Big Five Personality Traits — Know It All!
Knowing personality is interesting and deep, and Big Five Traits have a lot to tell about your personality.
I remember my uncle who would interpret people’s behaviors from their talk and way of dealings. “This person is honest and will treat your fairly”, he used to tell me. “This person lied, so you shouldn’t trust him”. He even used to predict behaviors from castes and city of origin.
Our guesswork is often utterly accurate, but not always.
We are biased against some people, sometimes we don’t have time to dig in, sometimes we just rely on our intuition, and sometimes we just learn a few techniques and think we have mastered behavioral science.
However, trait theorists (people who study personality traits and create tests) do the actual hard work. They develop hundreds of questions and select the right one to ask. They spend years in developing statistical methods and a couple more in assessing, categorizing and reviewing results to find something conclusive and useful. Still their research is found flawed and corrected by the later, more genius one.
