User talk:Saehee0908/Archive1

Old Discussion

Citation needed : A person's ratings on the five factors has been found to change with time, with Agreeableness and Conscientiousness increasing, while Extraversion, Neuroticism, and Openness generally decrease as a person ages.

I don't think its Costa et al. - so who is it? Cached 07:30, 7 October 2006 (UTC)

I am removing the following section for two reasons:

"Some anthropologists and sociologists are critical of the method because it measures personality traits on a basis of its synonymous adjectives in the English language, thus overlooking possible cultural construction of language. That English alone was used in factor analysis also arguably demonstrates an example of ethnocentrism. Furthermore, sociologists are critical that the theory only reinforces stereotypes and ignores social factors that might have lead to traits being present in certain groups of individuals. For instance, while women have a demonstrated tendency towards agreeableness, this is likely true of most subordinated individuals. Tying this trait to women at a psychological level then only reasserts inequalities by implying that differences exist as a matter of human nature rather than as a result of the social construction of gender."

1. The information given there is incorrect. I've checked the scientific research to be sure, and English alone was *not* used in factor analysis, and the existence and nature of the Big Five factors has been validated in multiple continents. Here's an excerpt from McCrae & Hofstede's fascinating paper, Personality and Culture Revisited: Linking Traits and Dimensions of Culture (2004):

"Research in the English-speaking world using the NEO-PI-R established that individual differences in the factors are stable throughout most of the adult life span; that self-reports generally agree with observer ratings; and that the five factors, as well as the more specific traits that define them, are strongly heritable. In the 1990s, researchers around the world began to develop translations 2 of the instrument, making cross-cultural research possible. A series of studies showed that much the same factor structure was found in a wide variety of cultures (McCrae & Costa, 1997), that developmental trends in the mean levels of personality traits between adolescence and later adulthood appeared to be universal (McCrae et al., 1999), and that similar gender differences were found among cultures (Costa, Terracciano, & McCrae, 2001)."

Here are the relevant citations from the above; if you can find them, I suggest taking a look:

McCrae, R. R., & Costa, P. T., Jr. (1997). Personality trait structure as a human universal. American Psychologist, 52, 509-516.

McCrae, R. R., Costa, P. T., Jr., Lima, M. P., Simões, A., Ostendorf, F., Angleitner, A., et al. (1999). Age differences in personality across the adult life span: Parallels in five cultures. Developmental Psychology, 35, 466-477.

Costa, P. T., Jr., Terracciano, A., &McCrae, R. R. (2001). Gender differences in personality traits across cultures: Robust and surprising findings. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81, 322-331.

As a further note in this regard, one group of subordinated individuals - prisoners - show personality profiles with low Agreeableness scores. Teenagers also show lower Agreeableness than adults. So I don't think it's "likely true of most subordinated individuals" that they have high Agreeableness. In point of fact, it appears that Extroversion actually has more to do with social dominance than Agreeableness does. (And men score higher in the Assertiveness sub-scale of Extroversion, incidentally, as given in the last study cited above.)

2. Beyond being incorrect, I don't like the above statement because it demonstrates bias. The fact that psychometric research "reinforces stereotypes" does not show that the research is bad or wrong; instead, it supports the truth to these stereotypes. Whether women are Agreeable because of genetic or environmental reasons is irrelevant to the question of whether Agreeableness is a valid and universal psychomentric construct. And of course while sociologists and anthropologists may be unhappy about these research results, that doesn't change the facts.

Hopefully this explanation is thorough enough to obviate the necessity of future arguments.

Harkenbane 22:26, 25 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Clearly the point is biased in some direction; it is, after all, called criticism. However, it is appreciatable to rework claims rather than remove them entirely, as for example my move to redirect back the bias of your word "discovered", implying a factual truth of the matter, back to the more neutral term identified, and my return of your loaded attempt of beginning the criticism section with "While the general consensus favoring a five-factor model is strong, there is still dissention."

And how was the Big Five originally constructed if not through factor analysis of personality traits from the English dictionary? That's what I had read. If later attempts were made to see if other cultures and languages "fit" the pattern, that is not enough to convince me. That all the studies you listed came from the original proponents of this model also suggests to me some degree of bias in their perspective.

My use of the term "subordinated individuals" was admittedly very loose. I meant individuals of any subordinated master status. For instance, any minority groups, including women, and lower class individuals. I would imagine the scores of these groups would prove quite similar, but by this theory's limitation of analytical claims to biological groups there is the suggestion that this is because of some biopsychological component, and not because of some common social characteristic present in minorities and the less privileged in general.

As for your remark that it does represent stereotypes, I will not say it doesn't. Women are in all societies subordinate to men. But there is also sociological research to show this is because of a need for women in huntering and gathering societies to nurse, which means having to stay near the children, which eventually leads to a divide in terms of labor by sex, with men working exterior to the home and women within, which further precipitates the notion of women as domestic and men as worldly, and so on and on. That women are generally subordinate to men is without question, but to say that this is because of some localized psychology in women is to suggest that women are by nature different, and then any attempt at change would therefore be fallible.

