I joke to students that if the teaching year is a roller coaster, we’ve crested the last peak and we can see the end of the ride. There’s just a lot of screaming before we get there.
I’m teaching personality psychology right now. This has involved a whistle-stop tour through the history of how we’ve come to think about personality. We’ve talked about Freud and his intellectual descendants. We’ve talked about Rogers, Maslow and the other humanists. And we’ve learned about Allport, Cattell and Eysenck and the foundation they laid for the currently dominant way to think of an individual’s personality.
Five traits cover off most of the variations in personality: agreeableness, conscientiousness, extroversion, openness and neuroticism (or emotional stability). Last week, I ran a “lemon test” – ranked the class in terms of how extrovert they are and invited the most and least extrovert to participate in a class demonstration. Unsurprisingly, the introverts were more reticent. Once they gathered at the bottom of the theatre, I gave them each a teaspoon of lemon juice and, sure enough, the introverts produced tablespoons more saliva than the extroverts.
One thing to note, though, from my summary of the course so far is that (a) with the exception of German psychoanalyst Karen Horney, the eminent personality psychologists are dudes and, more than that, (b) they’re white dudes.
The study of what we think of as personality as a core interest in psychology dates back to Gordon Allport who taught the first course labelled “personality” at Harvard in 1924.
Before this, people tended to focus more on “character” or “temperament”, and scholarly interest in these ideas goes back millennia. The Babylonians linked temperament to the movement of the stars, and the Greeks proposed the idea that our character reflects the relative amounts of different fluids coursing through our bodies.
In Islam, the Qu’ran lays out how we work. Our self, or nafs, sits at the intersection of our body and our spirit, mediating between the two. Too much of a focus on the body (nafs-al-ammarah) inhibits psychological and spiritual growth. If you go looking, you can find these kinds of scholarly traditions in most places, but they were supplanted early by Western thought, as translations of works by people like Freud and Allport made their way around the world.
In the 1990s, a group of Chinese psychological scholars led by Fanny Cheung set out to develop a means of assessing Chinese personality from the ground up, as in not just translating the Big Five and assuming it works. As their basis, they pulled out adjectives from popular Chinese novels, proverbs and lists of self-descriptors provided by pilot participants. They also paid attention to important Chinese psychological notions such as renqing, a principle related to interpersonal relationships.
These were then smooshed into a large survey, given to lots of Chinese people, and subject to statistical torture to reduce them down to a set of traits that describe Chinese personality without recourse to notions like “openness to experience”.
The end result is the Chinese Personality Assessment Inventory (which has gone through some revisions since). Interestingly, this boils down to four core pillars of personality: dependability, accommodation (of ideas and other people), social “potency” or expansiveness and social relatedness.
Subsequent validation shows these broadly map onto conscientiousness, emotional stability, extroversion and agreeableness. But no openness. Maybe Cheung et al missed openness in their adjectival survey?
But no. Openness does appear in ideas like adherence to tradition and adventurousness, but they come out as part of dependability and social potency, rather than forming a core trait together.
Something to think about before assuming we all share the same psychological architecture.
