Category: Personality

Some people have the talent to find the bad in anything.

Mountains, brie, Greece, electric toothbrushes; you name it, they don’t like it. And they want to tell you exactly why.

A new study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology suggests this might be a newly identified aspect of personality: how much people are predisposed to like or hate stuff, even if they know almost nothing about it (Helper & Albarracin, 2013).

To investigate, the researchers asked people questions about loads of different things that weren’t connected.

They included everything from ‘abortion’, ‘America’, ‘antidepressants’ and ‘architecture’ down to ‘voluntary euthanasia’, ‘wearing clothes that draw attention’ and ‘wine’.

Imagine if you took five of your friends and asked them about subjects as varied as these; surely you’d get really varied responses. Some people like wine and wearing clothes that draw attention, other people dislike those things. Others couldn’t care less either way.

What the researchers found was that there was certainly lots of variation between what people liked and disliked. But, oddly, at a general level, people were split between likers and haters.

In other words, some people tended to like stuff even though they didn’t really know much about it, and some people had the tendency to hate stuff, whatever it was.

The authors of this article argue that this initial stance towards anything and everything is a facet of personality. In the same way that you can be either extroverted or introverted, you can also be a ‘liker’ or a ‘hater’.

So, the answer to why the haters have to hate is that it’s built into them at the level of their personality.

Now, how you might become a like or a hater in the first place, we don’t yet know. Likely, it’s got a lot to do with genetics. Some people are born haters, others born likers.

But there’s also likely a learning component: people probably learn to become haters—hating from an early age, and so forth.

It raises all kinds of fascinating questions: does being a hater run in the family? Can a liker and a hater be in a relationship together? Which professions have the most haters?

I’ll leave you to ponder these and more important questions!

Image credit: Minh Hoang

Surveys keep telling us that between 65% and 75% of people rate their managers as the worst aspect of their jobs.

Is this just baseless moaning, or are they right?

Actually most are right since research into managers shows that around 50% of them are incompetent (DeVries, 1993).

The reasons they can’t do their jobs are pretty simple. When Leslie and Van Velsor (1996) looked at the research across different organisations and different employees, they found these four points summarised the problems with failed managers (research described in Hogan & Kaiser, 2005):

1. Poor interpersonal skills. Horrible managers look down on you from on high like irascible emperors. They are insensitive, cold and as likely to be nice to you as give their pay-checks to charity.
2. Can’t get the work done. They repeatedly set overly ambitious targets and then repeatedly fail to meet them. They don’t follow through on their promises and they’re likely to betray your trust.
3. Can’t build a team. It’s perhaps the most essential skill of being a manager. Team-building requires building trust, assigning roles and goals, promoting good communication and providing leadership. Terrible managers are totally incapable of any of this.
4. Can’t cope with promotion. Who knows how they got that promotion, but it’s clear the new job is beyond them. As soon as they’re settled in, everything starts to fall apart.

If 50% of managers are that bad, how do they become managers in the first place?

The answer is that horrible managers do have desirable qualities—that’s how they got hired in the first place—but they also have undesirable qualities, which often outweigh them.

Hogan and Hogan (1994) have looked at decades of research on this and they find that most horrible managers have a personality disorder. And the thing about personality disorders is:

Personality disorders are hard to detect

Many horrible managers are narcissists and, sadly, people like narcissists at first. They seem like fun people to be around.

In time, though, we come to notice that narcissists can’t learn from their mistakes and go around with a massive sense of entitlement.

What seemed charming on day one is revealed as arrogance over time. Unfortunately this usually doesn’t become obvious until too late.

Failure of the selection process

Managers are often recruited from outside the organisation using interviews.

Both narcissists and psychopaths are great at interviews: making a good impression in these sorts of situations is what they excel at.

Instead, more formal selection tools should be used with information collected about the person’s ability to be a manager from the people who know best: the manager’s subordinates.

In other words: you should vote for your boss.

Can you imagine?

Image credit: Victor1558

For many years personality psychologists gave the same answer as any pessimist: no, people’s personalities don’t change.

This was even more true once they got to 30-years-old. By that time, it was thought that if people preferred their own company or were overly neurotic, they tended to stay that way.

In the last 15 years, though, this view has changed. Instead of personality being set in stone at 30, now evidence is emerging that there is some change. In fact people don’t give exactly the same answers to personality questionnaires at different times in their lives. But are these shifts meaningful? Could the differences be more about the tests than real life?

To settle this you’ve got to look at whether the typical changes in personality over time really affect people’s lives. For example, the personality trait of high neuroticism is associated with mental health problems. So, does a decrease in neuroticism lead to a significant increase in how satisfied a person is with their life?

This is exactly what Boyce et al. (2013) looked at for all five aspects of personality: extroversion, agreeableness, openness-to-experience, conscientiousness and, of course, neuroticism. What they wanted to see was if changes in these over the years translated into changes in well-being.

