Mindframe

Are you the same “you” that you were twenty years ago? Thirty? Forty? What about fifty years ago? While science still struggles to quantify, measure, and categorize personality, some have a different question: how stable is personality in the first place? Do the high school version of yourself and the retiree version of yourself still have some common immutable core? It depends how you look at it , says a paper by lead author Rodica Damian of University of Houston and her co-authors Marion Spengler of the University of Tuebingen in Germany, Brent W. Roberts of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and UH grad student Andreea Sutu. The paper in question goes by the catchy title “Sixteen going on sixty-six: A longitudinal study of personality stability and change across 50 years.” Damian and her colleagues compared the results for 1,795 U.S. adults who had taken a personality test as teenagers and then again, five decades years later. The team found that yes, there is a...

Since the days of Hippocrates, science has struggled to quantify human personality, and group the seemingly infinite combinations of traits into a number of discrete “types”. However, it’s difficult to design a personality-sorting scheme that produces replicable results. In the case of the now oft-derided Myers-Briggs, even beloved systems have earned harsh criticism from the scientific community. Now, from Northwest University, a new study led by Luís Amaral of the McCormick School of Engineering has crunched data from more than 1.5 million participants to devise a brand-new way to categorize personality. The subjects were a self-selecting group of internet users willing to answer one of several different online questionnaires developed over the years. These surveys contained between 40 and 200 questions, designed to measure the degree to which each respondent demonstrated five widely agreed-upon personality traits: neuroticism, extraversion, openness, agreeableness...

If you've been hired for a job in the last thirty years, chances are you've heard of Myers-Briggs. It's a personality diagnostic tool used by everyone from self-searching college kids to Fortune 500 companies. It's understandable why employers embrace the Myers-Briggs Inventory. If there is a way to figure out ahead of time whether or not you're going to 'fit in,' it could save the company money in the long run, and you might avoid working for a company you don't like. If the test can prove you've got the right stuff, maybe you'll even skip a couple of rungs on your way up the management ladder. Perhaps someday you'll be the one ordering the personality testing of the young upstarts seeking to unseat you from your hard-fought throne. Obviously, when it comes to business, this is all a pretty big deal. If you're like me, you probably believed the Myers-Briggs was supported by some serious clinical evidence. After all, this is a ...

In 370 BCE, the great Greek philosopher Hippocrates was chilling out in the local public square (no one had invented the mall yet) and doing a little scientific inquiry.  In modern jargon we’d call this  "people watching."  As he hung out and observed, he realized people fell into roughly four groups: the pushy ones, the ones that talk too much, the anal retentive, and those who think the sky is falling. Of course he called them by different names, because he spoke Greek, but you get the idea. Fast forward to circa 2008 ACE. Helen Fisher, noted anthropologist, chilling out in the local research lab doing a little scientific inquiry.  In modern jargon we’d call this "people watching."  Along with some neuroscientists, she discovered that people fall into roughly four groups. The pushy ones, the ones that talk too much, the anal retentive, and those who think the sky is falling. Of course she called them by different names , because scientific terminology...