Sure, our intuitions can be spot-on. They can also be dead wrong. How do we determine which are valid and which not? We seek out external sources of information: we collect data, we do research. We put our heartfelt hunch to a test, if only informally. We get scientific.
For example, what would your intuition tell you about this query: What type of person is better at detecting deception – the individual with a more trusting personality or the individual with a less trusting personality?
I image most people would have the hunch that the less trusting person is better at such things as lie-detection. They’re less naive, more on the lookout for trickery, right?
Actually, the hunch may be wrong. Research published in the most recent edition of Social Psychological and Personality Science challenges the intuitive conclusion.
People high in trust were more accurate at detecting the liars—the more people showed trust in others, the more able they were to distinguish a lie from the truth. . . .
“Although people seem to believe that low trusters are better lie detectors and less gullible than high trusters, these results suggest that the reverse is true,” write co-authors Nancy Carter and Mark Weber of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. [emphasis added; source]
“These results suggest . . . ” Beautiful. Will the results hold up upon attempted replication of the study and verification of the finding? You might not want to leave it to your intuition to determine the answer.
I see intuition as a quickie guide to what might be the case. However, when we have the time and incentive to determine what really is the case — we should seek out more reliable sources of information.
The other evening I was watching So You Think You Can Dance with my wife. One of the contestants got criticized for not being emotionally expressive enough. A few minutes later they showed a clip documenting his growing up in Brooklyn. It was tough for a male dancer.
My wife said, “So that’s why he has trouble expressing himself.” Being ever the critical thinker, I said, “Maybe. But it might just be his personality.”
A quickie test for any hindsight explanation of this type is to see if the same influence could explain an opposite outcome. “That’s why he’s so expressive! He’s had to fight his whole life to survive!” If so . . . good reason to doubt.
Was it the dancer’s nature to be emotionally reserved/inhibited? Or did his social environment nurture and shape this part of him?
In terms of the nature/nurture issue, I have long looked at it this way: While nature likely sets the range of possibilities, nurture determines where in that range a person develops to. Depending on the attribute in question, and the nature of the person in question, that range will sometimes be large, sometimes quite small.
Of course, it’s likely not that simple.
Recent research highlights how personality seems little swayed by nurture, from childhood.
The title to the Eurekalert news release of the study reads: Childhood personality traits predict adult behavior.
The research itself consisted of this -
Using data from a 1960s study of approximately 2,400 ethnically diverse elementary schoolchildren in Hawaii, researchers compared teacher personality ratings of the students with videotaped interviews of 144 of those individuals 40 years later.
40 years later!
On a related note, a few weeks ago my wife and I attended her 30th high school reunion. And while many of her friends had changed quite a bit physically, 30 years later “Susan” was still shy, “Bob” a big joker. Etc.
The sub-head to news release says it perfectly -
We remain recognizably the same person, UC Riverside and Oregon researchers find
Lead researcher Christopher S. Nave made this general comment about personality -
“It’s a part of us, a part of our biology.”
I wonder, way back in the crib was I on track to becoming a skeptical thinker? Or is that a trait with a wider range of possible outcomes?
“Values deeply embedded in biology”
That’s the subtitle to an article on recent psychological research I read last evening. And sure. Parents valuing their offspring, that’s definitely deeply embedded in our evolutionary biology. But the title tells how the research got personal -
Personality predicts political preferences
Wow. Though this is not the first bit of research that has discovered this type of connection, it is still big news. Important. As much as I’d like to tout my values as the best and most reasonable, I realize that more goes into these judgments than pure thought. In previous generations psychologists asserted that the nurture of our social environments influenced our political views. The family and culture and unique experiences an individual encountered shaped their political self. But darn, it seems that the nature of our largely inborn personality traits exerts a strong influence as well. How strong? Unfortunately, the article didn’t delve into that important matter. Here’s the nutmeat of what it did cover:
There is a strong relationship between a voter’s politics and his personality, according to new research from the University of Toronto.
Researchers at UofT have shown that the psychological concern for compassion and equality is associated with a liberal mindset, while the concern for order and respect of social norms is associated with a conservative mindset.
“Conservatives tend to be higher in a personality trait called orderliness and lower in openness. This means that they’re more concerned about a sense of order and tradition, expressing a deep psychological motive to preserve the current social structure,” says Jacob Hirsh, a post-doctoral psychology student at UofT and lead author of the study.
While there is nothing conclusive here, there is plenty to consider. Perhaps there is at least sufficient cause to question the notion that our own values are THE values, simply because they feel so right to us.
Being a skeptic — also something influenced by personality? (I bet) — I did encounter this line in the article that raised a red flag:
Hirsh’s work contributes to accumulating evidence suggesting political behaviour is motivated by underlying psychological needs.
Um, a personality trait is a personality trait, not a manifestation of some underlying psychological need. A person with an extroverted personality is a person with an extroverted personality, not someone needing to work out a hidden agenda. It seems the ghost of the great pseudoscientist, Sigmund Freud, lives on.
Still. An intriguing finding.
