to post the above paragraph in numerous places because it is a succinct outline of the basic process you need to use. 

I used to harp on about looking, but it is also necessary to smash apart the web of deceit by utilising a bit of logic first. When you see these assumptions no longer work logically you can discard them and systematically demolish the foundations upon which the illusory self is based.

We all start out from a position where we are bounded by the belief that we are an enduring self that has such and such 'properties'. We have a tendency to objectify ourselves as having the 'properties' of traits, much like we can treat other people as objects of experience. I wanted to draw this parallel here, not because we normally treat friends and family like objects, but because we think in terms of all 'things' as having enduring properties.

What we mean here is the way we describe subjects and objects in dualistic terms, results in us assigning attributes to people which are of course consistent with our categorisation of traits.

These traits are predicated as aspects of the self, much like properties are the predicates of objects in our language.

So take the 'outgoing' trait as an example. Imagine that you are outgoing and sociable and by some awful freak event, you lose the use of your vocal cords and become dumb. What would happen to this personality trait then? You might claim 'I'm outgoing and sociable' previously. 

However, what would we make of this claim if you were struck down with this awful tragedy?

Nothing would have changed about your so called traits, however, this outgoing trait is contingent on your being able to talk. In this sense, the predicate would become unintelligible to somebody who just met you, and did not know you prior to your unfortunate change in circumstance. 

Clearly, these constructs are quite empty when we consider such extremes.

When we are talking about contingencies of circumstance these are rather fleeting things which can easily change, instead of being the solid and enduring things we think they are. We can start to look at our own personality traits and look at the ways in which we think they define us. 

The point of this whole piece really, is to smash apart the solidity of personality traits and highlight the shaky grounds on which they are based. 

It is not so much that we needed to disprove traits exist (although I have cast serious doubt on the claim), it is just to show that the solid assumptions we use to prop up our notions of selfhood are really quite flimsy when we examine them with a degree of scrutiny.

Once we start to hack away at the logic behind personality traits, it seems more and more likely that we are really dealing with an arbitrary notion of category construction, that is purely linguistic.

It should be noted at this point, that different cultures have different categories of behaviour. As such, cross-cultural trait models have a cut down five trait model, to try and apply it universally across the board. In this sense it is only our arrogance that leads us to assume that there are a definitive of set of objective trait correlates, that conform to the English language.

The reality seems to suggest that traits are merely the construction of personal values using shared language. In more scientific terms, traits theory is an attempt to treat people as having objective aspects, that can be medically categorised and diagnosed.

This of course has its roots in the orthodoxy of physicalism, which is now an untenable position in philosophy of mind and has since been superseded with functionalism. I argued earlier that we cannot delineate between traits and our personal construction of meaning convincingly. 

For this reason, I am convinced that a revised functionalist account of trait theory could not work, but functionalism certainly may be able to account for behaviour by identifying patterning in neural networks. However, this would constitute an as yet unspecified theory, and would abandon the constraints of traditional notions of traits. 

This new theory would be something that perhaps many eliminative materialists would endorse.

The evidence for the personal construction theory of traits seems to fit our observations. The lack of evidence for traditional notions of traits is compounded by the problems we have when we point to conventions of language.

Could it really be the case that nobody has objective personality traits, and the myth of the enduring personality is a fiction? For me, the fact that our ideas about personality are completely empty could be somewhat disconcerting and radical on the one hand. 

It seems that when I think about the ones I love and that they have no personality, other than what I construct in my own mind is counter intuitive. However, once we factor in the multiplicity of events and the vicissitudes of our different behaviours, it becomes clear that these categorisations of traits are too rigid for the rich and wonderful varieties of behaviour that our fellow human beings are capable of.

When viewed in this sense, it seems that quite the opposite is the case and traits are counter-intuitive.

The notion of trying to apply a narrow series of categories that apply to traits, would be far too restrictive to account for the dynamic nature of the unfolding of our lives. If we were only capable of behaving along a dimensional axis for each trait, then we would be somewhat robotic and more predictable in our responses to life's events. 

The fact of the matter is that we are far more unpredictable and are capable of surprising acts, and confounding expectations. We try to impose order on the world by using traits but this does not entail that the way we do so, or the way we learned culturally to do so, is definitive in any way.

