Big News: "Big Five" under assault

[Totenkindly]

http://news.yahoo.com/universal-personality-traits-not-study-finds-143701925.html

Psychologists can get a pretty clear picture of someone's personality by evaluating to what degree they express traits known as the "Big Five" — openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. These factors are thought to be rooted in biology and to transcend cultural differences, but a new study of an indigenous Bolivian society shows the traits might not be universal after all....

[discussion of the "Big Two"]

"Individuals in all human societies face similar goals of learning important productive skills, avoiding environmental dangers, cooperating and competing effectively in social encounters, and finding suitable mates. In small-scale societies, individuals have fewer choices for social or sexual partners and limited domains of opportunities for cultural success and proficiency. This may require abilities that link aspects of different traits, resulting in a trait structure other than the Big Five," the team wrote....

 

[KDude]

http://news.yahoo.com/universal-personality-traits-not-study-finds-143701925.html

Small indigenous societies always throw a monkey wrench into what we think of as normal. There's a whole tribe in Africa that doesn't know what masturbation is. They don't even have a word for it.

 

[Totenkindly]

Small indigenous societies always throw a monkey wrench into what we think of as normal. There's a whole tribe in Africa that doesn't know what masturbation is. They don't even have a word for it.

ROFL!
Compared to this, that should be the "Big One" and these are the "Little Five."
(Although I guess people use all five to reach a big one.)

---

My thoughts are that maybe the Big Five are still around, but in open-ended cultures within certain parameters. In other words, they are a natural development in human beings, but we have to specify the context since it's not quite "universal."

In a mathy framework, it's basically saying, "Giving these starting conditions/assumptions, the system will typically stabilize toward the following configuration."

 

[garbage]

Could be a failure of the Big Five, could be a failure of the translation. There's evidence that it may not apply to some cultures; see also: Wikipedia.

Current research concentrates on a number of areas. One important question is: are the five factors the right ones? Attempts to replicate the Big Five in other countries with local dictionaries have succeeded in some countries but not in others. Apparently, for instance, Hungarians don’t appear to have a single Agreeableness factor.[95] Other researchers find evidence for Agreeableness but not for other factors.[30]

We'll want to continue to probe, to determine whether the Big Five is truly universal, comprehensive, repeatable, and comprised of independent factors.

I'll knock Big Five off of my own mental pedestal if it turns out to be a useless measure.

What they missed is this.....Behavior is "learned" and, therefore, it can be subject to change albeit for better or worse with the proper conditioning of the mind.

I'll be sure to pass this along to every research psychologist on the planet.

 

[Totenkindly]

I'll knock Big Five off of my own mental pedestal if it turns out to be a useless measure.

Well, as I said, that doesn't mean it is USELESS. It just means it is not universal. So if you can set up a valid set of assumptions under which it is valid, that is still useful.

 

[garbage]

Well, as I said, that doesn't mean it is USELESS. It just means it is not universal. So if you can set up a valid set of assumptions under which it is valid, that is still useful.

Yup, it's just a matter of determining what those assumptions have to be. If a model's used outside of its relevant scope--well, that's bad news.

If the set of assumptions winds up including lots and lots of unrealistic caveats, then it'll become useless in terms of real-world applicability.

"Okay, we've determined that the Big Five's agreeableness factor doesn't apply to Belgium."
"Okay, we've further determined that the Big Five's agreeableness factor doesn't apply to any of Europe."
"... okay... it looks like three of the factors are just total bullshit."
".. okay. Turns out the Big Five only applies to people who lived on Mars in the year 1873."
".. uhgh. Fuck the whole thing."​

 

[Totenkindly]

Yup, it's just a matter of determining what those assumptions have to be. If a model's used outside of its relevant scope--well, that's bad news.

If the set of assumptions winds up including lots and lots of unrealistic caveats, then it'll become useless in terms of real-world applicability.

"Okay, we've determined that the Big Five's agreeableness factor doesn't apply to Belgium."
"Okay, we've further determined that the Big Five's agreeableness factor doesn't apply to any of Europe."
"... okay... it looks like three of the factors are just total bullshit."
".. okay. Turns out the Big Five only applies to people who lived on Mars in the year 1873."
".. uhgh. Fuck the whole thing."​

Strategically, I think we can sacrifice Belgium, but if you lose Kamchatka without being able to hole up in Madagascar, I think the game is over.

