Of the many books I have read or encountered on the topic of personality or typology, Daniel Nettle’s book “Personality: What Makes You the Way You Are” is certainly one of them. Throughout his introduction, I realized the concept of the “big five” was familiar. I encountered it for the first time only a few days ago in a documentary series on Netflix called “Explained: The Mind”. This sub-series looks at all the ways the human mind, brain, and psyche work. One episode centered on personality, particularly the five factor personality traits of extraversion, neuroticism, conscientiousness, agreeableness, and openness, which spell out the acronym OCEAN. These five traits developed over time as sub-traits, and were grouped together again and again into larger clusters. In the end the personality theory suggests that all human beings exhibit these five traits to greater and lesser degrees within a spectrum. Nettle writes, “This book is about the psychology of personality. I aim to vindicate the idea that people have enduring personality dispositions which partly predict what they will do, and which stem from the way their nervous systems are wired up.” (8)<\/p>\n
The five-factor model of personality, or the big five. It is widely accepted within psychology to be the most comprehensive, reliable and useful framework for examining human personality across culture and time.\u00a0The five-factor framework arguably encapsulates all other frameworks. Proponents argue not that the OCEAN framework is superior, but that it encapsulates other frameworks, and even seems to span across cultural and historical divides. The central personality notion is the trait. The five-factor framework charts such traits on a continuum, rather than grouping personalities into types. This allows for a certain fluidity within personality theory, rather than a strict typology. Nettle writes, “[…] everyone has all five factors of personality, just as everyone has a height and weight. Where we differ is the magnitude of the height and the weight, of the score along each of the five dimensions.” (20)<\/p>\n
Ultimately, I feel Nettle’s book offers images and metaphors to more palatably grasp the intricacies of personality psychology. However, I’m not convinced that the five factor framework is the ultimate framework for charting human personality, certainly across culture and time. I do think it is a very helpful way to understand rationality, behavior, and decision making. It also gives insight into the inward motivations for rational thought among individuals coming from differing points on each trait spectrum. The five factor framework seems incredibly rooted in Western rationalism, though I cannot quite put my finger on why. Perhaps it is the slightly higher focus on behavior, rather than motivation compared to how we approach the Enneagram typology.<\/p>\n
Another significant contribution from Nettle comes in his evolutionary biological approach to personality psychology. He writes, “Throughout this book, I have argued that natural selection maintains a range of different genetic variants relevant to personality traits in the human population, and that it does this because there is no ‘best-for-all-places-and-times’ level of these traits” (210). I feel this explains much of the ebb and flow of higher concentrations of a trait from generation to generation. Typically, if generation A swings high in one trait, for example conscientiousness, their children, generation B, may swing higher in openness. Of course, there are many environmental factors at play, but the OCEAN model allows for a more social-psychological approach into personality theory.<\/p>\n
Finally, I come back to Jung’s theory of dreams. For Jungians, dreams hold a compensatory function for the human psyche. So, if an individual is highly neurotic in their waking life, their dreams can be a portal for their unconscious opposite to be brought into consciousness. Likewise, an individual who exists as extremely agreeable in their waking life and relationships, may find themselves displaying fits of rage, stubbornness, and violence in their dreams. Of course Jung coined the terms introvert <\/em>and extrovert<\/em>, and wrote extensively on neuroticism, so I feel there is much to explore between the five factor framework of personality and Jungian psychology.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Of the many books I have read or encountered on the topic of personality or typology, Daniel Nettle’s book “Personality: What Makes You the Way You Are” is certainly one of them. Throughout his introduction, I realized the concept of the “big five” was familiar. I encountered it for the first time only a few […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":147,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2283],"class_list":["post-28485","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-daniel-nettle","cohort-lgp11"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28485","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/147"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28485"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28485\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28493,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28485\/revisions\/28493"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28485"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28485"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28485"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}