Does Personality Really Exist?

In the plans of all psychology majors there is a subject with the bombastic name of Personality Psychology. Sounds good right? However, when you begin to study it, the problems begin to multiply.

Sorry, I did not mean problems, rather I meant models, with their corresponding updates, revisions and associated criticism. It is as if you started studying chemistry and there were several different periodic tables. You can imagine the scope of the mess I’m talking about.

The real paradox: the existence of personality

However, there is another mess above the multiplication of models and definitions that is not passed over or is usually tiptoed over. Yes, the one who titled the article, does personality really exist? Specifically, can we say that someone is kind the same as we say that he is tall or short or that, to be punctilious, he measures 175 cm?

We imagine that Eysenck or McCrae and Costa would say yes. They are the creators of perhaps the most famous and reproduced periodic tables of personality. Those who always fall into the Personality Psychology exams and a reference for the taxonomy of the main diagnostic manuals. Lovers of factor analysis, principal components, and other information synthesis techniques through statistical processes would also agree. To a large extent, the bread is for them.

However, surely you know someone who is especially extroverted in one context and introverted in another. It is not even necessary to change even the context. As a rule, we can oscillate in this dimension even in the same social gathering.

Then? Talking about a personality is getting a bit awkward already, right? With how well ordered everything would be if we could simplify the information and say, in fairness, that someone is neurotic and friendly. Pum, categorized … and predictable then.

An illusion?

What if our belief in personality traits was an illusion – such as Santa Claus or the Three Wise Men – and people weren’t consistent from one situation to another? This was a possibility that shook the foundations of Personality Psychology in the late 1960s, when Walter Mischel published a book titled Personality and Assessment.

What did this psychologist raise? No, maybe he did consider the possibility, but it did not end with Personality Psychology. Not at least in the way that Cain killed Abel or Nietzsche beheaded God. Michel opted for a context-sensitive personality assessment. Okay, in Christian.

This author stated that a person is not honest, but that we can identify a tendency in him to be honest in certain circumstances. Carlos may be honest when he doesn’t make a profit by lying, but he may not be honest when he does. With this information, what would we say now about Carlos’ honesty?

By curling the curl further, Carlos may not be honest about protecting his loved ones, but he can be when he gets a lot of money for not being. Already doing the triple mortal, Carlos would have accepted that amount of money if the last statement from the Treasury had not returned to him. Carlos is a whole world. We people are a world.

Returning to Mischel, for him there would be five variables to which a person’s behavior would be sensitive:

• Competences : on all levels. Physical, intellectual, social, etc.

• Cognitive strategies : ways of coping and experiences with them.
• Expectations : the consequences that the person expects for each option considered.
• Scale of personal values ​​and self-concept : actions in tune with our scale of values ​​would be more likely -under threat of dissonance-.
• Self-regulatory systems : the set of rules and norms that people adapt to in order to regulate their behavior.

Final reflection

For this reason, when someone talks about the difficulty that studying other careers can entail, they do not understand that psychology presents the most complicated object of study: the human being himself. That is why there is a very big difference between popular knowledge and scientific knowledge. The latter is aware, or usually is aware, of the difficulty of its purpose.

Today psychology has not yet resolved the precipice opened by criticism of theories of personality traits. It seems that there is a certain consensus that would support that there would be a general trend.

If we put Juan in front of 100 situations that tested his honesty, we could obtain a percentage of them in which he is honest and assign him a score on the trait. It is 65% honest.

Now, to what extent could we predict Juan’s behavior in a concrete situation just from this information? They may offer him a lot of money in exchange for lying to Juan. However, Juan would be honest, because our friend does not have liquidity problems nor does he have high aspirations in this regard.

The problem is that in reality we have very limited information about the person in front of us – for example, we do not usually know the balance of their checking account; or yes, but not that of his brother, who does need the money.

In methodology there is a malevolent certainty: a population can measure an average of so many cm, but it may be that in that population there is no one with precisely that height. Thus, to a large extent, Personality Psychology has a hard time when we want to transcend theoretical models and apply it in reality.

A young Focoult was already aware that ” the dialectical nature of the individual’s relationships with his environment forces psychopathology to assume a necessarily ecological perspective, obliterating the possibility of considering the sick individual in isolation ” (Novella, 2009).

As for the didactic part and the thread laid out in the introduction, in the classroom Power Point the models are perfect on the slides, but beyond that we continue to encounter many problems. The theory at this point seems exhausted; It has largely survived thanks to the rise of positive psychology.

Sooner or later it will be the data, taking precedence over reflection, which will begin to guide us towards a solution. Then, paradigms, such as IRT, could be constituted as the rope that leads us out of the well. To say goodbye, that the article has been a bit serious, let’s go with a little music.