That the critical addendum of the sciences of sociology and anthropology needs to be reworked is certain, but the attitude that outward criticism from other disciplines is somehow null is at the very least off-putting, and your remark that your explanation is "thorough enough to obviate the necessity of future arguments" seems to suggest a general dismay at the idea of said criticism. That you approach the subject as a psychologist is clear, but as other sciences also examine the structure of personality, disregarding the views of those sciences consitutes a clear POV. When I get a chance, I will post another criticism section, and if you would like you can revise it, and we can attempt to reach some consensus through mututal cooperation rather than through the throrough deletion of large chunks of text that you are at odds with. Sarge Baldy 23:59, Apr 25, 2005 (UTC)

> However, it is appreciatable to rework claims rather than remove them entirely,

I agree, and this is what I did to the section on traits "beyond" the FFM. Unfortunately, the entirety of the text I deleted was simply unusable, for the reasons detailed above.

> as for example my move to redirect back the bias of your > word "discovered", implying a factual truth of the matter, > back to the more neutral term identified, and my return of > your loaded attempt of beginning the criticism section with > "While the general consensus favoring a five-factor model > is strong, there is still dissention."

I didn't notice these changes, and I suppose I can agree with both.

> If later attempts were made to see if other cultures and languages "fit" the pattern, that is not enough to convince me.

Factor analysis in other languages found the same five constructs. (There were a few exceptions, of course; I recall that Openness didn't have the same character in a German sample, where it seemed more related to general "rebeliousness.") I'm sorry if this isn't enough to convince you, but studies were carried out specifically with the intention of seeing whether the Big Five traits existed as fundamental psychometric constructs or were merely an artifact of Western language and culture.

> For instance, any minority groups, including women, and lower class individuals. I would imagine the scores of these groups would prove quite similar

An interesting idea, to be sure! But there is simply no support for it; that doesn't make it false, but it renders it meaningless as an argument, because subordinate status could just as easily *depress* Agreeableness - in fact there is some evidence which is in line with this view; again, Agreeableness increases with age, and so does social and economic status.

> That women are generally subordinate to men is without question, but to say that this is because of some localized psychology in women is to suggest that women are by nature different, and then any attempt at change would therefore be fallible.

I don't think that Agreeableness has much to do with subordinate status; this is likely to have more to do with things like Extroversion, and with psychometric g (which lies outside the personality domain).

> That the critical addendum of the sciences of sociology and anthropology needs to be reworked is certain, but the attitude that outward criticism from other disciplines is somehow null is at the very least off-putting, and your remark that your explanation is "thorough enough to obviate the necessity of future arguments" seems to suggest a general dismay at the idea of said criticism.

This appears to be the central issue, so once more I'll try to be thorough in stating my position. Criticism from other disciplines is really of very limited importance in an encyclopedic article. After all, if we are to consult sociologists and anthropologists on psychometric matters, what about economists or biologists? What about politicians, philosophers, or theologians? These are not facetious questions - for instance, knowing that personality exists, and that it is to some degree heritable, and that it has important outcomes in religious behavior, raises interesting theological questions. We have been discussing Agreeableness, and it seems that those who are more Agreeable tend to be more religious, to be less prone to marital infidelity, and to have a more generous nature. Does God judge on a curve? And if not, is it religiously acceptible that virtue and sinfulness could be genetic, or should pious individuals of fundamentalist sects reject the findings of psychometrics as readily as they might the findings of physical anthropology? These are questions which personally interest me to a great degree, and perhaps they deserve to be discussed in a full length book dealing with these topics, but I really don't think they have a place in a brief encyclopedic article. The objectively relevant view here is the psychometric one.

> I will post another criticism section, and if you would like you can revise it, and we can attempt to reach some consensus through mututal cooperation rather than through the throrough deletion of large chunks of text that you are at odds with.

The trouble with this is that the FFM is approaching the level of "settled science." Criticisms of it are generally outdated and have been dealt with by research from dozens of psychologists. The most robust criticisms generally involve firstly the fact that the five factors aren't all-encompassing, though it isn't claimed that they are, merely that they exist, secondly that the five factors are not fully independent of one another but exhibit correlations amongst themselves (N & E are notorious here with correlations approaching -.50), though this also doesn't dispell their existence, and thirdly that self report bias remains difficult to deal with. The latter criticism seems more important to me personally than the others, because it calls the utility of the measure into question and leads to speculations about a possible "Flynn Effect" (spurious increase in scores over the generations). But even here, the various instruments testing the FFM have shown good validity and reliability, so the criticism is merely a quibble over the accuracy of the instruments used.

