59 Seconds: Think a Little, Change a Lot (30 page)

Avoiding Threats

Threats work well in the short term but can actually prove counterproductive over longer periods of time. By pointing out all of the terrible things that will happen if your child follows a course of action, you may be making that activity more attractive in their minds. Instead, try the “softly, softly” approach used in the toy robot experiment. State that you do not want them to do something and leave it there. If they really do insist on knowing why you are stopping them, try to get them to identify some possible reasons themselves.

personality

Why not to trust
graphology
,
how to gain an apparently magical
insight
into
other people’s
personality
from their
fingers
and
thumbs
,
their
pets
, and the time they go to bed

IN 2005 WORLD LEADERS
gathered at a major economic forum in Switzerland to discuss some of the biggest problems facing Planet Earth. From poverty to privatization, and capitalism to climate change, nothing escaped their eagle eyes and influential minds. Despite the enormity of the issues, however, much of the media coverage of the event focused on a single sheet of paper that had been carelessly left by one of the attendees at a press conference.

The newspapers had managed to get hold of a page of scribbled notes and doodles apparently made by Tony Blair during the event. They asked various graphologists to make a psychological assessment of the British prime minister on the basis of his handwriting and drawings. The graphologists quickly rose to the challenge, noting how, for example, his disconnected letters, right-sloping writing, and strange way of writing
d
showed the “Blair flair at work” and revealed that he was struggling to keep control of a confusing world, was a day-dreamer hoping for the best, was unable to complete tasks, and possessed an unconscious death wish toward his political career.

At the time, Blair was trying to deal with various political problems and scandals, including a forthcoming election with the smallest of majorities, and so the observations seemed to present an accurate insight into his personality. However, a few days later things did not look so rosy: Downing Street pointed out that the page did not belong to Blair but
had instead been produced by fellow attendee Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft and one of the world’s most successful businessmen.

According to the proponents of graphology, the Blair-Gates mix-up is just a small blot on their copybook. In general, they say, a person’s handwriting can reveal amazingly accurate insight into their personality, intelligence, health, and even criminal intent. These claims are taken seriously by many personnel departments, with surveys revealing that between 5 percent and 10 percent of U.S. and UK businesses regularly use graphology to eliminate unsuitable candidates in their recruitment procedures.
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But is there really anything to it, or is graphology just another mind myth? Researcher Geoffrey Dean has devoted a great deal of time to examining the topic, gathering hundreds of scientific studies and using them to examine the claims made by the proponents of this ancient art form. The results make for chilling reading.

In one analysis, Dean collated the findings from sixteen academic papers that had examined graphology in the workplace. He compared graphologists’ predictions of employee performance with supervisors’ ratings of success during job training. The results revealed that there was little relationship between graphologists’ predictions and the ratings of job success. In fact, the graphologists were about as accurate as a control group of untrained laypeople who had no experience in graphology at all.

In another analysis, Dean examined studies in which researchers had compared graphologists’ attempts to determine a person’s character with that person’s scores on scientifically validated personality tests. Dean collected the journal articles (this time fifty-three of them) and analyzed the results.
Not only was the graphologists’ accuracy poor, but control groups of people with absolutely no training or background in assessing personality from handwriting scored just as well as the so-called experts.

When it comes to obtaining a graphology-based insight into the personality of others, the writing is on the wall. The Blair-Gates slipup does not represent a momentary slip of the pen but is symbolic of the findings of scientific studies that have investigated graphology. Contrary to the claims made by proponents, research suggests that graphology does not provide an amazingly accurate and reliable insight into personality and should not be seen as a useful way to predict employee performance.

So if you cannot understand someone’s personality on the basis of their handwriting, how can you gain insight into their real character? The answer involves a concept known as the “Big Five,” the eighteenth-century womanizer Giacomo Casanova, and the bumper stickers that people place on their cars.

THE BIG FIVE

Some of the world’s greatest thinkers have attempted to understand the complexities of human personality. Freud believed that people were best categorized according to the bodily orifice from which they derived the greatest pleasure, maverick Victorian scientist Sir Francis Galton examined bumps on the skull, and Jung was convinced that personalities were determined by the position of the stars at the moment of birth.

Other scientists, such as Gordon Allport and Hans Eysenck,
pursued a more levelheaded, and ultimately productive, approach.
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These researchers believed that the secret structure of the human psyche was buried deep within language. They speculated that the words people use to describe themselves and others were created because they accurately reflect fundamental dimensions of personality. They thought that if this was the case, it should be possible to discover the fundamental structure of personality by carefully collecting and collating all of the words that could be used to describe a person.