If we take the view of Heidegger, the subject/ object dichotomy is merely one way of being, and is a useful way to look at the world. However, restricting ourselves to this view means that we miss out on the modes of being where we don't view people as having properties. Such times would be when we are in the throes of sporting competition, having a laugh with friends in the pub, or losing yourself in a lovers kiss.

The point here, is simply that we need to differentiate between the way we think about people objectively when we reflect on them, and the way we experience them in the flow of life. It makes sense that we try to make predictions about how others might behave, or rationalise and criticise peoples actions. 

When doing this though, we are always doing it in a temporal sense outside of the present moment. When using traits we are talking about past and future actions.

I will leave it for you to decide where trait theory fits in to the present moment, but rest assured you will find it difficult to find relevance in the present moment, other than within a temporal narrative about time. That is, every time we think about traits it is in a temporal sense and does not conform to our 'being in the world' direct experience of socialising. 

We could of course be talking about drama when socialising in the present moment, and we could be focussed on why someone acted in such and such a manner. Again though, we would be referring to our temporal ideas and our experience of traits in the present moment would be limited to the act of talking itself, and the mental phenomena that arises during our chain of reasoning.

It seems then, that the notion of an enduring personality is nothing more than a myth in the grand scheme of things. Particularly where we use the categorisations available in our linguistic community. 

It was an unfounded assumption that these categorisations actually related to physical states and whilst it appears logical to divide the domain of traits in this way, we've seen that this is actually empty. 

It seems that personality is a mysterious phenomenon that we think we can know, but we cannot easily, or coherently, conceptualise it in the way we thought we could.

References:

• Butt, T. (2012) 'Critical Readings in Social Psychology', Ch. 3, 2^nd edition, Milton Keynes, The Open University.
• Butt, T. (2004) 'Understanding People', ch.1, Basingstoke & New York, Palgrave Macmillan.
• Eysenck, H.J & Rachman, S. (2012 [1965]) 'Dimensions of Personality', in Butt, T (2012) 'Critical Readings in Social Psychology', ch.3, 2^nd edition, Milton Keynes, The Open University.
• Fisher, H (2013) Extract of essay taken from 'On Temperament' in Brockman, J (2013 [2012]) This will make you smarter.
  Available at http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/6641.Helen_Fisher
  Last Accessed 23/11/14
• Holloway, W. (2012) 'Social Psychology Matters', ch.3, 2^nd edition, Milton Keynes, The Open University.
• Richards, G. (2002) 'Putting Psychology in its Place:A Critical Historical Overview', ch. 18, 2^nd edition, Sussex, Psychology Press.

Part I of the series here

F.A.E - The Fundamental Attribution Error

In rating people we have a propensity to commit the 'fundamental attribution error' which is where we overvalue the effect of human agency, and underestimate the effect of the present situation in explaining behaviour (Butt, 2004). To illustrate, when we have to slam on the breaks because of someone's driving, we may well blame the poor skill and idiotic driving of another. 

However, we might be overlooking the fact that they are lost and are unsure of where they are going, and had a moment of panic. In this sense, we are biased towards prioritising human agency, and underestimate the degree to which a situation determines behaviour.

If we apply this to Eysenck, he assumed widespread use of words by the general population pointed to the underlying objectivity of traits. Whilst we need not deny there are stable patterns in peoples behaviour, Eysenck's research was situated within this folk psychology paradigm and any results he derived were simply reinforcing his theories about the existence of traits, without an attempt to test the validity of them. 

In this sense, his entire research project begged the question, since he simply assumed that our categorisations pointed to real enduring qualities. In any case, any results he derived were simply a collection of people committing the fundamental attribution error, and this undermines his claim to objective validity.

The fundamental attribution error demonstrates our propensity to conform to the general populations assumptions about traits in everyday discourse, and assume these shape our agency. However, what we find is that Eyesenck simply reinforced these assumptions, by getting people to take part in his research program and not, even undertaking an independent verification of the existence of such traits. Moreover, his statistical measurement technology was flawed and we see that the case for objectivity here is very flimsy.

