Does Personality Really Exist?

No matter what college you go to, if you take a course in psychology, you will have a course called “Personality Psychology.” No doubt it sounds like a very interesting subject. However, we dare to say that it is not easy.

But you don’t need to be afraid of how complicated this can get. The fact is, there are many models, with their associated updates, revisions, and critiques that you should learn. It’s as if you start studying chemistry and there are several different periodic tables. You can imagine the extent of the confusion we are talking about.

The real paradox: the existence of personality

There is another confusion that goes beyond all the models and definitions involved that it is impossible to ignore. We are talking about the existence of personality. Believe it or not, the question: does  personality really exist? it is still latent for many people. Think about it. Can we say that a person is kind in the same way that we say he is tall or short?

Eysenck and McCrae and Costa would probably say yes. These two individuals are the creators of the most famous and reproduced periodic table of personality. In fact, when studying personality psychology, you will always see their names mentioned in books. Furthermore, lovers of factor analysis, principal components and other techniques for synthesizing information through statistical processes would also agree.

However, you  c ertamente know someone who is extroverted and introverted in a context in another. Sometimes you don’t even have to change the context. As a rule, we can oscillate in this dimension even in the same social gathering.

As you can see, talking about personality is complex and can be a little confusing. Wouldn’t it be so much easier if we were able to categorize people the way we do things? Everyone would be much more predictable. Unfortunately, this is quite implausible, given each person’s individuality.

An illusion?

What if our belief in personality traits was an illusion, like Santa Claus? After all, many people aren’t consistent in different situations. This possibility shook the foundations of personality psychology in the late 1960s, when Walter Mischel published a book entitled Personality and Assessment .

What did this psychologist propose? Well, maybe he considered the possibility, but he didn’t do away with personality psychology. At least not in the way Cain killed Abel or Nietzsche decapitated God. In this case, Mischel opted for a context-sensitive personality assessment. Mischel believed that psychologists should focus on people’s distinct reactions to specific situations.

This author stated that a person himself is not honest, but it is possible to identify a tendency in him to be honest in certain circumstances. Let’s see an example. Carlos can be honest when he doesn’t make a profit by lying, but he may not be honest when he makes it. With this information, what can we say about Carlos’ honesty?

Expanding on that thought, Carlos may not be honest in protecting his loved ones, but he can be if he earns a lot of money for it. Carlos is a whole world. Each person is a universe.

Let’s go back to Mischel. According to him, there are five variables to which a person’s behavior is sensitive:

• Skills. At all levels: physical, intellectual, social, etc.
• Cognitive strategies. Coping mechanisms and the person’s experiences with them.
• Expectations. The consequences the person expects for each option considered.

• Scale of personal values ​​and self-concept. Actions that are in tune with the person’s scale of values ​​are more likely to be at risk of dissonance.
• Self-regulation systems. Set of rules and norms to which people adapt to regulate their behavior.

final reflection

When a person talks about how difficult it can be to study other courses, he does not understand that psychology encompasses the most complicated object of study: the human being. This explains the difference between popular knowledge and scientific knowledge. Scientific knowledge is aware, or generally aware, of the difficulty of its purpose.

To this day, personality psychology still receives a lot of criticism, especially towards its theories on personality traits. There seems to be a certain consensus that there is a general trend.

If, for example, we put Juan through 100 situations that test his honesty, we could get a percentage of them where he is honest and give him a score on the trait. He is 65% honest.

But would it be possible to predict Juan’s behavior in a concrete situation with just this information? Someone can offer Juan a lot of money to lie about something. However, Juan can choose to decline the offer and be honest, because he has no financial problems and no high aspirations in this regard.

The problem is, we actually have very limited information about the people in front of us. For example, we may know your checking account balance, but not your brother, who needs money.

In the methodology, there is a cruel certainty: a population can measure on average so many centimeters, but there may not be anyone in that population with exactly that height. Thus, to a large extent, personality psychology has difficulty transcending theoretical models and applying them to reality.

Young Foucault was 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, we can say that the models mentioned in the introduction are great in Power Point presentations. However, there are still many different issues surrounding them. At this point, the theory seems exhausted; it survived mainly thanks to the rise of positive psychology.

Sooner or later it will be data, prevailing over reflection, that will begin to guide us towards a solution.