Customer Reviews

Personality: What Makes You the Way You Are

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I've always known I'm not like my family and friends. In our circle I'm definitely the odd man out. And I've known this since I was 19 or 20 years old. So fairly early in my life I was interested in why I was different, why I didn't mind being different, and why I always struggled when I tried to just fit in. I've read Myers-Briggs and other "modern" models of personality and took interest in them. And in them I usually found some nuggets of explanatory wisdom. So I had largely stopped reading about personality.

But I casually glanced at Nettles' book one day and found myself thinking, "A new model of personality? One with widespread support and evolutionary underpinnings? Damn. I'm going to have to read it."

And I'm glad I did. First, this book fills a void. Most psychology books for a consumer audience are so watered down and trite they fail to really teach anything. They're usually worse than the drivel you find in Cosmopolitan or Men's Health. Try searching for psychology books with a more intelligent bent to them and you quickly find yourself shoulder-deep in academic, jargon-laden prose. Nettles' book is a brilliant bridge between these two worlds. Personality: What Makes You The Way You Are is an excellent presentation of a newer model of personality theory. It is rich in back-story, supported by summaries of various experiments, bolstered by real statistical concepts instead of dumbing it down to "the average", and keeps itself wrapped in an evolutionary biology framework. And it does all of this without getting overly academic.

For those who lean toward Cosmopolitan and Men's Health, Nettles includes a personality inventory you can self-administer, and it makes the content of the book more personally relevant. Personality is also a quick read (I read through it on two flights between Minneapolis and Salt Lake City). And the book is laced with humor throughout.

For those who prefer academia, Personality is well-referenced and has a comprehensive bibliography and set of appendices. It is solid and honest academic work; it just reads better.

About the only warning I'll make is this: Nettles is a Brit. If you get confused by British spellings, idiom, and geographical references, you may occasionally find yourself scratching your head. But all this tells me is you don't read enough Nick Hornby.

Enjoy! I believe you will.

Daniel Nettle's writing is clear, attractive, and sometimes pleasantly humorous. He takes us through the emerging consensus on the 5 dimensional model of personality, with the genetic explanations, the neurological evidence, and some convincing speculation on the evolutionary reasons for how those dimensions, and the wide variety of scores along them, arose and continue. This is a wonderfully calm and compelling, and very human, book, for the major part of it which covers these aspects. I found, however, the small section on the possible explanations for the non genetically determined aspects of personality oddly frustrating. Nettle examines some potential factors, then demolishes each of them in turn, leaving us with pretty much no explanation. One reason may be that he requires a valid non-genetic factor influencing personality to 'make evolutionary sense', which is a way of ensuring that any candidate factor that passes the test can, hey-presto, be explained by genetics.
The 'bombshell', and it is major, concerns parental influence on personality, but I won't give any plot spoilers here.
His final section, on how to live with your personality once you've got it, is moving, illuminating, and convincing.
A great read for anyone who's either plain curious or looking for solid ground in the sea of 'psycho-babble'.

If you are a fan of evolutionary psychology, be sure to check out this great little book on personality. It has a short personality test (12 questions) that you can take before you dive into the book, which I highly recommend taking. Then you'll learn about each of the "big five" components of personality. Each component is convincingly tied to biological systems in the brain, and the author explains how both high and low scoring individuals in each of the five areas could have thrived as humans evolved.

Daniel Nettle explores the "big five" factor model or OCEAN model of personality. OCEAN is an an acronym that stands for openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. These factors offer a nearly complete description of one's personality.

Five factors describe people in great detail. For instance, people who are extroverts, according to the book, are outgoing, talkative, competitive, enjoy traveling and sex (more than others). Because people's interests clump together, only these factors are necessary to describe people quite well. The OCEAN model supercedes many other peersonality models like Myers-Briggs.

I was impressed because this book is written with great detail and thoughtfulness. It is a _study_ on personality. Nettle investigates each personality descriptor. For instance, people high in neuroticism not only worry more, they also have more bad things happen to them, like higher divorce rates. First-born children are lower in agreeableness. While the book is fascinating, it sometimes reads like a journal article, and I wanted Nettle to lighten up. But, to his credit, the manuscript is thorough.