The enterprise began in the 1930s, with a group of dedicated researchers carefully poring over each page of an unabridged dictionary. They selected each and every word that could be used to describe personality. From “amusing” to “abhorrent,” “benign” to “belligerent,” the team eventually compiled a list of more than eighteen thousand words. They then worked through the list and identified four thousand words that described relatively stable and central traits. In the 1940s another group of researchers continued the effort and subjected this shortened list to an early form of computerized analysis that reduced it to a set of about two hundred words. Over the next forty years or so, thousands of people were asked to rate themselves and others on various subsets of these adjectives, and researchers employed increasingly sophisticated statistical techniques to analyze the data in an attempt to identify the key dimensions on which people differed. Consensus finally emerged in the early 1990s, when several large-scale studies from many different countries and cultures confirmed the existence of five fundamental dimensions of personality.
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Together these factors, collectively referred to as the “Big Five,” represent the holy grail of personality research. The five dimensions have been given different labels over the years,
but are commonly referred to as openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism (easily remembered by using the acronym OCEAN). Each dimension is seen as a continuum that runs from high to low, and everyone can be described by five scores that indicate where they sit on each scale. Additional work has shown that the dimensions are determined by a combination of genes and childhood experiences and they tend to remain unchanged throughout a person’s life, and thus influence almost every aspect of behavior including relationships, performance in the workplace, leisure activities, consumer choice, religious and political beliefs, creativity, sense of humor, and health.

So what lies at the heart of these five dimensions, and what does it mean to obtain a high or low score on each of them?

Openness
represents the degree to which a person seeks and appreciates new, interesting, and unusual experiences. High scorers are curious and broad-minded. They get bored easily, but are especially good at tolerating ambiguity and so are skilled at seeing situations and problems from many different perspectives. They are creative, original, wise, funny, imaginative, and unconventional. They have a rich inner life, like new ideas, tend to remember their dreams, and make good hypnotic subjects. In contrast, low scorers tend to be more conventional, down-to-earth, and better able to focus on the practical side of things. They are more comfortable with familiar places and food, and tend to work through problems on a step-by-step basis.

Conscientiousness
reflects the degree of organization, persistence, and self-discipline to achieve goals. High scorers are very organized, reliable, hardworking, persevering, and able to forgo short-term rewards for long-term success. They tend to do especially well in the workplace, keep their New Year’s
resolutions, and be highly punctual. They also tend to live significantly longer than others because they don’t usually engage in high-risk behaviors, such as reckless driving, and are far more likely to exercise, eat a balanced diet, and have regular medical checkups. Low scorers tend to be less reliable and more easygoing and hedonistic. They are harder to motivate and more easily distracted, but can show greater flexibility in the face of changing circumstances.

Extroversion
reflects the need for stimulation from the outside world and other people. Those who obtain high scores on this dimension are fun to be with, impulsive, optimistic, happy, enjoy the company of others, and have a wide circle of friends and acquaintances. They prefer to lead rather than follow, enjoy aggressive and sexually explicit humor, drink more, are skilled at multitasking, strive for instant gratification, have more sexual partners than others, and are more likely to cheat on their partner. Low scorers tend to be far more considered, controlled, and reserved. Their social life revolves around a relatively small number of very close friends, and they prefer reading a good book to a night out on the town. They are more sensitive to pain, good at focusing on a single task, prefer more intellectual forms of humor, such as puns, and like to work in closed offices with few distractions.

Agreeableness
is the degree to which a person cares about others. High scorers are trustworthy, altruistic, kind, affectionate, and, perhaps most important of all, likeable. They are less likely to divorce, are perceived much more favorably in job interviews, and are more likely to be promoted at work. Low scorers tend to be far more aggressive, hostile, and uncooperative. They tend to see things from their own point of view, value being right over caring about other people’s thoughts and feelings, perform better in situations that
require tough-mindedness, and are less likely to be taken advantage of by others.

The fifth and final dimension,
Neuroticism
, reflects the degree to which a person is emotionally stable and able to cope with potentially stressful situations. High scorers are far more prone to worry, have low self-esteem, set unrealistic aspirations, and frequently experience a range of negative emotions, including distress, hostility, and envy. Their strong need to be loved, coupled with low self-esteem, can lead to forming overly possessive and dependent relationships. Low scorers tend to be calm, relaxed, resilient in the face of failure, and emotionally secure. They are unfazed by negative life events, skilled at using humor to reduce anxiety in themselves and others, able to cope well with misfortune, and sometimes even thrive on stress.

Most psychologists now believe that the apparent complexity of human personality is an illusion. In reality, people vary on just five fundamental dimensions. Understand these dimensions and you gain important insights into your behavior and thinking. Likewise, being able to quickly understand the personality of those around you will help you to understand their actions and how best to communicate with them. Modern-day research suggests that Freud, Galton, and Jung were wrong and that the secret to understanding personality lies in the five fundamental factors that are embedded deep within our language and lives.

IN 59 SECONDS

Psychologists have created several questionnaires to carefully measure people’s responses on each of the Big Five dimensions. Unfortunately, they tend to involve a large number of questions, and so take a considerable amount of time to complete. However, some researchers have created a quick and easy version that will help you discover your position on each of the five main dimensions.
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It does not provide a perfect description but is a useful guide to the fundamental forces that make up your personality.

To complete the questionnaire, please use the rating scale that follows and check a box to describe how accurately each statement describes
you
. Describe yourself as you generally are now, not as you wish to be in the future. Describe yourself as you honestly see yourself, in relation to other people you know who are the same sex as you are and roughly your age. At this point, ignore the numbers in the top-right corner of each box.