Check out Dustinland's wicked cartoons: http://dustinland.com/archives/archives626.html

This problem arises because Eyesenck simply drew a pattern from statistical inference of observations as justification for his theory. As Richards (2002) points out, the very psychometric survey measurements that we undertake can cause reification; where we falsely grant objective reality to the thing being measured.

To give an example, we could design a religious survey in 1700 say, that tried to measure devoutness to Christianity. We could make statements such as "Homosexuality is a sin and punishable by death", or "Witchcraft is rife in this village". 

We could collate a number of psychometric surveys and provide statistically derived empirical results. However, from these results all we have achieved is measuring a bunch of worthless religious assumptions. 

We have not proved that these assumptions are true, we have merely taken for granted their truth and produced a load of mathematical workings out to support our folly. 

Furthermore, these questions may have seemed valid in 1700 but were we to try and ask them now, they would sound quite ridiculous to any Christian. In this case, if we have supposedly measured devoutness to religion and the statements are irrelevant now, we can ask what exactly would we have measured back then? 

The simple answer is that we have reified the concept devoutness to religion and would have been engaged in sophistry.

What this tells us is that any psychometric studies are based on assumptions, and they produce a load of clever sounding mathematics that purport to back up these assumptions. All this is done without ever actually backing up these assumptions with evidence. 

What we really find is that this methodology is utterly worthless as a measure of truth, and in fact, this has been utilised as a tool by those of lowly scruples, to engage in the most wretched acts of deceit. 

It should be of little surprise that this is the tool of choice for charlatans in marketing, studies of 'public opinion', and your impotent government.

 This dangerous tool has been used to subvert the need to make claims based on evidence, and you should be suspicious of any statistical manipulations that are thrown at you.

 However, we can forgive Eyesenck as these facts were not known at the time, and he genuinely believed he was advancing science. It should be clear to you now though, that this questionnaire style methodology is fundamentally flawed and is still abused to this day by those who engage in the art of statistical manipulation.

Mischel's Criticisms

To cast further doubt on Eyesenck's research, Mischel (1968) started to assess the evidence for trait theories and found the key assumption that Eysenck had made was incorrect. It should be starting to become clear that Eyesenck had simply assumed stable personalities were based on a structural arrangement of traits. 

What Mischel discovered was that this assumption is not justified. Mischel cited extensive evidence that suggested the attributing of traits reflected the prejudice of the person doing the attributing, who had to draw on a culturally shared trait theory to frame their observations. Given that we use trait theory in everyday parlance, any observation is necessarily going to be couched in terms of traits. However, this does not necessarily mean our cultural categorisations are pointing to anything concrete.

Mischel cited a study that used Eyesenck's methodology of rating people from behind a screen, and using a psychometric survey to measure the responses. However, this time they observed strangers briefly in one condition, and in another observed people whom they knew personally. 

This study yielded a striking finding that went right to the heart of this kind of objective methodology. It was found that those doing the rating, produced the same stable trait structure in strangers that they observed very briefly, as in those that they knew well (Butt, 2012). 

This showed that under controlled conditions, subjects were prejudicial in their attribution of personality traits to strangers, and were willing to attribute them on very little evidence. It also showed that these attributions were based on the way they personally attributed traits to those they knew well (Butt, 2004).

This clearly demonstrated the error on which personality research was based. It is only natural, given the knowledge was situated in a paradigm that accepted folk psychological doctrine, that through seeing statistical patterns, practitioners could devise psychological categories for people in order to determine treatments. 

This kind of categorisation is now widely acknowledged to be unreliable and PCT actually denies this is useful, since it aims to understand the individual and acknowledges there are many individual differences, rather than narrow categorical dimensions.

Interestingly, PCT would embrace this subjective aspect of a person doing the personality construction, because when listening to how they construct someone's personality we can uncover some of the meanings this process has for them, and how they perceive the world. 

To this extent as a phenomenological exercise we can discover how people form their constructions, and perhaps some of the assumptions participants make. However, this endeavour fits in to the field of social psychology, and we would be moving beyond the scope of this essay.

Conclusion here

Part I of the series here

The Eye of the Beholder

Having outlined the idea of trait theory and why it does not seem to work, we will look to Personal Construct Theory (PCT), which suggests that we construct peoples personalities. To explain this we might look towards one of the common paradoxes that arises in assigning traits.