In the appendix, a simple 12 question test determines one's score on the OCEAN personality test. While it described me accurately, it seemed off when a friend took the test. Free OCEAN personality tests exist on the internet, like [...], which have more questions and provide better analysis of one's personality.

Overall, the book is a great read for people interested in personality. I recommend it. I may read the book a second time.

Nettle also wrote a book titled "Happiness."

People have stable traits that allow us to predict their behavior over time. This much seems to be unchallengeable. We all have friends whose behavior we can predict much more accurately than they can their own.
This leads to two obvious questions: 1) what underlies these life-history patterns we see? 2) why does natural selection preserve such variation when it should select the optimal personality profile and weed the rest out?
Nettle answers both of these questions with aplomb and alacrity. What is underlying personality? Brain wiring. Why doesn't one personality predominate? There are pluses and minuses to each personality. Thus, selective pressures keep diversity.
Take, say, extraversion. Now, you might think being outgoing and pleasure seeking would be an unalloyed benefit from the view of the selfish gene. Indeed, studies have shown that extraverts have more lifetime mates and more EPCs than introversts. Well then, why are we not all extraverts? Simple, it has a cost. Extraverts also go to the hospital more for stupid injuries due to their pleasure seeking hedonistic ways. They live a little on the dangerous side. Every EPC is a risk, especially if the person you are having a liasion with is married! So, it makes sense that we are not all so aroused by the carnal and material pleasures of the world.
I find Nettle's book to be very satisfying. Unlike Tooby & Cosmides, or other evolutionary psychologists, Nettle does not think personalities are stochastic froth over a core of panhuman adaptations. He thinks they are very important adaptations in their own right, and they deserve to be studied as such. It is hard to disagree. Yes, all cars have wheels, transmissions, and engines, but does it make sense to ignore the difference between a Ford F150 and a Ford Escort?

I recommend this book to all personality buffs, or to anybody who just wants to know why they feel the way they do and why their friends are so predictable!

Gone are the old Meyer Briggs personality types. No longer are people thinking or feeling. Science has suggested five new personality types. These are:

* Extraversion
* Neuroticism
* Agreeableness
* Conscientiousness
* Openness

Even extraversion has a subtly different meaning from the old Meyer Brigg's scale. Rather than simply being socially self confident it means the attachment that a person has for new experiences, is social or adventurous. An examination of introversion suggests that rather than shyness being the driver introversion may simply be a lack of interest in new experiences or change. Extroverts will have life experiences which involve things like an interest in travel multiple relationships and a desire to do different things.

Neuroticism is the most self evident of the definitions. It is the degree to which a person suffers from anxiety and negative emotions such as worry and resentment. Nettle makes the point that the various personality types are not only found in humans but also in other animals. He suggests that the personality types are useful in certain situations. Thus guppies will also have traits of extroversion and neuroticism. In some situations such as the lack of predators the odds are with the extrovert non neurotic guppies. They will seek out new feeding grounds and they will thrive. When predators are around extrovert non neurotic guppies become lunch and the introverts survive.

Agreeableness is the extent to which a person is cooperative non-judgemental and good natured. The opposite is irritable abrasive and suspicious. The agreeable can do well in some situations but can be floored in competitive environments were they end up last.

Conscientiousness is the degree of self discipline, preparation attention to detail. This may or may not be good. Conscientiousness can slow one down and lead to inaction. People with some intelligence can often get by with a low conscientiousness quotient. On the other hand you would want your accountant or treating doctor to have it in high amounts.

Openness is the ability to accept or explore new ideas or concepts. The degree to which one is a conformist, imaginative or unimaginative.

The problem with the Meyers Briggs table was that people produce different results over time on whether they fell within the categories. It wasn't scientifically consistent. It would seem that according to the proponents of these new personality types they are empirically verifiable and people have consistent results over time. In addition there is a consistent pattern across cultures.

The book also has a slightly different spin on intelligence. It sees it is a sort of wiring issues. Thus people who are intelligent also tend to have better results in things such as memory and reflexes.

The book has as an appendix a personality test so that you can see how you fit in with the new categories. Quick and easy to read a revelation.

