18. Personality and Personality Traits

Personality Traits

When we observe people around us, one of the first things that strikes us is how different people are from one another. Some people are very talkative while others are very quiet. Some exhibit active behaviour whereas others may live a more sedentary lifestyle. Some worry a lot, others almost never seem anxious. Each time we use one of these words, words like “talkative,” “quiet,” “active,” or “anxious,” to describe those around us, we are talking about a person’s personality — the characteristic ways that people differ from one another. Personality psychologists try to describe and understand these differences.

Although there are many ways to think about the personalities that people have, Gordon Allport and other “personologists” claimed that we can best understand the differences between individuals by understanding their personality traits. Personality traits reflect basic dimensions on which people differ (Matthews, Deary, & Whiteman, 2003).

An important feature of personality traits is that they reflect continuous distributions rather than distinct personality types. This means that when personality psychologists talk about Introverts and Extraverts, they are not really talking about two distinct types of people who are completely and qualitatively different from one another. Instead, they are talking about people who score relatively low or relatively high along a continuous distribution. In fact, when personality psychologists measure traits like Extraversion, they typically find that most people score somewhere in the middle, with smaller numbers showing more extreme levels.

There are three criteria that are characterize personality traits: (1) consistency, (2) stability, and (3) individual differences.

1. To have a personality trait, individuals must be somewhat consistent across situations in their behaviours related to the trait. For example, if they are talkative at home, they tend also to be talkative at work.
2. Individuals with a trait are also somewhat stable over time in behaviours related to the trait. If they are talkative, for example, at age 30, they will also tend to be talkative at age 40.
3. People differ from one another on behaviours related to the trait. Sleeping is not a personality trait and neither is consuming food — virtually all individuals do these activities, and there are almost no individual differences. But people differ on how frequently they talk and how active they are, and thus personality traits such as Talkativeness and Activity Level do exist.

Traits are important and interesting because they describe stable patterns of behaviour that persist for long periods of time (Caspi, Roberts, & Shiner, 2005). Importantly, these stable patterns can have broad-ranging consequences for many areas of our life (Roberts, Kuncel, Shiner, Caspi, & Goldberg, 2007). For instance, think about the factors that determine success in college. If you were asked to guess what factors predict good grades in college, you might guess something like intelligence. This guess would be correct, but we know much more about who is likely to do well. Specifically, personality researchers have also found the personality traits like Conscientiousness play an important role in college and beyond, probably because highly conscientious individuals study hard, get their work done on time, and are less distracted by nonessential activities that take time away from school work. In addition, highly conscientious people are often healthier than people low in conscientiousness because they are more likely to maintain healthy diets, to exercise, and to follow basic safety procedures like wearing seat belts or bicycle helmets. Over the long term, this consistent pattern of behaviours can add up to meaningful differences in health and longevity.

Thus, personality traits are not just a useful way to describe people you know; they actually help psychologists predict how good a worker someone will be, how long he or she will live, and the types of jobs and activities the person will enjoy. Thus, there is growing interest in personality psychology among psychologists who work in applied settings, such as health psychology or organizational psychology.

The Five Factor Model

The fundamental work on trait dimensions conducted by Allport, Cattell, Eysenck, and many others has led to contemporary trait models, the most important and well validated of which is the Five-Factor (Big Five) Model of Personality. According to this model, there are five fundamental underlying trait dimensions that are stable across time, cross-culturally shared, and explain a substantial proportion of behaviour (Costa & McCrae, 1992; Goldberg, 1982).

Descriptions of the Big Five Personality Traits (Diener & Lucas, 2019)

A large body of research evidence has supported the five-factor model. This system includes five broad traits that can be remembered with the acronym “OCEAN”: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. Each of the major traits from the Big Five can be divided into facets to give a more fine-grained analysis of someone’s personality.

The Five Factor Model

An advantage of the five-factor approach is that it is parsimonious. Rather than studying hundreds of traits, researchers can focus on only five underlying dimensions. The Big Five may also capture other dimensions that have been of interest to psychologists. For instance, the trait dimension of need for achievement relates to the Big Five variable of conscientiousness, and self-esteem relates to low neuroticism. On the other hand, the Big Five factors do not seem to capture all the important dimensions of personality. For instance, the Big Five do not capture moral behaviour, although this variable is important in many theories of personality. And there is evidence that the Big Five factors are not exactly the same across all cultures (Cheung & Leung, 1998).

Online Gamers, Shoppers, & the Five Factor Model

A group of researchers in Spain examined online gamer behaviour and how personality influences self-efficacy (the belief in our own capability to successfully accomplish what we set out to do).

Below is a summary of their research showing how different traits of the Five Factor Model influence gaming self-efficacy:

Online gamers are expected to display greater self-efficacy if they are organized and persistent (conscientious); not worried, nervous and emotionally stable (not neurotic); sociable, optimistic and talkative (extrovert); unforgiving, cold and skeptical (not agreeable) and curious, creative and imaginative (open).

How personality studies can help marketers

What are the implications for marketers? The authors of the study share how their research can also serve marketing managers of online games:

Our results reveal how gaming might have practical implications for marketing managers. If firms teach players how to play, it could indirectly promote the online purchase of related products, which also supports the effectiveness of gamification strategies. In this sense, Huotari and Hamari (2012) propose the use of gamification strategies to offer a good video game, with added value, thus enhancing the playing experience and entailing benefits for both game developers and players alike. Keeping in mind that central to the game model is consumer choice, players will accept better non-imposed marketing strategies. In this sense, game developers may let master players (i.e., that show high gaming efficacy) to exchange information (tips, strategies or trick) for extra features with others, making easy microtransaction process between consumers (C2C commerce inside the game).