For example, Fred may perceive upon meeting Gerald that he is loud and obnoxious. However, Harry may may meet Gerald and perceive him as outgoing and fun. In this sense, we look to the way Fred and Harry attribute these traits and construct Gerald's personality. In this sense we are looking towards our personal construction of meaning.

In theorising about personalities, we need to consider the extent to which we construct our own versions of individual differences. This PCT suggests that personality attribution is based on our own theories about ourselves and others, which are directly influenced by our preferences and meanings.

In this sense, PCT is a form of phenomenological description extracted from individuals and makes it a qualitative methodology that steps out of the experimental paradigm, and focuses on understanding individuals rather than categorising them (Butt, 2012).

In our above example it is plain to see that Gerald is constructed differently by Fred and Harry, so which, if either of them, is correct? If we are talking about objectively true traits, then a trait theorist would maintain one of them has to be wrong. It may be that Harry is correctly being objective and Fred has taken a disliking to Gerald.

How could we be sure who was correct though?

How each person makes sense of the world, influences how they perceive things. The only way to be sure would be to go through an objective assessment in a psychology lab. We will show this is problematic as our next task, but an alternative to trait theory might be to listen to Fred and Harry's construction of meaning through their own phenomenological accounts.

We would discover the meanings they bring to bear on the world and in this sense, PCT would seek to understand rather than try to carve up the domain in to categories. PCT would take account of the fact that we all have different likes and dislikes, which a trait theory would fail to capture.

This leaves trait theory stuck trying to capture the objective qualities of a person, independent of our experience of them. Implicit in the assumption of trait theory is that people have objective and measurable qualities, that are distinct and enduring.

The reality shows us that we actually bring our own presuppositions and preferences to the table when deciding what opinion we make of people. Trait theory does not take account of this fact, and tries to claim that people have objective qualities regardless of our view of them.

However, what we see is that this so called objective view cannot be separated from our opinion. For example, even if we are told Gerald is fun and outgoing, we may simply dislike him. It is not irrational to dislike somebody, even if we find no good logical reason. We may be questioned about why we dislike someone, but it is somewhat absurd to claim that really he is an objectively outgoing person, when we find him annoying and rude.

This is because we may never experience this 'fact'. We might assent that we have made an error of judgement, however, this can have no bearing upon the validity of our intuition towards people, or influence our viewpoint.

Here we are looking towards the fact that trait theory is faced with the absurdity of trying to say that the multiple ways of constructing people are incorrect, and there is one true objective account of an individual. However, in real life people do not show up in such a manner and this should point us to the error in this chain of reasoning.

Having outlined the basics of PCT, we can start to make use of the criticisms its advocates have made towards Trait theory, and show how a trait theorists objective analysis and laboratory work is fraught with problems.

Firstly, the very foundations of Eysenck's research is challenged, since it made use of statistical analyses to derive his personality index. Remember, he used a factor analysis in order to group descriptions together to form his list of 32 traits. To achieve this, he used a psychometric questionnaire of the type where a mark is placed on a numbered scale.

Such surveys are characterised by 'strongly agree' or 'strongly disagree' being placed at either end of this scale, and the respondent simply circles a number to state the degree to which they agree or disagree with a statement.

The methodology of Eyesenck's work was to have subjects with these style questionnaires sat behind a one way window, where they observed people in a room. 

The idea was that the observers rated the personality of those being observed. After a significant number of repetitions with different observers, Eyesenck collected the results together and conducted his factor analysis. In this sense he had the significance of mathematics and empirically valid results to work from. 

However, it is at this stage where multiple problems emerge.

Part VII here

Part I of the series here

Neurotransmitters

At this point, a trait theory might like to invoke the concept of neurotransmitters. Implicit in trait theory is the need to point to neurotransmitters as being the cause of behaviour. It may seem so far that I have ignored the idea of neurotransmitters being influential in this process, and am dismissing their importance. 

It may be the case that since physical and mental states are one and the same thing, John's new way of thinking after CBT is a result of a change in the balance of neurotransmitters. 

We could argue about the plasticity of the brain and how it adapts over time, and this relates to the experiential component we described previously. Going back to John's condition, a trait theorist could bite the bullet and suggest that being shy is an experiential disposition, or 'trait of character' as Fisher writes. 