They used data from a large Australian survey of 8,625 people over two years. What kind of difference had two years made to their lives? Had there personalities changed? And if so, had their satisfaction with life changed with it?

Firstly, they confirmed that personality was the strongest predictor of satisfaction with life. This is well-established and helps explain why some people have everything and are never satisfied and some people have next-to-nothing and seem quite happy with life. It’s not just what you have that makes you satisfied (or not), it’s how you think about it. And those habits of thought are heavily influenced by personality.

Secondly, they confirmed that people’s personalities had shifted over the two-year period. Indeed the degree of personality change in those two years was equivalent to changes in other demographic variables such as marital status, employment and income.

Most importantly, though, they found that these changes in personality were associated with significant shifts in satisfaction with life. The strength of the effect was about twice that for all the other aspects of circumstances combined. In other words, the typical shift in personality has a greater effect on your satisfaction with life than all the typical changes in circumstances, like income or marital status, all added up together.

This shows quite convincingly that not only do people change over time, but that these shifts in personality can have significant effects on how we experience our lives.

Image credit: Marco Belluci

My guess before I read a new paper by Balliet et al. (2011) was that there’s no difference between men and women or maybe a slight advantage for women. But according to the latest thinking that’s not quite right.

The debate over whether men or women cooperate more has been going on for years. The research finds that men are more likely to help a stranger and are better at cooperating in larger groups, while women are often kinder, more agreeable and more supportive.

Still, the differences between the sexes are often grossly exaggerated (see: Men and Women are Psychologically Very Similar); men and women definitely don’t come from different planets.

So what Balliet et al. (2011) did was look across 50 years of research and hundreds of different studies to see what emerged. They broke studies down by situations and they found that overall, when you averaged everything out, there was little difference between men and women.

As ever, though, the devil is in the details, and they teased out some somewhat counter-intuitive findings:

• In single sex interactions men are more cooperative than women. The difference is quite small but emerges consistently when men are working with other men and women with other women.
• In mixed sex interactions, though, women cooperate more than men. Again, the difference is quite small but it’s there, in study after study.
• When working together over time men are generally more cooperative than women. Once again the difference is quite small.

What’s going on here? There are a couple of theories:

• When men and women are in mixed sex groups they tend to act in more stereotypical ways because of the presence of the opposite sex.
• An evolutionary perspective would suggest that men are showing off to women how dominant they are in mixed sex groups, so this reduces their cooperation.

Whatever the reason, these findings fit in with much other research. Generally the differences between men and women’s social behaviour are quite small. If you want to know how much a person is going to cooperate with you forget about their gender and focus instead on their personality.

Image credit: Kerry Jardine

Modern technology means it’s never been easier to hear exactly the music we want, whenever we want it. But whatever technology we use, the reasons we listen to music are universal.

Music grabs our emotions instantly in a way few other art-forms can manage. It engages us on all sorts of different levels. A few bars of a song can take us back decades, to a different time and place.

So what are the universal psychological functions of music? Lonsdale and North (2010) asked 300 young people about their main reasons for listening to music to see which came out top. Here are the answers, in order of importance, counted down from six to the number one spot.

6. To learn about others and the world

Languishing down at number six was the way in which music teaches us about the world. Music tells us stories about other people and places and it gives us access to new experiences. Music can teach us how other people think and even suggest how we might live.

Psychological research backs up the importance of the information music sends out to others about our personalities. In one study participants could broadly judge another’s personality solely on the basis of their top 10 songs (see: personality in your mp3 player).

Music is also sending us a message about the state of the world. Dodds and Danforth (2009) downloaded the lyrics to almost 250,000 songs composed between 1960 and 2007. They found the lyrics got steadily more depressing up until 1985 and then levelled off around 1990. This decline was seen across all musical genres.

5. Personal identity

In at five is identity. The type of music we like expresses something about ourselves. Even the broadest genres like rock, classical and blues begin to give us a picture of a person. We also seem to discover ourselves through music: it can teach is who we are and where we belong. Through music we can build up and project an image of ourselves.

One general trend in popular music is towards greater narcissism. A study has examined the lyrics of the top 10 songs in the U.S. between 1980 and 2007 (DeWall et al., 2011). This found that lyrics related to antisocial behaviour and self-focus increased over the period. On the other hand, over the same time, lyrics related to positive emotions, social interaction and a focus on others have decreased.

4. Interpersonal relationships

The fourth most important function of music is its social dimension. Music is a point of conversation. We listen to it while we’re with other people and we talk to them about it. It’s a way of making a connection.

There’s little doubt that music and love are inextricably linked and we use one to get the other. One study tested whether exposure to romantic music makes a woman more likely to agree to a date Gueguen et al. (2010). The answer is, emphatically, yes. The percentage of women who agreed to a date almost doubled from 28% to 52% after they had been played some romantic music.

The song that did the trick? “Je l’aime à mourir” (I love her to death) by Francis Cabrel (the research was conducted in France).

