The Personality Constellation
In which psychology meets a metaphor
Four letters ðŸ”
I’m interested in personality. I actually did my Ph.D. on it (well, in small fish, but still…), There are more personal reasons for my interest as well (a story for another day, perhaps).
The question? Why do people think, feel, and act the way they do?
The answer? A combination of external and internal factors, as most answers in biology and psychology are.
Those internal factors are themselves a combination of traits that somehow congeal into what we call a personality. It gets even better: we can take all that context-dependency and all that complexity and distill it into only a few letters that describe it.
I’m kidding, of course.
And yet, admit it, you have done one of those personality tests. I know I have. Probably a Myer-Briggs one that gives you a four-letter combination and a cool name for your personality type. INTJ/INFJ here depending on which mood I’m in.
Behind those letters, though, a world awaits. Not everyone realizes that each of those letters moves along a spectrum. For example, I’m on the edge between the T and F (thinking and feeling) on my third letter and can probably lean this way or that depending on the day. My first two letters (introversion and intuition) are much harder to change - I’m further along to one side of the spectrum.
That’s all well and good, but the Myer-Briggs is - despite its popularity in many contexts - not widely endorsed by academic psychologists. The Big Five seem to do better, as they tend to come up more regularly when analyzing survey data. (If you’re curious, here’s a short free test.) The Big Five are:
openness to experience
conscientiousness
extraversion
agreeableness
neuroticism
Context and free traits ðŸŽ
Big Five, Myer-Briggs, or one of the many other personality tests; they all share one assumption that’s not entirely true: that personality is fixed. That’s both true and false. Personality is not fully fixed, but also not infinitely malleable. (Screw black-and-white thinking, it’s all gray anyway.) For example, depending on a few factors I can be more or less introverted (fluid), but I’ll never truly be an extrovert (fixed).
There are two main factors I want to address here: context and free traits.
Context speaks for itself. Depending on a specific situation, you might feel, act, and think differently. To use myself as an example again, put me in a large crowd with a lot of noise and I shut down*. On the other hand, when I open up in a smaller group of people talking about things that interest me, I become a walking - occasionally even bouncing - explosion of ideas.
* Which, interestingly, probably has more to do with neuroticism than with introversion. Depth of sensory processing - being sensitive to sensory stimuli and quickly ‘overloading’, most recently made popular by the highly sensitive person idea - is linked more to neuroticism than to introversion. Then again, introverts seem to respond physically stronger to colors, so it’s likely a little bit of both.
Anyway, context matters.
How can that uncontroversial observation be compatible with the equally uncontroversial intuition that our personality traits are fixed? After all, if they weren’t, we’d have no personality to speak of; we’d all simply be chameleons that can’t decide which colors to go for.
Free trait theory might help here. This is the idea that we can use ‘culturally scripted patterns of conduct‘ to mimic personality traits that are relevant for projects that have personal meaning to us. For example, introverts can choose to ‘act’ like extroverts for a little while if this helps them with some aspect of pursuing their passion. Going to an event, promoting your work… We live in a world that’s designed for the extrovert ideal (if you’re an introvert, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about), so acting extroverted can help you achieve specific goals sometimes, and - so free trait theory proposes - if you care enough about those goals, you might pull it off.
Let’s leave the theory behind for my own little bout of speculation. If you do this often and long enough, you might slightly rewire yourself through something like the odd baby of exposure therapy or cognitive behavioral therapy.
You can’t change your personality, but you might nudge it in a specific direction with time and effort. (If you’ve ‘nudged’ your personality, feel free to comment. I’d be interested to hear about it.)
Building a constellation ✨
Let’s bring all that together in the metaphor of a constellation. Think of all the many cognitive, emotional, and behavioral traits that form your personality as stars in the sky, arranged in a specific shape. Call that shape your personality type.
Just like real stars appear to be fixed in the night sky but aren’t, so too are our personality traits seemingly fixed but ever-moving. Depending on context or conscious effort, the stars can move around a bit, but that probably won’t massively change your constellation in its entirety. Significantly altering the entire constellation requires more. Galaxies colliding (falling in love?), perhaps.
Metaphors are only metaphors and no metaphor is perfect. For me, the constellation metaphor for personality has its appeal (maybe because I made it up). It gives us an image of something that seems fixed, but never truly is, and it fits rather nicely with the well-known metaphor that we are all just star stuff, doesn’t it?
The only thing I’m worried about is black holes.