John was only affected by anxiety in the presence of strangers, and a trait theorist could claim that this is a purely experiential component. If we were able to establish a link between neurotransmitters and behaviour this would support this line of argumentation.

Implicit to such a counter-argument is that we will act the same way in similar situations because we have enduring traits. To account for any deviation from this we have to appeal to dimensionality and allow that neurotransmitters influence our behaviour along a dimensional axis. 

However, this leaves little room for manoeuvre when we consider that we may have major life events that cause our behaviour to change drastically from the traits we are ascribed. A death or traumatic event in the family may cause our behaviour to deviate from these fluctuations in dimensionality. 

This might mean we are enveloped in a terrible sense of melancholy that is somewhat out of character and is of a temporal duration. It is pushing the bounds of trait theory too far if we were to suggest that new traits appear, or we swing to extremes on fixed dimensional planes. 

This account would be missing out on the kind of volatile mood swings, memories, and projections that would feedback into our psychological world during a traumatic time. A functionalist account might be better placed to capture this aspect because it would not rely solely on neurotransmitters*. It allows causal interactions between our mental and physical states, however, trait theory is not afforded this luxury, since its aim is to explain psychological differences in purely physical terms.

* Footnote: A more advanced trait theory might like to try and exploit this functionalist view, however, this would be untenable for reasons we will outline shortly. Essentially, this boils down to the fact that we cannot clearly delineate between traits and our own personal view point. We will treat this matter fully in due course.

Perhaps more damaging to trait theory is the whole edifice of this argument stands or falls on the assumption that neurotransmitters are the cause of our behaviours. Butt pointed out that neurotransmitters may be sufficient but not necessary to cause behaviours, and the simplistic notion of neurotransmitter changes driving behaviour has no empirical support (Butt, 2004). 

Despite all the appeals to neurotransmitters, it has never been established in any studies that they are the causal mechanism for our behaviour. 

Certain behaviours may be correlated with changes in neurotransmitters, however, this alone is insufficient for any explanation of behaviour. For instance, testosterone may be said to make us more aggressive and research has shown that playing sports produces high levels of testosterone. However, this does not necessarily mean aggressive behaviour and violence will result, although we can observe there is a correlation (cited in Butt, 2004). 

This suggests that dimensionality cannot be explained in terms of neurotransmitters alone, and consequently we are unable to account for the complexities of human behaviour by merely appealing to neurotransmitters pushing us back and forth along a categorised dimension.

A New Approach to Traits

Assigning traits and categorisations is a natural propensity to social beings like us. These descriptions are useful in our day to day lives and interpersonal relationships. However, once the light of reality is allowed to illuminate the landscape, we find nothing tangible and no solid basis for grounding traits. In this orthodox trait theory we have found that there are no grounds to assert that neurotransmitters are a necessary cause of behaviours. 

We need not deny there is any correlation or that they play a role, but it is certainly asking far too much to suppose that neurotransmitters can fully account for the dimensionality of our behaviour. 

Furthermore, such an account has no coherent justification for explaining how extremes of uncharacteristic behaviour occur in traumatic circumstances. We can go from the pits of despair to elation in an instant, and we can ask for an account of how neurotransmitters can fluctuate so much so as to cause this, particularly when we are trying to make sense of behaviour in terms of traits? 

Clearly, we are giving an impoverished account by pointing merely to fixed traits. As we have seen there is little basis for them, nor is there any evidence to suggest any enduring mechanism is responsible for them.

So, given that there clearly are patterns in peoples behaviour, does it not make sense to try and categorise them? 

Yes, it does make sense and we use these terms when describing people, however, we are now left with the question of where do these categorisations originate from, if not from psychological and biological dispositions? 

It is one thing to deny the existence of these traits, yet we must be able to convincingly account for why the notion of traits is so widespread. So, where does this illusion come from?

Part VI here...

