Don’t confuse my personality with my attitude. My personality is who I am. My attitude depends on who you are.
― Frank Ocean
The way you look, what you do, and how you do things reveal information about who we are as a person. It informs people around us about how we might react in various situation. It gives them insights into our personality. What do we mean when we talk about personality though? Personality can be defined as the characteristic set of behaviours, cognitions, and emotional patterns that evolve from biological and environmental factors. Is it clear yet? Probably not... Personality can also be understood as that which predicts what a person will do in a given situation.
It is therefore the characteristics specific to an individual, that will help explain how and why they react a certain way in given contexts. For example, if you meet someone for the first time and that person seems uncomfortable when talking to people s/he doesn’t know, you can infer that this person is shy and expect her/him to act similarly when meeting someone else. Similarly, looking at people’s gait or outfit can provide information regarding their personality.
But first, let’s have a look at the basic concepts of personality and how it is measured (in humans).
A personality can be defined on three different domains of traits: dynamic traits; ability traits; and temperament traits. Dynamic traits characterise the tendency of person to be set into action to achieve a goal, i.e. how easily the person does something or takes decision for example. Ability traits refer to the effectiveness with which the goal is achieved, i.e. whether the person tends to procrastinate or not. Finally, temperament traits are linked to the stylistic aspects of goal achievement, i.e. whether the person emotionally load the goal and what emotions they project onto the goal. The specific combination of traits exhibited by a person composes their personality. To assess one’s personality, we don’t usually try to establish the exhaustive lists of traits characterising the person; personality is usually measured using questionnaires to assess the Big Five.
You’ve probably heard about the Big Five before, or at least some of them. The Big Five are five dimensions researchers tend to agree on to help characterise someone’s personality: Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, Neuroticism, Openness, and Extraversion. Those dimensions represent continuum, going from one extreme to another. It goes like this:
Conscientiousness (efficient/organized vs. easy-going/careless) can be seen as the personality trait of being careful, or diligent. High conscientious scores are associated with tidiness, efficiency, and organisation; on the other hand, low conscientious scores are associated with procrastination, free thinking, and spontaneity.
Agreeableness is often associated with people’s skills (friendly/compassionate vs. challenging/detached). People with high scores are often sociable, friendly, and altruistic whereas people with low scores tend to be rude, antisocial, manipulative, callous, and even disruptive.
Neuroticism (or emotional stability; sensitive/nervous vs. secure/confident) can be seen as our ability to deal with situations and how they affect us. When you score high on neuroticism, you tend to worry a lot, it is harder to put things into perspective, everything affects you, and you’re more self-conscious, nay you have a fairly low self-esteem. Scoring low on neuroticism means you are more confident, you’ve got a good self-esteem, to the point that you tend to blame others for what’s happening to you, but you are better at putting things into perspective and delay gratification.
Openness to experience (inventive/curious vs. consistent/cautious) involves five facets, or dimensions, including active imagination (fantasy), aesthetic sensitivity, attentiveness to inner feelings, preference for variety, and intellectual curiosity. People with high scores tend to be more creative, experiment more, are often risk-takers and do not conform to social norms. People with low scores favour the familiar, conventional or traditional in their look and behaviours.
Extraversion (outgoing/energetic vs. solitary/reserved) can be linked to public behaviours and is probably the best known of the Big Five (even though common understanding and definition by psychologist are slightly different). Extraverted people (high scores) tend to be loud, outgoing, authoritative, energetic, and thriving in loud work places like open spaces. Introverted people (low scores) tend to be quiet, preferring nights in to clubs, enjoy alone time, and need less stimuli to feel fulfilled.
Our personality is thus the specific combination of traits expressed by a person. It can change based on context and situation and change over time, but overall the pattern of traits seems to be consistent through life. For example, you might need more permanent stimulations and more organised with age but that often means you were displaying tendencies when you were younger. So that’s what we mean by personality: the unique combination of traits displayed by a person. Now, cool thing about it, we don’t need fancy questionnaires to get a sense of one’s personality. We have the ability to self-assess someone’s personality by just looking at them.
In order to gauge a personality, we use behaviours that are often telling of specific personality traits (e.g., being comfortable with public speaking). Then, we need to look for those behaviours, making sure we are using something available to the observer (choice of clothes vs choice of underwear for example, the former being -usually- more visible than the latest). If the behaviour is present and observable, we have to have the tendency to detect it or see it, be attentive to details or pay attention to our social surrounding (making the difference between Louboutin and Clark heel shoes for example – hint: the sole gives it away). Finally, we need to do something once we detected the relevant behaviours, usually we make a judgement about the person we just observe. I told you last week that by looking at someone’s gait you could know a bit about their personality. How? Well, research has shown that people that tend to move their upper body more when walking (the “shoulder-swaggerers” as would say a friend of mine) tend to be more aggressive, energetic, and spontaneous individuals. Now think about it: it’s night time, you’re walking home when you see this person walking towards you. You don’t seem to know them but you notice that they’re moving their shoulders – a lot. That’s all you can see, the movement of their shoulders as they walk towards you. You can’t see their face but you know it’s a man. And men have been shown to be more aggressive than women! Similarly, people moving their lower body more when walking (the “hip-swayers” as he would call them) tend to be more friendly, outgoing but also verbally aggressive, preferring the use of words to the use of fists. Again, you’re walking at night, same scenario but this time the person walking towards you sway their hips – left-right-left – as they walk. You don’t have the same level of apprehension than when facing the shoulder-swaggerers because a little voice in your head tells you that it’s probably a woman walking towards you. And again, women tend to score higher on friendliness and prefer words to physical violence. So next time you’re walking alone at night and you see someone walking towards you, listen to your guts. They tend to be right about the sense they get from one’s gait.
Personality judgement is actually a very natural task: you see someone, you scrutinise them (with more or less attention), and boom! Thanks to all the available information from their clothes, their hair, and their gait, you made a judgement not only about whether you like them or not (cf last week post on first impressions), but you were also able to assess their general personality. However, remember that those judgements are based on nonverbal signals, subject to socio-cultural influences. The assessment you make of someone’s personality may actually tell more about who you are and what you think than it does about that other person. You might see very negatively loud people, or people with piercing or tattoos, whereas it won’t matter to someone else. And again, remember that if visual signals are important, they're not the whole story. The cover of a book might push you to open it or not, but you never know what it contains until you’ve given it a chance. The same applies to people.
During those past five posts, we explored the subtle art of communication. We saw it goes way beyond the simple act of formulating thoughts aloud to someone’s else. It requires good delivery abilities, but it is also important to remember that listening is as important as talking. A good listener will be able to understand a lot more than the verbal content, but also the emotional state of the person and what sort of questions to ask. Communication between individuals begins as soon as they enter each other’s visual field. Communication is not all about words, it includes a lot of signals available to the eye of the attentive listener.
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Want to know more about your true selves? Wondering how you score on each dimension of the Big Five? Or simply wondering what you're made of?
Follow this link for finding out which house you belong to with the Sorting Hat test (proven to be fairly accurate):
https://www.proprofs.com/quiz-school/story.php?title=mte2mdawoq2srl
... or this one for a real-life, science-backed, personality test (with clear extensive feedback at the end!!):
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/personality-quiz/
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