Personality can be defined as consistency in a person’s way of being — that is, long-term consistency in their particular ways of perceiving, thinking, acting and reacting as a person. Organized patterns of thought and feeling and behaviour.
To some extent, people generally do tend to operate in a similar way day after day, year after year. We’re not talking about specific actions being repeated again and again, like compulsive hand-washing, but about overall patterns, tendencies, inclinations. Someone who has tended to be quiet and reserved up to now will probably still tend to be quiet and reserved tomorrow.
It is this general predictability in individuals’ thought patterns, emotional patterns and behaviour patterns, which defines personality. Or to put it another way:
“Your personality style is your organizing principle. It propels you on your life path. It represents the orderly arrangement of all your attributes, thoughts, feelings, attitudes, behaviors, and coping mechanisms. It is the distinctive pattern of your psychological functioning—the way you think, feel, and behave—that makes you definitely you.”
Five factors of Personality:
These are known as the ‘Big Five’.
To some extent, people generally do tend to operate in a similar way day after day, year after year. We’re not talking about specific actions being repeated again and again, like compulsive hand-washing, but about overall patterns, tendencies, inclinations. Someone who has tended to be quiet and reserved up to now will probably still tend to be quiet and reserved tomorrow.
It is this general predictability in individuals’ thought patterns, emotional patterns and behaviour patterns, which defines personality. Or to put it another way:
“Your personality style is your organizing principle. It propels you on your life path. It represents the orderly arrangement of all your attributes, thoughts, feelings, attitudes, behaviors, and coping mechanisms. It is the distinctive pattern of your psychological functioning—the way you think, feel, and behave—that makes you definitely you.”
Five factors of Personality:
These are known as the ‘Big Five’.
Extroversion — the tendency to be outgoing, energetic and sociable
Openness — the tendency to enjoy variety, novelty, challenge and intellectual stimulation
Neuroticism — the tendency to experience unpleasant emotions
Agreeableness — the tendency to be friendly, compassionate and cooperative
Conscientiousness — the tendency to show self-discipline and self-control
Each of these five factors is actually a sort of mega pair of opposites: extroversion v. introversion, openness v. closedness, neuroticism v. emotional stability, agreeableness v. hostility, conscientiousness v. spontaneity. For example, we find that there is one whole set of words which describe either aspects of extroversion (‘outgoing’, ‘energetic’) or its opposite, introversion (‘shy’, ‘withdrawn’).
It’s as if everything we have to say about personality falls under one of these headings. This is one of the most robust findings to come out of decades of research into human personality.
Many psychologists now understand personality as how we all vary on these five dimensions or five factors. We are all variations on the same five themes, and these variations define our personality traits. We each have our own scores on the same five scales. An introvert, for example, is simply someone who scores low on the extroversion scale.
Many studies show that we can include a sixth factor, called Honesty/Humility (or the H factor). This is essentially a dimension of character maturity, ranging from high selfishness to high integrity.
The number of factors we “find” also depends on how strict or how loose we are with our statistics.
To get down to five factors you have to accept fairly loose connections between words. This means that, for example, we get lots of surprisingly different traits lumped together under ‘extroversion’ (such as dominant, outgoing and passionate).
Neuroticism — the tendency to experience unpleasant emotions
Agreeableness — the tendency to be friendly, compassionate and cooperative
Conscientiousness — the tendency to show self-discipline and self-control
Each of these five factors is actually a sort of mega pair of opposites: extroversion v. introversion, openness v. closedness, neuroticism v. emotional stability, agreeableness v. hostility, conscientiousness v. spontaneity. For example, we find that there is one whole set of words which describe either aspects of extroversion (‘outgoing’, ‘energetic’) or its opposite, introversion (‘shy’, ‘withdrawn’).
It’s as if everything we have to say about personality falls under one of these headings. This is one of the most robust findings to come out of decades of research into human personality.
Many psychologists now understand personality as how we all vary on these five dimensions or five factors. We are all variations on the same five themes, and these variations define our personality traits. We each have our own scores on the same five scales. An introvert, for example, is simply someone who scores low on the extroversion scale.
Many studies show that we can include a sixth factor, called Honesty/Humility (or the H factor). This is essentially a dimension of character maturity, ranging from high selfishness to high integrity.
The number of factors we “find” also depends on how strict or how loose we are with our statistics.
To get down to five factors you have to accept fairly loose connections between words. This means that, for example, we get lots of surprisingly different traits lumped together under ‘extroversion’ (such as dominant, outgoing and passionate).
Author and Credits: Barry
Edited for easy understanding.
Edited for easy understanding.