Tag Archives: personality

Personality Profiles of Great American Presidents – Scott McGreal (Unique—Like Everybody Else)

A study finds that presidential greatness is associated with a mix of bright and dark traits. Great presidents have been compassionate, yet also knew how to manipulate people.

Personality’s ‘Big One’ and the Enigma of Narcissism – Scott McGreal (Unique—Like Everybody Else)

Narcissists can be charismatic yet also alienate others. Narcissism combines adaptive and maladaptive traits. This makes it difficult to reconcile narcissism with the theory that all personality traits express a single underlying dimension such as a general factor of personality.

Can the Experience of Awe Open the Mind? – Scott McGreal (Unique—Like Everybody Else)

People who are open to experience are more prone to experiencing awe. Is it possible that profound experiences of awe could also induce greater open-mindedness? Mystical experiences under the influence of psychedelics can increase openness to experience. Perhaps such experiences are so awe-inspiring that create a deeper and lasting appreciation for the mystery of life.

The Colorful Personality: Another Face of the Dark Side? – Scott McGreal (Unique—Like Everybody Else)

People with colorful personalities, or histrionic traits, can be entertaining yet also very self-centered. Charming and theatrical, they may use social skills to exploit others. The colorful personality may be an addition to the growing list of dark personalities.

LSD, Suggestibility, and Personality Change – Scott McGreal (Unique—Like Everybody Else)

A recent study found that LSD increases suggestibility. Research suggests that psychedelic drug use can increase openness to unusual ideas, such as spiritual and paranormal beliefs, in the long-term. Could this be be due to a long-lasting increase in suggestibility and related personality traits?

Resolving the “Conscientiousness Paradox” – Scott McGreal (Unique—Like Everybody Else)

Conscientious individuals generally have good outcomes, but countries with high national levels of conscientiousness generally have poorer levels of human development. What does this apparent "conscientiousness paradox" mean?

Regional Differences in Personality: Surprising Findings – Scott McGreal (Unique—Like Everybody Else)

Individual personality traits and the geographic region where one lives are correlated with important social outcomes. Research has found that personality traits are also geographically clustered in ways correlated with these same outcomes. Some of the results are surprising as the individual level and societal level correlates of personality can differ strikingly.

ARP Highlights (from a graduate student’s perspective) – Carol Tweten (Person X Situation)

I just got back from St. Louis, where I attended the biennial conference of the Association for Research in Personality for the first time. What a great conference! I highly recommend this conference for any graduate student interested in the study of personality. Here’s what some of the most prominent personality researchers had to say*: Rich Lucas (Michigan State): Sample sizes in the Journal of Research in Personality (JRP) have increased since 2010, with a particularly large jump in 2014. Fortunately, this increase does not appear to coincide with less rigorous methods or less diverse samples. JRP welcomes submissions of replications and even has a special issue of replications coming up, in addition to a special issue on intraindividual personality change (YES!). Simine Vazire (U.C. Davis): Data cleaning involves a lot of seemingly minute decisions (e.g., drop this item, control for that variable), but they can result in over-fitting analyses to data. Continue reading

Replicability in personality psychology, and the symbiosis between cumulative science and reproducible science – Sanjay Srivastava (The Hardest Science)

There is apparently an idea going around that personality psychologists are sitting on the sidelines having a moment of schadenfreude during the whole social psychology Replicability Crisis thing. Not true. The Association for Research in Personality conference just wrapped up in St. Louis. It was a great conference, with lots of terrific research. (Highlight: watching three of my students give kickass presentations.) And the ongoing scientific discussion about openness and reproducibility had a definite, noticeable effect on the program. The most obvious influence was the (packed) opening session on reproducibility. First, Rich Lucas talked about the effects of JRP’s recent policy of requiring authors to explicitly talk about power and sample size decisions. The policy has had a noticeable impact on sample sizes of published papers, without major side effects like tilting toward college samples or cheap self-report measures. Second, Simine Vazire talked about the particular challenges of addressing openness and replicability in personality psychology. Continue reading

Fifty Shades of Tattooing: Body Art, Risk and Personality – Scott McGreal (Unique—Like Everybody Else)

Women readers of the Fifty Shades trilogy have higher rates of risky behavior So do women who get tattoos. Both of these may be outward signs of a predisposition to take risk rather than a cause of such behavior.