Personality
This chapter will focus on psychology’s attempts to categorize and
understand people according to pervasive differences in their behav-
ioural tendencies – their “personalities”. The idea that each of us has a
distinct, consistent personality is essential to our folk psychology. We
deal with each other on the basis that a person who’s been amiable
and garrulous in the past is likely to be so in the future – and the same
goes for any other personality traits. Were it any other way, our social
relations would doubtless descend into chaos.
Critics of personality theory argue that more weight should be given
to the power of a situation to explain our behaviour. Forget personality
they say, a person is more likely to be brave if surrounded by friends;
to be outgoing at a party full of people they know; more likely to work
hard in an office shared with conscientious colleagues. In fact, there’s
a phenomenon in social psychology known as the fundamental attri-
bution error, which describes our tendency to downplay the influence
of situational factors when interpreting other people’s – but not our
own – behaviour.
These criticisms aside, science generally backs up the idea of
consistent personalities. One study compared people’s scores on
the same personality test carried out twelve years apart and found
little change. Measures of personality also effectively predict later
outcomes, such as marriage and occupational success, thus suggesting
that personality exerts a consistent effect throughout a lifetime. In
a 1987 study, for example, Lowell Kelly and James Kolney followed
three hundred couples from their engagement in the 1930s until 1980.
Personality scores obtained in the 1930s were strongly predictive of
marital outcomes. For instance, divorce was more likely if either the
man or woman had scored highly in neuroticism (see p.178).