1) I think personality descriptions are more about abstractions for communication.
2) I'm unconvinced people are all that great at instinctually understanding personalities different from their own or close friends. I think most folks empathize by projecting which is a bad starting place if personalities/culture/experience are quite different.
1) I think personality descriptions are more about abstractions for communication.
2) I'm unconvinced people are all that great at instinctually understanding personalities different from their own or close friends. I think most folks empathize by projecting which is a bad starting place if personalities/culture/experience are quite different.
Re 1: Thats hard to evaluate. Certainly it's great to use in the scientific study of psychology but in terms of daily life it's hard to evaluate the counterfactual. I mean it might be a useful way to think about things but even without it you'd have had some model to think about things and I suspect it would be pretty good.
I mean that kinda has to be true because our ability to predict the actions of others is probably the aspect of our intelligence under the most selective pressure -- some people think it's literally why we evolved so much intelligence -- so it would be weird if a simple idea like this improved our predictive ability here alot.
Re: 2 how great do they really have to be to do better than the big 5? We may mostly project but we do modify that by the kind of broad info basic 5 give us -- if John doesn't like going out in big groups or is always turning down party invites we absolutely incorporate that information, if Mary is always very punctual and precisce we use that as well etc
The big 5 are only capturing very rough information so it doesn't take lots of accuracy to do as well just seat of the pants as you would if you were also told their big 5 scores (ofc looking at data about the specific prediction always helps).
Two divergent thoughts:
1) I think personality descriptions are more about abstractions for communication.
2) I'm unconvinced people are all that great at instinctually understanding personalities different from their own or close friends. I think most folks empathize by projecting which is a bad starting place if personalities/culture/experience are quite different.
Re 1: Thats hard to evaluate. Certainly it's great to use in the scientific study of psychology but in terms of daily life it's hard to evaluate the counterfactual. I mean it might be a useful way to think about things but even without it you'd have had some model to think about things and I suspect it would be pretty good.
I mean that kinda has to be true because our ability to predict the actions of others is probably the aspect of our intelligence under the most selective pressure -- some people think it's literally why we evolved so much intelligence -- so it would be weird if a simple idea like this improved our predictive ability here alot.
Re: 2 how great do they really have to be to do better than the big 5? We may mostly project but we do modify that by the kind of broad info basic 5 give us -- if John doesn't like going out in big groups or is always turning down party invites we absolutely incorporate that information, if Mary is always very punctual and precisce we use that as well etc
The big 5 are only capturing very rough information so it doesn't take lots of accuracy to do as well just seat of the pants as you would if you were also told their big 5 scores (ofc looking at data about the specific prediction always helps).