In conclusion, while some of Costa & McCrae's statements may be debatable (McCrae's interpretation of these traits as purely biological predispositions is indeed ludicrous) and while the instruments may be imperfect, it's extremely difficult to provide a meaningful and scientifically accurate criticism of the Big Five itself.

Harkenbane 08:07, 27 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Please, could anyone mention the name of O.P. John in this article. He IS a real father of Five-Factor Theory. However you can also correct the comment about the same factoring in other languages. There are different numbers of secondary level factors in different languages. (4 to 7(I think in japanese)) Im not too strong in English to write there, so please...

Martin Pírko, Czech Rep., 16 July 2005

Two comments. First, awful beginning. The reader has to wade through a bunch of stilted history before getting to the actual five factors. Few people looking for a Wikipedia entry will care about the history: please put the five factors earlier in the article and make the "origins" stuff later. Second, the five factors are often presented as contrast classes (e.g., extroversion/introversion, etc): why not include this (even if you have to include a caveat that introversion is just a negative value of the extroversion dimension this should still be included). Such breadth would be more helpful than the origins and its talk of new-fangled computing machines.

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I removed "even a bit eccentric" as a discription of how introverts might be perceived for two reasons. One - eccentricity, to my mind at least, doesn't imply invtroversion, albeit introversion in the extreem does imply eccentricity. Two - the sentence was discribing negative perceptions of introverts, eccentricity isn't universally regarded as a bad thing. I recgonise that there may have been an element of irony in the phrasing, but it annoyed me anyway. --86.11.167.138 21:20, 15 November 2005 (UTC)

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OK, I tried to address most of the concerns I saw here (although I've never heard of O.P. John and am really not very interested in or knowledgable about the origins of the Big Five).

I've reinstated and expanded the description of the five factors which originally stood at the start of the article, and tried to at least imply the contrasting nature of high and low scores on these scales (which I think is better than inventing a series of terms for the low poles of these dimensions which often don't exist in the literature).

I also cleaned up the main descriptions by quoting directly from an article by Dr. Johnson; whoever wrote the text I overwrote ought to find some sources for the various claims made there, many of which were misleading (E.Q. is positively predicted by high scores on E, A, C, O, and low scores on N, not just high scores in E and A) and others which I've never seen before (are Low-C's really better at multitasking? Where is the research for this?).

Finally, I fixed some unencyclopedic language in the future of the FFM section and tried to give it a better wrap-up. Hopefully others will find these changes to be acceptible. Harkenbane 20:18, 19 November 2005 (UTC)

Too much expansion in the introduction. I don't think the assertion "Each factor consists of a number of more specific traits" is correct: a factor is the product of a statistical analysis, each of the Big Five designates a trait artificially identified by such mathematical treatment. It does not "consist of" nor "include" anything, it is a single trait in itself. On the opposite, the basic point about the Big Five is that they are self-sufficient, that they can efficiently (though not perfectly) replace all other traits. To kow or describe someone, you can content yourself with evaluating her/him on these 5 aspects; only if you want to be more precise, you may evaluate her/him separately on each or several correlated traits. --Freb 15:00, 20 May 2007 (UTC)

Paragraph "Hiatus in research": except for last sub-paragraph, this paragraph does not pertain to the Big Five but to personality research in general. It should be put in [Personality_psychology|Personality psychology] and replaced by something like "This pioneering research has been forgotten for two decades because researchers failed to [Personality_psychology|demonstrate correlation between personality tests and observed behavior], until emergence of a more appropriate methodology around [1980]." And "This event was followed by..." could be turned into "This convergence of the Lexical Hypothesis with theoretical research lead to...", as previous versions said.

Paragraph "Consensus on the Big Five" partly clears up the nature of the Big Five and would be welcome at the beginning, partly details scientific findings and therefore should be included in the following paragraph. I suggest putting 2d sub-paragraph into the Overview and replacing the two last ones with a shorter statement at the beginning of paragraph "Selected scientific findings": "They have been proved significantly correlated with behavior as observed through professional performance (Barrick and Mount, 1991, 1998) or in personality disorders (Saulsman and Page, 2004)."

Last but not least, all the history should be put far further, just before "Criticisms", since a generally accepted piece of science (opposite to candidate theory) is just fact, how it has been established is an independent and secondary point. --Freb 16:27, 20 May 2007 (UTC)

Have a look: John, O. P. (1990). The "Big Five" factor taxonomy: Dimensions of personality in the natural language and in questionnaires. In L. A. Pervin (Ed.), Handbook of personality: Theory and research (pp. 66-100). New York: Guilford. He was first to put personality traits in OCEAN order - mnemonic...

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Paragraphs "Biology of extroversion", "Causes of Openness", "Correlates of Openness" (except for the end) and "Biology of Openness" should appear under "Scientific findings", or? --Freb 17:01, 20 May 2007 (UTC)