Tag Archives: Personality

Personality Is Overt

By Robin Hanson · February 9, 2012 5:20 pm · Comments (9)

If the human mind is split to parts that manage overt appearances, and parts that manage covert strategies, which parts do you think more control our personalities? Yup, personalities are closer to overt appearances:

By using composite images rendered from three dimensional (3D) scans of women scoring high and low on health and personality dimensions, we aimed to examine the separate contributions of facial shape, skin texture and viewing angle to the detection of these traits, while controlling for crucial posture variables. After controlling for such cues, participants were able to identify Agreeableness, Neuroticism, and Physical Health. … Information allowing accurate personality identification is largely lateralized to the right side of the face. (more)

Chimpanzees, other primates, and humans produce asymmetrical facial expressions with greater [emotional] expression on the left side of the face (right hemisphere of the brain). (more)

In most animals, left brains tend to manage and initiate actions within the current mode, while right brains watch in the background for patterns and reasons to veto current actions and switch modes. In humans, it seems the current-action-sequencer brain half was recruited to focus more on managing overt rule-following language, decisions, and actions, ready to explain away any apparent rule-violations. The less-introspectively-accessible pattern-recognizing background-watcher brain half, in contrast, was apparently recruited to focus on harder-to-testify-on-and-so-more-easily-covert meaning, opinion, and communication, including art and music. (more)

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Who Is Consistent?

By Robin Hanson · June 28, 2011 1:50 pm · Comments (17)

Young rich well-educated men make more consistent choices. Family structure, risk tolerance and personality type don’t matter:

We conduct a large-scale field experiment … to test subjects choices for consistency with utility maximization. … High-income and high-education subjects display greater levels of consistency …, men are more consistent than women, and young subjects are more consistent than older subjects. We also find that consistency with utility maximization is strongly related to wealth: a standard deviation increase in the consistency score is associated with 15-19 percent more wealth. This result conditions on socioeconomic variables including current income, education, and family structure, and is little changed when we add controls for past income, risk tolerance and the results of a standard personality test used by psychologists. (more)

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Cheated-On Personalities

By Robin Hanson · June 27, 2011 1:25 pm · Comments (21)

Ron Guhname took a dataset of ~1500 people, and predicted which people said their spouse cheated on them from the victim’s five-factor personality, as well as his or her age, social class, religiosity, and body mass index. He found less cheating on religious people, on older and less agreeable men, and on conscientious and closed-to-experience women. These personality effects are much bigger than the religion effect!

More on agreeableness:

Agreeableness is a tendency to be pleasant and accommodating in social situations. … empathetic, considerate, friendly, generous, and helpful. … believe that most people are honest, decent, and trustworthy. People scoring low … may … be suspicious and unfriendly. … Agreeableness [has a] positive association with altruism and helping behavior. … In the United States, midwesterners and southerners tend to have higher average scores on agreeableness than people living in other regions.

More on openness:

Openness involves active imagination, aesthetic sensitivity, attentiveness to inner feelings, preference for variety, and intellectual curiosity. … Closed to experience … [people] tend to be conventional and traditional in their outlook and behavior. They prefer familiar routines … [and] have a narrower range of interests. … Openness to experience correlates with creativity … [and] crystallized intelligence, but not fluid intelligence. … People who are highly open to experience tend to be politically liberal and tolerant of diversity. As a consequence, they are generally more open to different cultures and lifestyles. They are lower in ethnocentrism. … People living in the eastern and western parts of the United States tend to score higher on openness to experience than those living in the midwest and the south.

I am puzzled by many things here. It makes sense that older people are better able to detect cheating, but then why doesn’t this effect work for women? It makes sense that suspicious people are cheated on less, but then why no agreeable effect for women. It makes sense that conscientious people are cheated on less, as they should be more careful in watching for cheating. But why no such effect for men? Could all women be suspicious enough, and all men conscientious enough?

And what is going on with openness, and why does it only influence women? Open vs. closed personality seems to correlate both with more of a forager than farmer mentality (art, travel, rich, liberal, intellectual, female promiscuity), and also with more of a far than a near mental mode (creative, larger social groupings). Makes me wonder how much forager mentality and far mode correlate.

Added 3p: I read that chart way wrong! Sorry – have edited the above greatly to correct my error.

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