Saturday, September 06, 2008
How deep is the OCEAN?
Although I have a master’s degree in Psychology in Education, I learned something new from Sam Gosling, Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Texas. In his book Snoop: What Your Stuff Says about You, he bases his research on personality on a framework called the Big Five: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism (OCEAN.) I had never heard of this theory before, only the Myers-Briggs types which Gosling says are less widely used in academic psychology. Someone had better tell that to the University of Pittsburgh.
Anyway, Gosling attempts to predict how strong people are in each of the OCEAN dimensions by looking at the items in their bedrooms or their offices or even the songs on their iPods. All of this seems fairly simple if you ask me. To conclude that someone is conscientious by examining a book shelf on which the books are in alphabetical order doesn’t require much of a leap. But first you must make an effort to look. If you do, you will undoubtedly learn helpful things about a potential employer or mate.
More interesting to me was the section on stereotypes. Gosling’s student researchers made certain assumptions about subjects, some accurate, some not, based on jumping to conclusions instead of basing assessments on what they actually saw. For example, once a researchers determined that a subject was female, they assumed she was high in both neuroticism and agreeableness without any other clues. It turns out that women are, on the average, more neurotic as defined by OCEAN than men so that stereotype held true; however, women were not automatically more agreeable.
Gosling gives a detailed analysis of how he goes about snooping in recounting how he was asked to describe the personalities of Charlie Gibson and Mike Barz from Good Morning, America. I would like to have heard what each of the newsmen said about Gosling’s conclusions or even what their co-anchors said. Was he correct? Guess we’ll never know.
Anyway, Gosling attempts to predict how strong people are in each of the OCEAN dimensions by looking at the items in their bedrooms or their offices or even the songs on their iPods. All of this seems fairly simple if you ask me. To conclude that someone is conscientious by examining a book shelf on which the books are in alphabetical order doesn’t require much of a leap. But first you must make an effort to look. If you do, you will undoubtedly learn helpful things about a potential employer or mate.
More interesting to me was the section on stereotypes. Gosling’s student researchers made certain assumptions about subjects, some accurate, some not, based on jumping to conclusions instead of basing assessments on what they actually saw. For example, once a researchers determined that a subject was female, they assumed she was high in both neuroticism and agreeableness without any other clues. It turns out that women are, on the average, more neurotic as defined by OCEAN than men so that stereotype held true; however, women were not automatically more agreeable.
Gosling gives a detailed analysis of how he goes about snooping in recounting how he was asked to describe the personalities of Charlie Gibson and Mike Barz from Good Morning, America. I would like to have heard what each of the newsmen said about Gosling’s conclusions or even what their co-anchors said. Was he correct? Guess we’ll never know.
Labels: agreeableness, behavioral psychology, conscientiousness, extraversion, Gosling, neuroticism, openness, personality
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