Measuring personality
Researchers generally agree that the main components of anyone’s personality can be boiled down to five different aspects: neuroticism, extraversion, openness, agreeableness and conscientiousness. How a person rates in these five categories can predict many important life “outcomes,” such as health and mortality, academic success, job performance and the ability to have successful, lasting romantic relationships.

McCrae and his colleagues have developed a questionnaire that can be used to evaluate someone’s personality according to these five basic traits. It’s called the “Revised NEO Personality Inventory," or "NEO-PI-R.” The survey results can be used to generate a profile of a person based on 30 specific characteristics that fall under these five larger categories.

The NEO-PI-R is widely accepted as an objective way to describe someone’s personality. People taking the survey can either rate themselves or someone they know well.

Story continues below ↓

The survey says…
In the Science study, McCrae’s team began with two groups of NEO-PI-R surveys they had previously collected in a wide variety of countries. They averaged the profiles in each of the two sets, producing one profile that reflected how volunteers rated their own personalities and another profile that reflected how they rated the personalities of other individuals they knew.

The researchers also conducted a third survey in about 50 countries, using questions about the same 30 characteristics — but in this survey, they asked the volunteers to describe a typical person from their culture. They averaged these results, so that they had a third personality profile for each country, reflecting the national stereotype.

The authors found that in most of the countries, the two personality profiles that were based on information from real people matched each other reasonably well. But they were significantly different from the stereotype profile.

“There was essentially no agreement between people’s perceptions of the typical personality [in their culture] and what we actually measured,” McCrae said.

The one exception was Poland, where the ratings from volunteers provided a better-than-usual match between typical and real personalities, suggesting the volunteers were better at seeing past stereotypes to perceive people as they really are.

Perhaps in heaven, the therapists are Polish.

< Prev | 1 | 2