Personality Quotes

“This clarification of the nature of intelligence predicts that there will be no relationship at all between personality and intelligence, but research in the last decade has shown that this is not quite true. There are no very strong relationships between personality and intelligence, but some relationships there are, though debate about their nature and significance goes on. Most strikingly, though, in a couple of studies where relationships between Conscientiousness and intelligence have been found, they are not, as you might imagine, positive, but weakly negative. The smarter people are, the less conscientious they are.13 The most likely explanation for this is that people who are very sharp soon learn that they can get away with not preparing things too much in advance, not being overly disciplined with their time, and so on, since their quick abilities will get them through whatever academic and professional challenges they meet. Conversely, people who are not quite so quick have to use organization and discipline to achieve what some others might achieve carelessly. Thus, a behavioural style is developed that compensates for the level of intelligence, and so ends up inversely related to it. This means that there is no intrinsic genetic connection between low Conscientiousness and high intelligence. Rather, the weak negative correlation is something that emerges through development.”
― Daniel Nettle, Personality: What makes you the way you are

“The sex difference in Agreeableness puts the debate about sex discrimination in society into an interesting light. The media tends to decry the fact that the prevalence of women chief executives of large corporations is very much lower than 50 per cent. But is this really evidence that discrimination is operating? It could equally well be the case that there is no discrimination, but that fewer women want to emphasize status gain at the expense of social connectedness. Given the known relationships between Agreeableness and career success, and the known sex differences in Agreeableness, you could actually work out the expected number of women in top positions if the market is blind to sex. It would not be zero, but it would be not be 50 per cent either.”
― Daniel Nettle, Personality: What makes you the way you are

“Obsessive-compulsive personality disorder (OCPD) is unhelpfully named, since it is not particularly closely related to the better known obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). It does not tend to co-occur with obsessive-compulsive disorder, or even run in the same families. Obsessive-compulsive disorder is an anxiety disorder, in which the sufferer feels compelled to repeat particular thoughts or actions, such as checking or hand-washing. As an anxious condition, it belongs to the same family as depression and generalized anxiety disorder, and thus is related to high Neuroticism and responds to some extent to serotonergic antidepressant medications. Some people have even seen obsessive-compulsive disorder as a low Conscientiousness problem, since the affected individual cannot inhibit the checking or washing response in rather the same manner as the alcoholic cannot inhibit his desire to drink. Whether this is the right characterization or not, it is clear that OCPD is a very different type of problem.16 What, then, does OCPD entail? Psychiatrists define it as ‘a pervasive pattern of preoccupation with orderliness, perfectionism, and mental and interpersonal control, at the expense of flexibility, openness and efficiency, beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts’.”
― Daniel Nettle, Personality: What makes you the way you are

“attachment theorists argue that the mother-infant bond forms a kind of relationship template which the developing person then transfers to his or her important relationships later in life. How much adaptive sense would this really make? The quality of your attachment to your mother is very important for your relationship with your mother, which is a very important relationship. But there is no reason to believe that the type of interaction provided within this one relationship is going to turn out to be predictive of all the interactions you encounter throughout your life. Your mother might be eccentric, or ill, or have heavy commitments other than you. It would make little evolutionary sense to calibrate your whole personality on something so idiosyncratic. This is consistent with the evidence from attachment studies. Children of depressed mothers are unusually subdued in interaction with their mothers. However, this disappears when they are with their nursery teachers, with whom they behave normally. Of course; what they learn from their interactions with their mothers is what their mothers are like, not what the world is like.7”
― Daniel Nettle, Personality: What makes you the way you are

“non-twin children who are adopted into different families resemble their biological siblings in personality, even though they may rarely or never have met them, and they have no greater resemblance in personality to their adoptive siblings, who they grew up with, than they do to randomly chosen strangers. The correlation is essentially zero.”
― Daniel Nettle, Personality: What makes you the way you are