Part I of the series here

Traits of Temperament & Character

At this point it may be argued that persistence or 'relaible' is the wrong sort of thing to constitute a fixed trait. We might divide the trait realm in to traits of character and traits of temprament. This is an argument favoured by Helen Fisher in 'This Will Make You Smarter'

"Personality is composed of two fundamentally different types of traits: those of ‘character;’ and those of ‘temperament.’ Your character traits stem from your experiences. Your childhood games; your family’s interests and values; how people in your community express love and hate; what relatives and friends regard as courteous or perilous; how those around you worship; what they sing; when they laugh; how they make a living and relax: innumerable cultural forces build your unique set of character traits. The balance of your personality is your temperament, all the biologically based tendencies that contribute to your consistent patterns of feeling, thinking and behaving. As Spanish philosopher, Jose Ortega y Gasset, put it, ‘I am, plus my circumstances.’ Temperament is the ‘I am,’ the foundation of who you are". (Fisher, 2013)

Here we see that Fisher divides the trait domain in to two components which consist of temperament and character. She claims that temperament is the foundation of who you are. Then, we also have traits developed by experience, that is our character. In this sense, she is trying to say there is some fixed essence to us, but also a malleable component much like Eyesenck. Given that in our previous example, my persistence was learned, we could pass this off as a trait of experience, if we could really call it a trait at all. A trait theorist may reject my persistence is a trait of temperament, and try to run another argument in favour of traits which might run like this.

John is an introvert who clearly has a shy trait since he has a social anxiety disorder of some kind. It is evident that we observe consistent and regular withdrawal behaviours when he is surrounded by strangers, and he has always been like this. This points to an enduring mechanism that causes this behaviour, therefore, traits do exist.

Constructing an argument in this way, we have delineated between experience and some fixed essence of an individual. That is to say, persistence is the kind of thing derived from our experience, but there is some particular immutable hard wired aspect to our personality which is the biological foundation of what we refer to as ourselves.

However, this might not be a tenable claim to make if we consider the following. If we take John and put him in a different situation i.e. with two friends he knows well, it might be reasonable to suggest this shy trait would disappear. This means that the appearance of the trait is contingent on a specific context, namely when confronted with strangers. In this instance, it would appear that a specific stimulus is required in order to trigger this disposition. Here, an explanation might look like this.

Stimulus – Perceptual recognition - Neurotransmitters released - Behavioural response

This may well be observable in a series of events and it is reasonable to draw this conclusion, however, we need not hold to the claim this is a fixed enduring disposition. It is recognised by psychologists that cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) can affect changes to people who suffer with social anxiety disorder. 

Essentially, if we take someone like John we could put him through a series of therapy sessions and over time he could well become cured of his social anxiety. On this account it seems that these dispositions are not enduring at all, they are actually malleable and a product of his dysfunctional thinking. In this sense, we can question the assumption that there are hard wired biological aspects to our personality.

Proponents of trait theory try to appeal to certain aspects of personality being malleable, and others which are not. It is clear here that in order to account for this, a trait theorist points to both an experiential component, and a fixed biological component. However, by appealing to these dual mechanisms, trait theorists are both having their cake and eating it. How can we justifiably claim that on the one hand there are experiential traits that are malleable and fixed biological traits that are also malleable? In order to assert a solid foundation for this “I am”, it would be necessary to put this shyness trait in to a biological category. How could one possibly be shy and this not be part of their temperament?

Right here we run in to a clear contradiction in terms. This division in to traits of temperament and character appears to be underspecified at best and at worst incoherent. It is recognised that people can go through major changes to their behaviour, especially when we consider the transition from a child to an adult. It might be pertinent to assign an aggressive temperament to a child, but how then do we explain this transition to a calm and relaxed adult using the idea of fixed traits? Clearly, the distinction between temperament and character cannot be maintained since we need to appeal to malleability of temperament, and it seems this division is clearly a product of reification. That is, we have mistakenly granted this conceptual division concrete existence, when it does not exist. It would be incumbent on a trait theorist to specify this difference coherently, and it appears that this difficulty is insurmountable.

The other option available here is to bite the bullet and say there are no fixed traits. That even our temperament is malleable, as we are beings that change over time. In this sense, Trait theory could incorporate John's cure and allow that this foundation of who we are can shift over time.

However, the difficulties for trait theory begin to become apparent once we expose the assumptions needed for this idea to work... 
Part V here...