This delightful little book, although deceptively "user-friendly" is still a rigorous "evidenced-based" account of the latest findings in research on personality. In many ways it has done the theoretical spade work that should have been done but is missing in "pop cultural" versions of personality analysis such as those expounded by I. Myers, in her Manual:The Myers-Briggs Indicator; or David Keirsey and Marilyn Bates in their elaboration of the Myers-Briggs categories, "Please Understand Me: Character and Temperament Types;" as well as that of Helen Palmer's "The Enneagram."

Here, in telling us why character matters, Nettles not only gives us a five-factor taxonomy of personalities (wanderers, worriers, controllers, empathizers, and poets) but also the reasons why personalities are different -- connecting these differences back to evolution, natural selection and survival strategies more generally -- and bringing us up to date on existing cognitive, evolutionary, and gnome theories of how our personalities are hardwired into our brains. The analysis thus goes well beyond the theories of Carl Jung upon which most of the pop cultural personality taxonomies cited had been based.

Nettles, defines personality about as rigorously as it can be done: as an internally stable cognitive framework that stretches across a person's life like a blanket. It becomes the recurring thematic patterns, a virtual repertoire of psychological and behavioral strategies that stand in a casual relationship to the individual's specific choices, motivations, reactions, and obstacles faced in the stream of events he encounters over the course of a lifetime.

The author then introduces the science behind the study of personality and explains how we measure it, what the measurements mean, what they predict, as well as why there should be personality variations in the human species in the first place. Since the five factors seem to be "settled" and thus consensus science in the field of psychology, by using them as the centerpiece of his analysis (they are taken up individually in chapetrs 3-7), the author sidesteps the many contentious debates within psychology about the scientific basis of a "construct" called personality.

Thus in a larger sense, the book represents a succinct and "state-of-the-art" summary of what has been learned about personality since the invention and use of the Gnome Project and as seen through the prism of the experimental results of neuroscience (and in particular with the use of such techniques as PET and fMRI scans). What the author discovered is that just as genetics can be linked to disease or responses to drugs, genetic individuality and differences, also can be linked to differences in brain structures, which then can be mapped back into the five concepts defining personality.

Using a rich data base, (which includes a survey and review of existing literature, recent personality studies, including his own accumulated case studies where subjects were tested using the scales and questionnaires based on his five-factor analysis), Nettles finally, dives into evolutionary psychology, explaining in a macro sense, how the population collectively, got to be the way it is, and in what ways natural selection and genes were involved in making that determination. Altogether this book is a virtual renaissance in the study of personality theory. But as rich as it is in theory, it still is not just theory for theory's sake but is deeply rooted in the reality of the personalities the author studied and tested, first hand. As one who has "diddled" in developing a computer program to do personality analysis, this is a rich mother lode and has exceeded my wildest expectations about what the book would be about.

I could not be happier. Five stars, plus.

Scientists have considered psychology to be a very soft science at best and quackery or psychobabble at worst. But psychology is finally making scientific strides with the testable theories generated by evolutionary biology, brain imaging equipment, being able to measure genetic variation between people, and animal studies - critters also exhibit what in humans we call personality traits.

Daniel Nettle has written a book for the public explaining the latest scientific research on personality. He explains how it's measured, what the measures mean or predict, and why we vary in personality traits.

He defines personality as:
* Consistent patterns in our lives across love, career, and friendships, often repeating the same sorts of triumphs or mistakes.
* Even smaller, less significant patterns in everyday life tend to have patterns - how we dress, whether we talk to strangers, etc
* Basically, everyone's nervous system is wired up differently.

Nearly all psychologists agree on a Big Five model of personality dimensions, consolidating decades of research. Before this, different researchers used different varying traits. For example, 4 main types (thinking, feeling, sensing, or intuiting), or just reward vs harm avoidance. Each study had results that appeared to have no relationship to each other.

The five factor model created order out of this mess, all previous studies can be fit into this framework because they either measured one of the big five or a sub-part of one of them, or perhaps a mix of several.

Okay, it's not science entirely yet - to do that, this new approach needs to prove these traits are neurobiologically real, but this framework gives personality psychologists testable hypotheses. Until now, much of it sounded like psychobabble to me, and I do cringe at lumping people into categories.

What makes the big 5 more plausible to me is that we all have all five traits to varying degrees, and we change over time depending on our genetics and our life experiences (which is why twins, even though totally the same genetically, can be quite different).

