KNOW YOUR PERSONALITY TYPE.

5 Harsh truths about personality that one should know : A blog to help readers understand their personality type.

By- Lehrika Bedi

Personality traits reflect people’s characteristic patterns of thoughts, feelings, and behaviour. Personality traits imply consistency and stability. Thus, trait psychology rests on the idea that people differ from one another in terms of where they stand on a set of basic trait dimensions that persist over time and across situations. The most widely used system of traits is the Five-Factor Model. This system includes five broad traits that are-

OCEAN: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism.

• Openness- The tendency to appreciate new ideas, feelings, behaviour.

• Conscientiousness- The tendency to be careful, on-time for appointments, follow rules, be hardworking.

• Extraversion- The tendency to be talkative, to socialise, to enjoy others and to have a dominant style.

• Agreeableness- The tendency to agree and go along with others than assert one’s own opinions and choices.

• Neuroticism- The tendency to frequently experience negative emotions, anger, worry, sadness and being interpersonally sensitivity.

Each of the major traits from the Big Five can be divided into facets to give a more fine-grained analysis of someone's personality. There are some traits that cannot be completely captured by the Five-Factor Model because people do not act consistently from one situation to the next and are influenced by situational forces. This is one major debate in the field of people’s traits versus the situations in which they find themselves as predictors of their behaviour.

When we observe people around us, one of the first things that strikes us is how different people are from one another. Some people are very talkative while others are very quiet. Some are active whereas others are couch potatoes. Some worry a lot, others almost never seem anxious. Each time we use words like ‘talkative’, ‘quiet’, ‘active’, or ‘anxious’ to describe those around us, we talk about a person’s personality- the characteristic ways that people differ from one another. Personality psychologists try to describe and understand these differences. Although there are many ways to think about the personalities that people have, “personologists” claim that we can best understand the differences between individuals by understanding their personality traits. Personality traits reflect basic dimensions on which people differ.

These dimensions are Extraversion, Conscientiousness, and Agreeableness, and each individual falls somewhere on each dimension, meaning that they could be low, medium, or high on that specific trait. An important feature of personality traits is that they reflect continuous distributions which means characteristics can go from low to high, with all different intermediate values possible. One does not simply have the trait or not have it, but can possess varying amounts of it.

There are three criteria that characterise personality traits: (1) consistency, (2) stability, and (3) individual differences.

1. Individuals must be somewhat consistent across situations in their behaviours. For example, if they are talkative at home, they tend also to be talkative at work.

2. Individuals with a trait are also somewhat stable over time in behaviours. If they are talkative, for example, at age 30, they will also tend to be talkative at age 40.

3. People differ from one another on behaviours which is called individual differences. They differ on how they talk and how active they are, and thus personality traits like Talkativeness and activeness exist.

A challenge of the trait approach was to discover the major traits on which all people differ. Scientists for many decades generated hundreds of new traits, so that it was soon difficult to keep track and make sense of them. For instance, one psychologist might focus on individual differences in “friendliness” whereas another might focus on something similar like “socialisation”. Scientists began seeking ways to reduce the number of traits in some systematic way and to discover the basic traits that describe most of the differences between people.

Meanwhile, we must have sense of psychological acceptance of personality as it ensures happiness and peace. A person who identifies and accepts his personality can also identify other’s personality. If he willingly accepts it, it leads to true happiness and great levels of bond and understanding.