The Big 5 and Locuses -- Monster Movies or Personality Tests?

A few blogs back I was talking about giving personality tests to the "At-risk" Teens at the community center I work at. The results are in! Let me explain the tests before for those who are interested.

I gave them two tests. The first is called the "Big 5 Test." "Big 5" sounds more like a falsely advertised penis than a legit personality test to me, but I didn't go to school for Psychology.

What a Google search for "Big 5" renders, even with "Safe Search" set to off.

The Big 5 Test  

Tests for five personality traits:

Extroversion -- Agreeableness -- Openness -- Conscientiousness -- Neuroticism

Maybe there's a strange correlation between the "Big 5" Animals of Africa and these five personality traits! I'll let someone else crawl down that water buffalo hole. Well this test is called the "Big 5" because all known personality traits are thought to be subsumed under these five general categories. I did a tiny bit of research before deciding to give the kids this test. Here's the test I gave them.

Here's a picture that should stifle all of your skepticism.

Wikipedia talks about an old theory, called the "Lexical Hypothesis" that attempted to identify all the human traits in existence by flipping through the dictionary and scribbling down every adjective for human characteristics. I think there's a Sherlock Holmes story about this. Gordon Allport and H. S. Odbert undertook this quest, first proposed by Sir Francis Galton (sounds like a alias for Moriarty to me). Allport and Odbert (is there an Adult Swim show by that name?) found "17,953 personality-describing words." This list was soon paired down to the manageable number of 4,504. Were they even trying?!!

Long story short, people began doing psychology on humans instead of dictionaries. 

"Tell me about why you chose the name 'Dict-ionary'..."

There have been several independent studies, but they all generally end up labeling 5 different categories of traits. The "Big 5" is generally accepted as a good balance between all of them.

"Hey, Mike..." you say because you know my name and have a question, "what about the Meyers Briggs test? I'm partial to that. It told me I have the same personality type as Simone de Beauvoir!" Well, that's cool (I guess) but I have reasons for picking the "Big 5" over the Carl Jung approved Meyers Briggs. Firstly, the Big 5 is a bit less "different strokes for different folks" than the Meyers Briggs. The Big 5 is very opinionated and that's what I'm looking for.

Personally, I value spontaneity over being disciplined. I'm a believer that Jesus was an INFP, the "I" standing for "Introvert." So a test that says being an extrovert is inheritly better than being an introvert is inherently heretical, according to the church of Me. But I think the Big 5 is a BIT more nuanced than that. From reading tthrough the questions, it seems that the form of "Introvertedness" the Big 5 is talking about is less "needing to chill in the hills, praying to your Dad and recharging your δύναμις" and more like being agoraphobic. And the "spontaneity" is more like the spontaneity of Norwegian volcanoes than the spontaneity of Robin Williams.

The Big 5 gives you 5 traits, each with a spectrum based on a previous sampling, and you get a percentile on that spectrum. It's a bit like the SATs, which gives you a raw score and a percentile, but without the raw score.

The idea is that people who score highly in these traits will have more success in life. In the past IQ test and knowledge-based tests were used exclusively for this purpose. Recent data, as explored in books like: "How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character" by Paul Tough shows that these skills are equally if not more important for determining future success. The inspiration for this research came from longitudinal studies of GED takers. Here's a "This American Life" episode on the same research if you're an Iraphile.

Statistics show that GED takers are 3x more likely to take
this slogan literally than actual graduates of High School.

The GED is in theory the same as graduating from High School, but the future income of actual High School Graduates was found to be much, much higher than those who only passed the GED. What were kids getting in High School that they weren't with GED courses? If the GED tested for "Cognitive Skills" then these unknown x-factors were labelled as "Non-Cognitive Skills." The preexisting theory on personality traits was newly examined. Here's a survey of psychological studies from the E.U. on the optimization of the workforce through increased "Non-cognitive Skills.

Future income doesn't excite me too much. I know some millionaires and most of them suck. But for the kids I'm working with, a higher future income is a good statistic because it shows that they are at least alive. Remember this chart:

The thing of interest is the solid blue line declining at age 16. Ignoring the causality behind these traits for a moment, are there personality traits that cause young black men to live violently which may be changed? Thus the interest in Non-Cognitive Skills which, unlike Cognitive skills such as IQ, can be changed. I haven't seen any data on survival rates and Non-Cognitive Skills, but I have come across this related statistic in that E.U. survey above: "... non cognitive skills have a much stronger effect at the low end of the earnings distribution. At the tenth percentile, the effect of these skills is between 2.5 and 4 times the effect of cognitive skills. One reason for this result is that men with low non cognitive ability are significantly more likely to become unemployed than men with low cognitive ability," (Page 16).

Curb Your Enthusiasm consistently
demonstrates the importance of
Non-Cognitive aka Social Skills.

It's a pretty simple thing. These Non-Cognitive Skills are social skills, those things which are much harder to quantify than raw knowledge. Yet it is with these traits that most people achieve success. It is these traits that take the harshest toll when we are raised in chaotic environments. And it is these traits that we can change most easily. How exactly we change them is a whole other topic, but identifying these weak places in our personalities is the most important thing.

I give them another test besides the Big 5 test, and I got that idea from the E.U. paper. 

Locus of Control Test

Available Here

"Locus," -.o "from the Latin for 'location,'' determines whether one sees the center of control in their life as an external or an internal condition. Pervasive belief in concepts like "fate," "luck," "randomness," demonstrate an EXTERNAL Locus of Control. If one believes that hard work, determination, "making your own fate," are means to success, this demonstrates an INTERNAL Locus of Control. Obviously it's about people's perceptions of of their amount of control, not the reality of it.

Shamelessly stolen from Wikipedia

So obviously some people have reasons to be biased in different directions when it comes to this Locus of Control thing. From the Wiki article on the Locus of Control Test: 

As Berry et al. pointed out in 1992, ethnic groups within the United States have been compared on locus of control; African Americans in the U.S. are more external than whites, even when socioeconomic status is controlled.

How does one's perception of their amount of control correlate with with their Big 5 Test scores?

I'll post the test results in the next blog. Remember, this is a sample size of seven kids administered by the un-highly trained professional which is me.