"New" Personality Traits

Assessing personality is complicated. Use caution.

Whether we have been aware of it or not, humans have been classifying things and people for ages. The practice is so old that we engage in this reflexively with baked-in habits. Originally an important defense mechanism for survival, it can now be oriented toward managing resources, carrying out various agendas, even ordinary curiosity, and more.

Photo by Minator Yang on Unsplash

Most lay rubrics used in this way have been simple ones: good vs bad, nice vs mean, friend vs foe, etc. But we are far too complex for these to be very functional or fair. Even those who are trained to evaluate personality are not always in agreement. Some have argued for decades that diagnostic manuals are faulty and based on false premises. Some claim that personality and its disorders don’t actually exist. (I am not in that camp.) Online personality “tests” are available everywhere. (Hint: nearly all are not valid…avoid them.)

Let’s take a look at one aspect of personality measurement, known as The Big Five. For 40+ years psychologists have believed that personality can vary on five traits: conscientiousness, agreeableness, neuroticism, openness to experience, and extraversion. It has been a fairly solid theory for a long time now, with instruments developed to generate profiles for individuals. But recently researchers used new methods and uncovered new traits or dimensions. Which means they were not really new; we just didn’t know about them. This should give us all pause…what else have we missed? This discovery has the potential to produce richer assessments and therefore improved therapeutic approaches.

From the linked article: “They found three meta-traits (stability, plasticity, and the new disinhibition), six traits (neuroticism, conscientiousness, openness, and three new ones: sociability, integrity, and impulsivity), and 28 facets.”

You can do deep dives on these to learn more about them. For the purposes of this brief note, which is to generate circumspection about our judgments, just considering four can prove quite illuminating.

• Plasticity is the capacity to adapt, change, and reorganize for better outcomes.

• Disinhibition refers to an orientation toward immediate gratification.

• Integrity is the adherence to moral and ethical principles.

• Impulsivity is a tendency to act on whims with little forethought.

When you contemplate the theoretical structure behind what is proposed, that is, that we have meta-traits, traits, and multiple facets or dimensions, we should all pledge to act with more humility and reflection in our opinions. It may appear that some of these are “fixed” while some are less so, but recall that facets of each exist. And someone can have trait X and also have plasticity or integrity at the same time. So it can be premature to think that the jury is ever really in.

I find the trait of integrity to be a fascinating addition. It may be the most important dimension that we have all been overlooking. Along with just a modicum of plasticity, it can wholly alter our notions about ourselves and others. A plethora of negative impressions and a history of mistakes may not be the correct or final statement. Alternatively, certain combinations of traits may result in profiles suggestive of the type of help or change that is actually needed.

We need to take more time in our judgments, especially when emotions are intense and agendas are pervasive.