Part I of the series here

The Self Delusion of Personality

The traits that we use in everyday conversation appear in the form of a predicate in grammatical terms. That is, they form the part of the clause that describes the subject. So for example, we could say “John is shy” and the 'is shy' portion is our predicate. This is how we tend to describe people in an objective capacity. However, this does become problematic when we try and apply it across the board.

A trait that I liked to apply to myself was my strong level of persistence. Since Eyesenck does not use the word persistent, I find the closest matching trait from his chart which is reliable. I do not get easily dissuaded and I have an unwavering ability to push forward towards my goals even in difficult circumstances. This is perhaps my strongest trait and something I considered to make me who I am. 

This description is rather inaccurate though because I was not always so persistent. In fact, I used to be a quitter and found it difficult to see things through when I was younger. I sometimes used to look at things that had a degree of difficulty and did not even bother entertaining giving it a go, quickly dismissing them as too difficult. When I did try, I often ran out of momentum and my interest waned quickly.

In later life I developed an interest in many difficult things such as producing music, writing philosophy, and martial arts. These are not things you can just give a quick go and become a master at. These are things that require a serious degree of commitment and also many failures through trial and error. By applying myself to certain endeavours, I found I got a great deal of satisfaction from them and I was willing to persist at them for this reason. 

When completing my degree I did not find the same level of satisfaction in doing the work, but I did focus on the end result, which I believed would give me a great deal of satisfaction. Even though there were times when studying drove me to despair, especially when I was sat in the house whilst it was 30° outside during the summer, I managed to stick it out right through till the end. In this sense, when we perceive that it is something of value then persistence becomes something that naturally flows from this.

When we look at it in this sense it seems I actually learned to become persistent rather than having it as a natural trait. However, if someone in a job interview asked me “What is your strongest trait”?

I would reply “My persistence”. It is plain then I have led myself into self deceit and there is no enduring quality about me that is persistent.

It is just simply the fact that I persist at doing things that I deem to be of value.

I would not demand to continue a picnic when the weather turned inclement, and clearly my persistence trait would disappear on such an occasion. Personally, I find more value in sticking at difficult tasks, and I do not find things that come with little effort very rewarding. However, this does not mean it is some enduring quality that I possess more so than anybody else.

We are all willing to persist at something that we believe is of value to us, and to say this is a personality trait, would be conflating it with our preferences. Our preferences are real but we were trying to point to enduring 'traits' in order to predict our behaviour. Our preferences, as we know, change over time and sometimes quite drastically too. 

For instance, you probably didn't like the taste of alcohol or olives when you were younger, and I seriously doubt that you are interested in playing with action figures or Dolls any more. Anyhow, I digress here and this is a subject worthy of future exploration in its own right.

The main point is this.

Do you see how easy it is to concoct an identity story?

By overcoming adversity at University and persisting with my endeavours through all the difficult parts, I have constructed an enduring quality about myself that is grounded in fiction. In the past I could have used this as a device to delude myself about my triumph over adversity, or to try and coerce or manipulate the way people might think about me.

The reality is sometimes I persist at things and other times I don't.

That is about as far as any chain of reasoning can be established here, and all we are left with is a miserable tautology, when we expected to find some enduring quality of my 'personality'. The thing that determines whether or not I do persist is simply whether I deem it to be of value. Very simply, we are looking to contingencies of circumstance that determine whether or not we perform particular behaviours.

That is, the context we find ourselves in is the factor which determines our behaviour.

To point to some enduring quality that 'makes me the person who I am' clearly seems to point to the mistakes we made in the first part of this essay. This is where we referred to 'categorisation' as being an incoherent means of assigning traits to people, since there is a dimensional quality to their behaviours. Furthermore, we can invent new categories to rationalise our stories, and the above is an instance where I have conjured up a personality trait out of thin air.

It seems that we all find it too easy to make the error of rigidly categorising ourselves and to compound this problem, some of our categorisations may not be positive traits like persistence. Have you ever categorised yourself as a loser, unlovable, clumsy?

Well guess what.

You are using the very same mechanism of delusion to conceptualise yourself. When we take a look at the imposing fortress of such categorisations, we need only revise our view point, and realise it was folly all along.

This argument might not hold with some folk though, and we might say this is the wrong sort of thing to call a trait, and challenge this argument by splitting traits in to two types....

Part IV here...