Older phrenology -
Phrenology (from Greek: ????, phre-n, “mind”; and ?????, logos, “knowledge”) is a hypothesis stating that the personality traits of a person can be derived from the shape of the skull. It is now considered a pseudoscience. [Wikipedia]
Newer? -
Brain structure corresponds to personality
Personalities come in all kinds. Now psychological scientists have found that the size of different parts of people’s brains correspond to their personalities; for example, conscientious people tend to have a bigger lateral prefrontal cortex, a region of the brain involved in planning and controlling behavior. [Eurekalert]
Certainly, this newer hypothesis is off to a much better start. Consider the methods for the study.
For the study, 116 volunteers answered a questionnaire to describe their personality, then had a brain imaging test that measured the relative size of different parts of the brain. A computer program was used to warp each brain image so that the relative sizes of different structures could be compared. Several links were found between the size of certain brain regions and personality. The research appears in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
Is there really something to it? Certainly seems plausible. But I wouldn’t jump to a conclusion, pro or con, just yet.
There is something from the article I would like to jump all over, however. This statement got me grunting:
Psychologists have worked out that all personality traits can be divided into five factors, commonly called the Big Five: conscientiousness, extraversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, and openness/intellect.
Psychologists have worked this out? Costa & McCrae’s trait model is certainly the most tested, most used personality inventory. And yes, it has been found to be a useful tool for this or that. But I strongly doubt it stands the test of time.
My greatest beef with the model are the traits themselves. Particularly neuroticism. My study and interest in evolution tells me this trait and others are at least somewhat off-the-mark. Human animals are highly adaptive, and our personalities are multi-dimensional and varied for likely many reasons. I suspect that a future, better trait model will have characteristics that more accurately reflect real-world social dynamics.
But that’s just the guess of a conscientious, somewhat neurotic intellectual.
Kids these days.
It seems that every generation of people, upon transitioning to the current “older generation,” looks back and the younger and concludes that society is going to hell in a handbasket.
Doesn’t appear that way to me. Sure, kids are maturing faster. But objectives measures such as overall crime rate show, for instance, show no decline.
Yes, they look and dress funny — compared to how we did. They use language differently. And why not, for it is a bonding thing. They have their odd, new words and expressions, we had ours. Besides, language evolves.
A bunch of years ago Tom Brokaw released a book, The Greatest Generation, about American “citizens who came of age during the Great Depression and the Second World War and went on to build modern America.” [School Library Journal]
While the people and accomplishments are nothing to scoff at, my reaction to the sentiment went like this: “Well, okay. But people are people. Change the opportunities and the attributes of the social environment, and myriad other factors — and you will change the behavior of people.
In psychology this is called the “fundamental attribution error.” People tend to over-estimate personality/character traits as the explanation for behavior and under-estimate situational/environmental factors.
Consider the infamous Milgram experiment. Nearly two thirds of all subjects “shocked” their peer to a surprising degree. Why? Because they had been informed of the “rules” and instructed to “go on” by an authority figure. A more recent, and ethical, follow-up study generated surprisingly similar results. Sure, personality likely plays a role in most behavior, particularly on the individual level, but in this case it seems situational variables are stronger. In most cases, however, the two are very difficult to tease apart.
A new study suggests that some character traits are more malleable than we may have presumed.
The results of a meta-analysis of 72 separate studies on the attributes of American college students, conducted by Sara Konrath, were released under this heading:
Empathy: College students don’t have as much as they used to
Wow.
“We found the biggest drop in empathy after the year 2000,” said Sara Konrath, a researcher at the U-M Institute for Social Research. “College kids today are about 40 percent lower in empathy than their counterparts of 20 or 30 years ago, as measured by standard tests of this personality trait.”
But again, if these results hold up, I wouldn’t conclude that the nature of the American populace has changed. Rather, how the newer generation has been nurtured, and is still influenced, by a multitude of factors — social, cultural, economic, political, etc., — that has likely changed. And so any condemnation or attempts at remediation should be aimed there.
The saying about not throwing out a baby with the bathwater is appropriate here. Until we know which factors lead to a drop in empathy (and some might further argue, and know that this is indeed a bad thing) let’s not go blaming “the media” or Facebook or the incredible prosperity our culture is fortunate enough to assume.
As for that factor — economic prosperity — why wouldn’t the younger generation assume it? They have known no world wars, no severe economic depressions, no want for meat or bread. How are they to rise to greatness without a meaningful calling or challenge?
Not that we should create one. Not that we shouldn’t, either. I just wonder.
There may be something in the nature of the skeptic that makes him/her less suited to lead the general public and succeed in politics.
That’s a suspicion of mine that was further fueled by a research team from the Faculty of Biological Sciences at the University of Leeds and their finding about the qualities of leaders. Briefly, it was this:
[S]uccessful leaders display more decisive behaviour, spending less time following others and acting more quickly than others in the group. [source]
The “less time following others” I imagine skeptics have nailed. But maybe not. Maybe we/they spend time following different others, such as pillars of the skeptical community.
It’s the “decisive behavior” and “acting more quickly” element that might get in the way of skeptics taking on leadership roles in the wider community.
While I and many of my skeptical cohorts tend to see deliberate thought and the public display of a lack of certainty to be virtues, judging by the politicians that get elected in this country, many, many other people do not, at least not in politicians.
Alas, all is not lost. It seems to me that in a healthy society there can and should be a system of checks and balances. And educated skeptics could serve the essential role of informing those with more decisive and quick-acting temperaments.
Of course, I could be all wet.
Damn, that wasn’t very decisive of me.