2= Negative mood management

Tying for the second spot is negative mood management. When we’re in a bad mood, music can help us deal with it. When your mood is low, there is something cathartic about listening to sad music. Somehow it helps to know that you’re not alone. We use music to relieve tension, express our feelings and escape the realities of everyday life.

Music certainly seems to help us cope with life’s slings and arrows. There have been many studies on those about to undergo painful medical procedures. These find that music helps people get through this stressful and anxious time (e.g. Good et al., 2002).

2= Diversion

Also coming in at number two is diversion. Music relieves the boredom of the commute, or of a lazy Sunday afternoon. It’s something to do when we don’t know what else to do.

A word of warning though: don’t use background music while you’re trying to do something complicated. Research shows that it reduces performance on standard cognitive tests (Cassidy & MacDonald, 2007). Music is a distraction and this research found that the most distracting type is depressing music.

1. Positive mood management

Right up at the top of the charts is positive mood management. This is rated people’s most important reason for listening to music: making our good moods even better. It entertains us, relaxes us and sets the right emotional tone.

Music makes us more hopeful, even after things go wrong for us. In one study by Ziv et al. (2011) participants were falsely told they’d done badly on a task. Those who were played some positive music afterwards, were more hopeful about the future than those left in silence.

Image credit: Kris Krug

From time to time we all wonder what other people think of us. Often in a quiet moment, just before going to sleep, while reviewing the day, we try to work out how friends and family might interpret what we’ve said and done.

How neurotic does my partner think I am? Do my colleagues think of me as a reliable, hard worker? Do my friends think I’m stuck in a rut or open to new experiences?

Here on the inside we have a model of ourselves that makes sense, but out there, what conclusions are those who know us best drawing about our personalities?

Of course we all differ and you might imagine that the differences between actor and observer would cancel out. For example some people might appear more conscientious than they are, and others less so.

How do friends see you?

When psychologists compare people’s ratings of their own personality with those of others, they find something curious. There are consistent and reliable differences between how people, on average, see themselves and how those closest evaluate them.

Estonian psychologist Juri Allik and colleagues gathered personality tests on participants across Europe; from Belgium, The Czech Republic, Estonia and Germany (Allik et al., 2010). People were asked to fill out one personality questionnaire themselves, and get someone who knew them well to do the same.

Here are the five different dimensions into which personality is most often broken down, along with brief descriptions:

• Extraversion: assesses how outgoing you are, for example do you love or hate parties?
• Neuroticism: centers around the dark thoughts you might have about yourself and others.
• Openness to experience: measures how much you like trying out new ideas or activities.
• Agreeableness: looks at how easy-going you are.
• Conscientiousness: do you get things done or is your to-do list overflowing?

Despite the differences between the four cultures examined, the pattern of results was remarkably similar. When Allik and colleagues compared what people thought of themselves compared with their friend’s judgement, some consistent differences emerged. Here’s what they found, on average, across all the participants:

• People were rated as less neurotic by those close to them than they saw themselves. This could suggest we appear less anxious, depressed or self-conscious than we feel.
• People were rated as more conscientious by others, having greater competence and self-discipline than they gave themselves credit for.
• People were rated as less open to experience, including to fantasy, new ideas and values, than they thought of themselves.
• For agreeableness and extraversion people were generally in agreement with their friends.

To rule out the conclusion that there’s something unusual about Belgians, Czechs, Estonians or Germans, Allik and colleagues looked at similar data taken from 29 cultures, including the United States, Japan, India and Burkina Faso (in West Africa).

Broadly the same pattern of results emerged, which suggested that people all around world share this same tendency to see themselves as more neurotic and self-conscious and less open to experience than they are rated by friends and family.

Battle of the biases

None of the differences that emerged were huge, but they were consistent. And it’s the exceptions that are fascinating because they are tricky to square with people’s natural tendency for self-enhancement, i.e. most people think they are above average. If that were true we’d expect to see people rating themselves higher on conscientiousness and lower on neuroticism than their friends.

One way to resolve this apparent contradiction is to notice who the comparisons are between. In the experiments where people consider themselves above average, the comparisons are between strangers.

But, in Allik et al.’s study, the comparisons are between friends and family. Because our friends and family naturally have a positive bias towards us, they may rate us higher than a stranger on socially desirable personality traits.

The finding from Allik et al.’s study that doesn’t fit with this explanation is the lower rating others gave for openness to experience. Because being open to new experiences is socially desirable, if this theory is correct, we’d expect the same positive bias from our friends. It’s certainly a hole in that particular explanation so we can’t yet be sure exactly how to explain these findings.

The researchers conclude that, on average, our friends and loved ones have much the same view of our personalities as we do. Perhaps we are a little pessimistic on neuroticism and conscientiousness, maybe a little optimistic on our desire for new experiences. But in broad-brush personality terms, the real you is probably shining through.

Image credit: Gueorgui Tcherednitchenko