Ways to Salvage the Big Five
1. Add a new factor -- the Fudge Factor, known as trait #6.
2. Send in the military to wipe out this rogue culture.
3. Put more plastics in the environment, to screw with everyone's head.

 

[uumlau]

Very interesting. I've been largely skeptical of the Big Five since my first encounter with it. I'm also skeptical of MBTI and Jung, but more along the lines of figuring out how to differentiate the essential properties of a type from the superficial ones.

The main problem I see with the Big Five is that there is no underlying theory. Indeed, while it is backed up by its scientific consistency and predictability in measurement, I get the strong impression that such results consist mostly of confirmation bias.

For example, if I take a test that asks me what color my eyes are, and I answer "brown", I get classified as a "brown-eyed person", and this is deemed scientific because I consistently answer brown on subsequent tests. But there is no meaning attached to "brown-eyed person". Or rather, there is no new knowledge gained based on the test answers. The Big Five traits seem to me to be that meaningless. How does a person with a particular set of traits actually behave/react (aside from the broad generalizations of Openness, Agreeableness, etc.) in a specific situation, with specific kinds of stress? I read the Big Five descriptions and gain no insight about myself, and I come away thinking, "Well, yeah, it would say that about me, because that's how I answered the questions." I've learned nothing new, no more than if I'd answered a question about my eye color.

Enneagram has an answer for this, as does MBTI and Jung, where the essential types are particular underlying attitudes/worldviews that are both strengths and weaknesses. Ironically, there are new things to learn because the types do appear to overlap, because they aren't clear-cut superficial descriptions. In these typologies, the descriptions are more like a "quick start guide" to the typology, to help you figure out where you might lie, and THEN comes the hard work of figuring out which of the underlying properties really maps to how you think and react, and perhaps learn something about yourself that you didn't know before.

Assuming the results in the link are true, then that means there is finally some evidence that this perception of mine about Big Five is perhaps accurate, that it's just a set of arbitrary dichotomies. That doesn't mean it's completely useless, but that it's only relatively useful in a context where those dichotomies apply.

 

[ptgatsby]

For example, if I take a test that asks me what color my eyes are, and I answer "brown", I get classified as a "brown-eyed person", and this is deemed scientific because I consistently answer brown on subsequent tests.

Not specific to what you were saying, but the eye example is a good analogy.

There are some cultures that don't have a word for green. So no test can capture "green eyes". However, they can tell you that green eyes are different than blue eyes even though they use the same word. The reason I say this is because

The team instead discovered evidence of a pair of broad traits that could be considered the Tsimane "Big Two." The researchers labeled one prosociality — socially beneficial behavior, which among the Tsimane, looks like a mix of items under the extroversion and agreeableness portions of the Big Five. The other trait is industriousness, which blends the efficiency, perseverance and thoroughness found in the conscientiousness portion of the Big Five, the researchers said.
(Article)

doesn't seem to actually have much to do with the underlying foundation of the FFM. You don't really end up rejecting FFM from giving a FFM test. You'd need a new factor/clumping test, using their local language, in order to discern whether the same traits emerged; then you could attempt to map the results to each other to see commonality.

OTOH, certain traits are more rigid/biologically driven (extroversion and neuroticism) while I can see cultural biases changing the rest significantly. Do they exist because we primarily test modern (post-agricultural) cultures? "Industriousness", "Empathy" and "Openness" could be fundamentally different in a tribal situation.

 

[Folderol]

Does anybody see a cultural link between Maslow's hierarchy of needs and typology systems as evidenced by this study? This hit me instantly.

In the pyramid, the more basic needs you fulfill steadily, the more personal/"frivolous" things you start to care about. Likewise, indiginous societies may rank very low on the pyramid, as they are mainly living for survival (or you can say they are living for all things simutaneously but place the most emphasis on needs. Therefore, it only seems natural that they would group multiple variables at once when looking at personality - they haven't reached those higher levels of the pyramid to even consider them as much, or even think of them as individual traits. What if some variables of personality rely on being well rounded or enriched first?