STEELETTER

First and foremost, HAPPY NEW YEAR to all STEELETTER readers. I trust you all had an EXCEPTIONAL 2025 and have hit the ground running with a THUMPING start to 2026! Today, I am over the moon to deliver an electric piece on the topic of personality. As always I have included bonus extracurricular material for the avid pupil. The MultipleSTEELE Test is located in Appendix A. If completed please message me your answers, I will mark them personally and provide tailored feedback.

Announcements

Congratulations to Joe Widdrington, more formally known as Widzy for completing last issues STEELEQ Test on the topic of intelligence. Widzy is a professional academic who researches vital topics to keep his hot water running. His responses demonstrated professionalism and an exemplimentary understanding of the content in both the rapid fire and short answer questions. FANTASIC WORK WIDZ!

Part 1

What is personality?

Personality refers to individual differences in thinking, feeling, and behaving that are relatively stable over a long period of time and remain consistent across different environments and situations (Haslam & Smilie, 2022).

Why should we care about personality?

Among the first documented musing around persaonlity can be traced back to Theophrastus in 319 BC, “Often before now have I applied my thoughts to the puzzling questions – why it is that, while all Greece lies under the same sky and all the Greeks are educated alike, It has befallen us to have characters so variously constituted”. Whether it be over tea and biscuits with friends or catching up on the latest gossip in the lunchroom, we have probably all attempted to describe our own or another person's fundamental tendencies. We are social animals that are motivated to understand how we are like all people, like some people, or like no other person, Murray, and Kluckhohn (1953).

Personality Traits

Personality traits are often used as the descriptive unit of personality. In psychology a personality trait is quite specific and must follow a few rules (Haslam & Smilie, 2022).

What are not personality traits?
• Fruitcake
• Tall
• Malaka
• Hot cross bun lover
• Soccer player

Hypothetical example

Frankfurt’s has just starting playing tennis his new peers describe him as sociable because his mouth does a lot of flapping. Frankfurt also frequents church for gospel studies and the countryside to attend bird watching seminars. However, Frankfurt is much quieter and reserved at church and bird watching. Because this talkativeness is restricted to the tennis club, it reflects both situational exclusivity and there is not enough evidence regarding stability over a period of time, as Frank has only just started playing tennis.

Part 2

Do you have a personality type?

No.I would be unsuprised if you have taken something like the Myers-Briggs Nonsense Test (MBTI), an inventory that outputs your personality type like ‘INTJ’ or ‘BSBS’. If instructed to do an MBTI, I would suggest tossing in into the loo and be sure to use the FULL FLUSH setting, not the half flush setting.

BIG 5 (OCEAN)

The big 5 is an structured heirachy of personality traits that have evolved since 1936 using methods like statistical clustering and factor analysis. The big 5 are the fundamental domains that summarise individual differences. high level traits mid level, which eventually at the bottom drills down into some kind of observable behvariour.

How did we get to the BIG 5 (OCEAN)

Amazing Allport and Outstanding Odbert

Allport & Odbert believed that anything of value or important enough to a society is encoded in the language. In 1936 the boys took a New International Dictionary in search of an extensive list of possible adjectives that could be used to describe individual differences. The criteria to make it on there list was as follows.

• Adjective that describes broad ways in which people can be different
• Adjective that describes temporary moods or activities.
• Adjective that describes social or character judgements of personal conduct.
• Adjectiveinclude Miscellaneous descriptions of physique, capacities, and developmental conditions.

Remarkable Raymond Cattell

Cattell believed in the lexical hypothesis, but explored how traits could be used to predict real world outcomes like professional job success (Cattell, R.B, 1943). Out comes the calculator, and with some clustering and factor analysis, the 17, 953, was reduced into 16 fundamental personality factors

Legendary Lewis R. Goldberg

Formally coined the term BIG 5, refering to OCEAN traits after his research showed that the psychological literature agreed that the BIG 5 were common stable factors that kept emerging in the psychological literature even across languages. and officially coined the big 5 in his famous paper Goldberg, L. R. (1993). An alternative “description of personality”: The Big-Five factor structure. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 59(6), 1216–1229. they used the psycholgocal literature and lexical datasets originating from allport and odbert to statistically derive the BIG 5 personality factors.

Standardised Inventories