The goal of this site is to lay out a theory of personality that is not based upon the lexical hypothesis.
Personality is a strange thing. We all have one. We all use our own everyday as we go about our lives, just as others do with theirs.
But we don’t really have a way of saying what personality is. Perhaps a more important question is why we have a personality but for now let’s focus on the former.
The lexical hypothesis has so far succeeded in distilling behaviours down into commonly accepted traits. Traits are ingrained behaviours rather than transient moods or states.
These are commonly referred to as the “Big Five”; Openness to experience (O), Conscientiousness (C), Extraversion (E), Agreeableness (A) and Neuroticism (N), easily remembered by the mnemonic OCEAN or CANOE.
This is all very well but leaves us with the difficulty of not being able to qualitatively say what a trait is. We are left with having to provide an example of a behaviour to exemplify a trait which is a different thing.
In addition, we have trouble explaining how behaviour differs in different contexts, the so-called person-situation debate, and also establishing primal causality.
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The model set out on this site starts with the assumption that all behaviour is a response to an event in the environment. Events and environments may change and a more appropriate response may be found by the individual.
An individual who responds in a consistent manner may be said to have the appropriate traits and from here we can make inferences about his or her personality.
If we can decompose this response we can make progress in understanding how others and ourselves see the world.
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Research in personality has often been seen as a poor relation in comparison to other fields in psychology.
An explanation for this might be that progress in being able to decompose an individual’s response to the environment has stalled.
Without this ability and with the need for academia to perpetually find something new, researchers moved on to other (seemingly to me increasingly obscure) branches.
This always seems strange to me. It may be other things to other people, but for me psychology is the study of our behaviour and we are our behaviours.
We have these behaviours for a reason. Evolution would have got rid of them if there wasn’t. Choosing a response to the environment (i.e. making a decision about which behaviours to enact) must benefit us in some extent.
Therefore, our behaviours are actions to obtain a benefit from the environment we find ourselves in. Also, it is rational for us to choose the behaviour that provides the greatest benefit.
For me this is why we have a personality.
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Setting about trying to find how we decompose an individual’s response to the environment, the answers appeared to me to be hiding in plain sight.
Research into vision has found dorsal and ventral pathways (from multiple researchers but especially Milner and Goodale) providing evidence for vision-for-action and vision-for-perception respectively. From here we can make arguments for allocentric (I term as Global) and egocentric (I term as Local) representations of the environment. Given the evolutionary age of the visual system compared to that which produces personality it seemed to me a good starting point to investigate whether it could piggy back off this architecture.
John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern (VNM) deduced four axioms that a VNM rational individual would follow in deciding which was the best choice (which I extrapolate to be the best response to enact) to take.
We also have to judge whether it is feasible for us to enact this response. We can do this by applying four of five Big Five traits mentioned earlier.
Of course, things don’t always go the way we want them to. Again, we have a theory for this already. Four of the five stages in the Kübler-Ross model of grief can be applied to situations where our expectations are not meet.
A uniqueness of humans is the extent in which we have learnt to influence our environment to get our way.
John Boyd’s OODA loop links together how we respond to the environment in a cycle; our behaviour being an interaction with it.
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But how do we decompose our response to the environment?
I would argue that we compose the environment (from the work of VNM) from lotteries, both Globally and Locally (Milner & Goodale).
This gives us four elements.
To decompose our response to the environment we do so by finding the same equivalents cognitively (Big Five), emotionally (Kübler-Ross) and Influencing(ly).
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Seen like this the brain is nothing more than a system of cross matching. Whether you subscribe to your experience of life being this or to a greater power, by Reduction of Uncertainty (RoU) and maximising Capital (Ca) we can logically follow through an individual’s response to the environment.
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There are several pathways through this site.
RoUCa grid lays out its composition and usage.
What’s Wrong with Psychology consists of a series of articles about how economic behaviour leads to cognitive thought.
Behavioural Economics examines our response to the environment and circumstances where our behaviour might appear irrational.
Psychology examines existing theories and how we might use them in conjunction with the RoUCa grid.
Thoughts are my ramblings and practical application of the RoUCa grid.