(As a parent of two children who have both grown up playing Minecraft, I can say with certainty that the influence master and expert players have on children is strong! My kids can spend hours (no judgement, please) watching YouTube videos of how master players build and defend fortresses, uncover hidden treasures, and mine ore.)

Research also provides evidence about the link between mobile gaming and online shopping behaviour (Balakrishnan and Griffiths, 2018). Xu, Chen & Santhanam’s 2105 study has found that richer online formats and recommendations throughout video games enhance consumers’ perceptions about experience products and positively affect consumers’ intentions to purchase products.

Recent data (Gaming Industry…2018), from Statista (2019) suggest that video gamers conduct in-game purchases, such as upgrades, additional lives, currency, personalized avatars, an ad-free experience, unrestricted playing time or special items (i.e., famous football players’ avatars or skins that modifies the appearance of a character or item), and consumer spending on in-game purchases will grow until 32 billion in 2020. In fact, 4% of global iOS device users and 3% of Android users are making in-game purchases per month and (“Mobile Gaming…,” 2019).

Since users decide to adopt one activity they tend to another similar one (Eastin, 2002). This is why the authors of the study state that:

Therefore, when consumers exhibit self-efficacy playing a video game, they will probably display this ability when purchasing related products. Therefore, we propose that video gamers acquire several skills when playing, the fact that allow them to feel more self-confident and effective when using online shopping platforms to buy games or accessories.

The Person-Situation Debate & Alternatives to the Trait Perspective

The ideas described in this section should probably seem familiar, if not obvious to you. When asked to think about what our friends, enemies, family members, and colleagues are like, some of the first things that come to mind are their personality characteristics. We might think about how warm and helpful our first teacher was, how irresponsible and careless our brother is, or how demanding and insulting our first boss was. Each of these descriptors reflects a personality trait, and most of us generally think that the descriptions that we use for individuals accurately reflect their “characteristic pattern of thoughts, feelings, and behaviours,” or in other words, their personality.

But what if this idea was wrong? What if our belief in personality traits were an illusion and people are not consistent from one situation to the next? This was a possibility that shook the foundation of personality psychology in the late 1960s when Walter Mischel published a book called Personality and Assessment (1968). In this book, Mischel suggested that if one looks closely at people’s behaviour across many different situations, the consistency is really not that impressive. In other words, children who cheat on tests at school may steadfastly follow all rules when playing games and may never tell a lie to their parents. In other words, he suggested, there may not be any general trait of honesty that links these seemingly related behaviours. Furthermore, Mischel suggested that observers may believe that broad personality traits like honesty exist, when in fact, this belief is an illusion. The debate that followed the publication of Mischel’s book was called the person-situation debate because it pitted the power of personality against the power of situational factors as determinants of the behaviour that people exhibit.

Because of the findings that Mischel emphasized, many psychologists focused on an alternative to the trait perspective. Instead of studying broad, context-free descriptions, like the trait terms we’ve described so far, Mischel thought that psychologists should focus on people’s distinctive reactions to specific situations. For instance, although there may not be a broad and general trait of honesty, some children may be especially likely to cheat on a test when the risk of being caught is low and the rewards for cheating are high. Others might be motivated by the sense of risk involved in cheating and may do so even when the rewards are not very high. Thus, the behaviour itself results from the child’s unique evaluation of the risks and rewards present at that moment, along with her evaluation of her abilities and values. Because of this, the same child might act very differently in different situations.

Thus, Mischel thought that specific behaviours were driven by the interaction between very specific, psychologically meaningful features of the situation in which people found themselves, the person’s unique way of perceiving that situation, and his or her abilities for dealing with it. Mischel and others argued that it was these social-cognitive processes that underlie people’s reactions to specific situations that provide some consistency when situational features are the same. If so, then studying these broad traits might be more fruitful than cataloging and measuring narrow, context-free traits like Extraversion or Neuroticism.

In the years after the publication of Mischel’s (1968) book, debates raged about whether personality truly exists, and if so, how it should be studied. And, as is often the case, it turns out that a more moderate middle ground than what the situationists proposed could be reached. It is certainly true, as Mischel pointed out, that a person’s behaviour in one specific situation is not a good guide to how that person will behave in a very different specific situation. Someone who is extremely talkative at one specific party may sometimes be reticent to speak up during class and may even act like a wallflower at a different party. But this does not mean that personality does not exist, nor does it mean that people’s behaviour is completely determined by situational factors. Indeed, research conducted after the person-situation debate shows that on average, the effect of the “situation” is about as large as that of personality traits.

However, it is also true that if psychologists assess a broad range of behaviours across many different situations, there are general tendencies that emerge. Personality traits give an indication about how people will act on average, but frequently they are not so good at predicting how a person will act in a specific situation at a certain moment in time. Thus, to best capture broad traits, one must assess aggregate behaviours, averaged over time and across many different types of situations. Most modern personality researchers agree that there is a place for broad personality traits and for the narrower units such as those studied by Walter Mischel.