“Unfortunately, psychologists know much less about how the environment influences a person’s personality than is commonly assumed. People often talk as if the environmental effects had been well understood for decades, and the new discovery was that there were genetic effects too. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. The area of environmental influences on personality is a morass of unsupported or poorly tested ideas, and, ironically, it is behaviour geneticists who have brought the most progress to the field. The irony is that behaviour genetics was founded in order to discover heritable influences on human behaviour. The methods such studies use, however, also allow us to identify non-genetic influences, and say quite a lot about them.”
― Daniel Nettle, Personality: What makes you the way you are

“it is a sensible suggestion that there might be individual differences in how widely activation spreads in networks of meaning. Moreover, the breadth of spread might plausibly be the cognitive mechanism underlying Openness. There is no direct evidence on this question, but there is an interesting study by Christine Mohr on Unusual Experiences-type schizotypy, and as I have said, I see ‘real’ Openness as quite close to this construct. In Mohr’s experiment, participants saw pairs or triads of words, such as ‘HONEY-BREAD’ or ‘LADDER-BOTTLE-CAT’, and had to rate how close in meaning they felt the different words to be. Scores on the schizotypy measure were a good predictor of how close on average the words were judged to be. The higher the schizotypy score, the closer the meanings seemed. The best explanation for these results is that, for the high-Unusual Experiences scorer, each word activates a broad raft of related associations, and since the second word is either in that raft or related to a word which is, the words seem close in meaning. For the low scorer, the raft of associations is narrower, and so the distance to the second word seems greater on average.”
― Daniel Nettle, Personality: What makes you the way you are

“One of the most robust sex differences in personality research is the finding that women are higher in Agreeableness than men are. The difference is over half a standard deviation, which means that although there is plenty of overlap between the sexes, the average man scores lower than 70 per cent of women. Women have an advantage on theory of mind tasks too. Moreover, there is evidence that the difference is deep in our biology. When women are given testosterone experimentally, it reduces empathetic behaviour.19”
― Daniel Nettle, Personality: What makes you the way you are

“Lessened theory of mind processing has also been linked to paranoia. After all, if one does not accurately model the mental state of another, one may treat it as hostile.”
― Daniel Nettle, Personality: What makes you the way you are

“Different psychological mechanisms can share resources because they have a shared evolutionary history, because the design brief they perform is structurally similar, or because they are often needed together. Some combination of all of these can also be true. Either way, it is costly, difficult, or unnecessary for natural selection to make related mechanisms totally functionally independent in a brain that must have been built up piecemeal from a simpler ancestor. Thus it is no surprise that there are families of psychological mechanisms drawing on shared or overlapping resources.”
― Daniel Nettle, Personality: What makes you the way you are

“Let me illustrate this with an example. For someone who works in a busy office, there could be twenty instances a day of needing something that a colleague is using. For any single one of these instances, being low on the personality trait of Agreeableness might make, say, only a 10 per cent difference to the probability of snapping irritably at that colleague. For predicting snapping in any single episode, then, the power of the personality variable is quite weak. However, aggregated across all instances, low Agreeableness will mean an average of one extra bout of irritable behaviour per day, or five per week, or more than two hundred per year. This is a hugely important difference that is bound to have an impact on a person’s life, and yet it stems from what, in the single shot, is only a very slightly raised probability of annoyance. The more we aggregate behaviours across multiple instances, the more important personality as a predictor becomes.”
― Daniel Nettle, Personality: What makes you the way you are

“These fascinating findings make it untenable to claim that personality ratings are irrelevant, or all in the eye of the beholder, or tell you nothing but some kind of story that the participant is spinning about himself. Being alive and having a successful partnership are profoundly important elements, in both experiential and evolutionary terms, of any human life, and so if some pen-and-paper rating scale that takes ten minutes to complete predicts them, however imperfectly, we should sit up and take notice. We should try to understand how it could be that such a scale could have any predictive value given the preposterous and unpredictable complexity of human life. That, of course, is what this book is about.”
― Daniel Nettle, Personality: What makes you the way you are