Does Personality Exist?

Part of my teaching ethos is to ensure my material is as up to date as reasonably possible with the recent literature each year. I had not taught "personality" for a few years prior to this semester, so, it’s been a while since I’ve looked at the literature. After all the debunking of the Myers-Briggs over the years, I was amazed to see that its popularity seems to be sustained. Maybe that’s a bit of an "idealist" perspective, in light of acknowledging its popularity in business settings and the subsequent influences of that. The "powers that be" don’t have to understand the mechanics behind psychometrics or even the psychology or theory behind the measures—they just want an answer, regardless of whether or not they understand what that answer means. What an ENTJ thing of me to say!

… or is that INTP?

I don’t normally pass much heed on how the business world winds up bastardising psychological concepts. It’s nothing new. I’m used to it. I still get people asking what they’re thinking. But, what surprised me was how many psychological researchers were supporting it! Though a number of questions went through my head, one that kept coming back to me, evolving on each iteration, was that regarding the nature of personality itself. Does it even exist? This question became a focus of consideration for my personality class this year.

Those au fait with personality and behaviourism are probably aware of the latter’s criticisms of the former: personality is nothing more than series of response tendencies learned and reinforced over time. For example, as an only child, I was more frequently in the company of adults, which, alongside requiring manners, etiquette, and knowing how and when to speak, resulted in me being spoken to as an adult more often than not. I gained confidence in my abilities to socialise, losing any sense of "shyness" at a rather young age. Coupled with this confidence, I was often rewarded by my parents with praise for my behaviour—having followed their instructions and modeling the behaviour they had set out for me. Thus, it might be fair to say that I had been reinforced to be a bit of an extravert. According to Skinner, personality is an unnecessary concept, perhaps because it’s just a subtle variation of what behaviourism has laid out and explained, "fleshing out" a reasonable rationale for such response tendencies, as in the example above. That’s another criticism of personality theory—the circularity of its rationale. For example:

John is "dominant."

How do we know he is dominant?

Because he shows dominant-type behaviour.

Why does he show dominant-type behaviour?

Because he’s dominant.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I don’t agree with everything the behaviourists say. Given the focus of this blog on critical thinking, it should come as no shock that I come from a cognitive tradition, and, thus, I focus on the goings-on of the brain, not exclusively the environment and its stimuli and responses. Though I do, to a large extent, adopt the behaviourist approach to personality, I don’t think it’s complete (e.g., there is some good research on the biological basis for personality, concerning evidence from twin studies, but that doesn’t necessarily provide a complete rationale either). Moreover, if we look at personality through a social–cognitive approach, the "why" behind personality might become clearer.

Shades of Grey

For as "unique" as we all are, in many ways, humans are all the same. We know this because our quantitative methodologies allow us to generalise patterns from "big data" across populations. However, if you take any two people out of that data set, their uniqueness is staggeringly apparent. These "patterns" reflect our tendencies, perhaps even "traits." However, humans are also, in many ways, unpredictable—perhaps because of each person’s uniqueness. Nevertheless, we must acknowledge that the context of a particular situation is likely what drives this unpredictability. Any good psychologist will tell you that there is no black and white—humans are always a shade of grey. Personality is no different. If personality exists, it’s certainly not an all-or-nothing scale for each dimension (e.g., introversion v. extraversion), like results on the Myers-Briggs might imply. With that, Carl Jung acknowledged these shades of grey, unlike the developers of the Myers-Briggs—a mother and daughter team, lacking any training in psychology between them, who based the theoretical background on Jung’s work, despite misinterpreting it.

Anyway…context is important—consider the example above regarding my extraversion. In reality, I would consider myself an introvert: I relish time on my own and prefer only "socialising" with close family as opposed to being out with larger parties. But, despite my preferences, I generally do very well in larger groups, where extraverts excel—I will almost always gravitate toward that "trait" because, implicitly, I know it’s associated with positive outcomes, such as the praise I received from my parents. Ultimately, though, the situation presented by the environment (people, place, etc.) influences which response tendency is utilised.

Gravitation Toward Labeling

This is consistent with the behaviourist approach, but what the social–cognitive perspective does is provides us with a rationale for why personality types persist. Though personality has a variety of uses, simply, we use it to explain our similarities and differences. When we encounter someone dissimilar to ourselves, we want to know why—implicitly or explicitly. Humans don’t like being confused or uncertain. It’s the same rationale for why we develop adages and aphorisms: to help us make sense, in a simplified manner, for why something happens. Such constructs provide us with an instant explanation for a wide array of scenarios, saving us from having to engage complex thought. As many cognitive researchers would say, "We’re cognitively lazy." So, we categorise and classify things because it makes our lives and thinking easier—hence our gravitation toward wanting to label everything. Personality psychology provides us with such labels to explain the various similarities and differences among us. Now, don’t jump to conclusions! If you do, you actually reinforce my point about cognitive laziness! This is not a criticism of personality, per se, but we have to be real about it.

Whatever personality is—whether it exists or not—whatever we’re measuring when we use the NEO or EPQ, we seem to be doing a decent job of drawing relationships and making predictions; so, personality can’t really be said to not exist. However, I contend that a more accurate way of looking at it is as a series of socially derived continua for commonly observed response tendencies. As someone who values the concept of personality and, simultaneously, acknowledges its flaws, I genuinely welcome further such considerations, which might facilitate achievement of a wider rate of acceptance from other branches of psychology that hold either a negative or indifferent perspective of personality, thus leading to more collaborative and stronger research.

Also, let’s just ditch the Myers-Briggs altogether.

What? Too ESTP?