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February 7, 2020
OPENNESS (also called INTELLECT and IMAGINATION) includes curious, intelligent, and creative,
The drive to organize people’s traits into categories is ancient; astrology is one such attempt to assign personalities to people systematically, depending on when they were born. While it is still popular throughout the world, it has no scientific basis. Sure, you may know a Capricorn who is stubborn, but statistically, you’re just as likely to find stubborn Leos, Libras, and Sagittarians.
Proponents of the Big Five never intended to reduce the rich tapestry of personality to a mere five traits. Rather, they seek to provide a framework in which to organize the myriad individual differences that characterize human beings.
Whenever genes, situations, or therapy changes our personalities, they must do so by changing the brain. In that sense, all personality differences are biological, regardless of whether they are influenced by genetics or not, because they must go through the brain. These neurobiological changes are accompanied by chemical changes in the brain.
Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, and Emotional Stability can be thought of as reflecting a tendency toward reducing unwanted drama in our lives, and evidence is mounting that these are influenced by serotonin. Openness and Extraversion reflect a general tendency to explore and engage with possibilities, and these appear to be influenced by dopamine.
The structure of genes has also been shown to influence personality. Alterations to the gene known as SLC6A4 are associated with neuroticism-related traits including anxiety, depression, hopelessness, guilt, hostility, and aggression. Other genes with hard-to-pronounce names are associated with self-determination and self-transcendence and with novelty seeking. The novelty-seeking genes are involved in dopamine regulation.
An active area of research is dedicated to mapping these kinds of interactions between genes, brain, neurochemicals, and personality.
Temperament versus Personality Babies are born with certain predispositions—a pattern of individual differences in how they react to different situations, as well as the regulation of those patterns. In babies and children, these patterns are usually called temperament, whereas in adults these patterns are called personality. Temperament and the young child’s early life experiences contribute to growing a personality.
That personality will be based on the child’s developing views of self and others as they are shaped by experience. A child who grows up in an environment with many dangers and hazards will surely view the world differently than one who is nurtured and sheltered.
There are a number of ways in which the natural aging process itself tends to cause some personality changes. In a meta-analysis of ninety-two research papers, covering the life course from age 10 to 101, 75 percent of personality traits studied changed significantly after the age of forty and well beyond sixty. (These tendencies will not apply to all people. Some people don’t change at all, and some change in ways that contradict statistical trends.)
Self-control increases steadily every decade after the age of twenty. Some of this has to do with the development of the prefrontal cortex, which continues through the early twenties,
Flexibility—your ability to easily adapt to changes in plans or to your environment—decreases steadily in every decade after twenty. With age, men typically show increased emotional sensitivity, and women experience decreasing emotional vulnerability.
In addition, older adults are generally more concerned with making a good impression and with cooperating and getting along with others—Agreeableness increases substantially.
Individuals appear to become more self-content in old age, an aspect of Emotional Stability called the La Dolce Vita effect: the sweet life. Older adults are more content with what they have, more self-contained and laid-back, less driven toward productivity. Mood disorders, anxiety, and behavioral problems decrease past age sixty, and onset of these problems after that age is very rare.
Trying something new later in life, like competitive sports, business enterprises, or artistic endeavors, can dramatically increase both your quality of life and how long you live. Openness and curiosity correlate highly with good health and long life.
Charles Koch, CEO of one of the largest companies in the world, says: “I’d rather hire someone who is conscientious, curious, and honest than someone who is highly intelligent but lacks those qualities. Runaway intelligence without conscientiousness, curiosity and honesty, I learned, can lead to dismal outcomes.”
IQ, one’s intelligence quotient, is a familiar metric. Increasingly, so too is EQ, the emotional intelligence quotient, thanks in part to the popular writings of Daniel Goleman. Cognitive scientists now talk about a third metric, CQ, the curiosity quotient, and it predicts life success as well as, and often better than, IQ or EQ.
The internal narrator also tells us, “This is what I’m like—these are the things I like to do, these are the ways I respond to certain situations.” Knowing this about ourselves is the first step toward change, toward affirming that our past behavior does not necessarily determine our future behavior. Even models we learn about through the media can help us to make aspirational changes. And personal affirmations (“I am generous, I am kind”) can help us to become what we’re not. A famous old psychology experiment showed that people who act as if they’re happy end up being happy.
A cheerful, positive, optimistic outlook—even if it starts out fake—can end up becoming real.
One tangible thing that we can all do to avoid misjudging others is to exercise compassion, to allow for the possibility that you might be wrong in attributing a trait to someone’s behavior. Indeed, this is the core principle at the heart of both social psychology and the teachings of the Dalai Lama. “Compassion is the key to happiness,” he says.
Buddhism, like most of the world’s religions, teaches you how to change your personality. You may feel that your personality is fixed, inflexible, and was determined in childhood, but science has shown otherwise.
The compassionate attitude and outlook are also related to experiencing less stress. You can choose not to be stressy—or learn how—and this can save your life. The HPA (hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal) axis is an endocrine system that controls the secretion of stress hormones (glucocorticoids) including cortisol. Exposure to high levels of glucocorticoids can be particularly detrimental for the aging hippocampus and is associated with decrements in learning and memory.
Curiosity, Openness, Associations (as in sociability), Conscientiousness, and Healthy practices are the five lifestyle choices that have the biggest impact on the rest of our lives.