Here's the list of the Big 5 (high scoring and low scoring descriptions):

1) Extraversion High: Outgoing, enthusiastic Low: Aloof, quiet

2) Neuroticism High: Prone to stress & worry Low: Emotionally stable

3) Conscientiousness High: Organized, self-directed Low: Spontaneous, careless

4) Agreeableness High: Trusting, empathetic Low: Uncooperative, hostile

5) Openness High: Creative, imaginative Low: Practical, conventional
Eccentric

About half of your score is out of your control - genetics is responsible.

These traits have important consequences in life. High neuroticism in either partner is more likely to lead to divorce or an unhappy marriage. Divorce is also likely if the male is low in conscientiousness. Extraverts are the least likely to stay in an unhappy marriage.

Other consequences, such as low agreeableness, have less dire consequences, but will nevertheless affect how a person gets along in the world. These folks are more likely to snap at others and be irritated easily, leading to less satisfying personal relationships and career advancement.

Situations make a difference, extraverts have more casual sex than introverts, probably because introverts are at home and extraverts are at parties, meeting potential partners.

A recurring theme of the book is that while you might think that there's some optimum level of any trait to have, this doesn't appear to be the case or natural selection would make us much more similar. For example, high scoring neurotics are more worried than other people. Why not just be happy all the time?

Nettle says that animals vary in what we could call neuroticism too - some guppies hide if there's a predatory fish in the tank because they come from a stream with predators, and other guppies are fearless because they live in a place with no predatory fish. The fearful guppies outlive the fearless guppies by far if you introduce a predator.

But creatures who spend too much time looking for predators won't get enough to eat and be as healthy as their more relaxed brethren - so there's a constant balancing act going on in nature across neuroticism and all of the other traits. In one situation a trait might be good, in another bad, and so there is never an optimal balance of a particular trait that nature settles on (in evolutionary theory this is called fluctuating selection).

Extraversion

Extraverts are high in sociability but that doesn't mean they have good social relationships - that's predicted by agreeableness. Shyness isn't usually due to low extraversion, but to high neuroticism and anxiety. Someone low on extraversion can do without much social activity and not mind it, often seeming aloof.

Extravert traits: enjoy sex, romance, tend to be ambitious, work hard for fame or money, like active sports, travel, and novelty. They have a lot of positive emotion, with more joy, desire, enthusiasm, and excitement than low scorers. This acts as an incentive, so they're more willing to go the extra mile to a party, event, or date after an exhausting day at work. This doesn't mean low scorers on the extrovert scale are negative or sad, they're just emotionally flatter, which makes them less likely to get out and about, because there's less reward in it for them.

Extraverts brains even operate differently - with higher responsiveness in several brain areas than low scorers.

Nettle speculates at the end of each chapter about the advantages and disadvantages of each trait. So who wouldn't want to be an extrovert? Nettle says that perhaps their predilection for dangerous sports leads to earlier deaths, and more breakups of marriages from affairs, which puts their children at risk with step-parents.

Within a marriage, if your partner is a higher scorer than you, they'll want to do things that seem pointless and expensive whether it's buying a sports car, wanting to go to far more parties than you do, or taking up a wild new hobby. If you score higher, then you'll feel disappointed (s)he doesn't want to do as much as you do or get enthusiastic about your latest passion. Nettle concludes "Don't worry. It's just how they are wired up".

Neurotics

Scoring high means being more affected by the tribulations of everyday life, feeling more fear, anxiety, shame, guilt and sadness than most people. Neurotics are more likely to have depression, anxiety, eating, personality, and obsessive-compulsive disorders, phobias, PTSD, schizophrenia, insomnia, and headaches.

Sadness may be useful -- to the extent it slows us down enough to re-think our plans if they've failed, and make better plans for the future, and signal to others we need support and comfort.

Why on earth would such an unhappy trait be selected for? We're probably all wired to look for dangerous predators, loss of social position, or the risk of social ostracism - death sentences for most of our ancestors. But Nettle says that neurotics are like overly sensitive smoke detectors, spending a lot of time looking for dangers. Chances are the ancestors of neurotics worried a lot, but in the end, were less likely to make a fatal error than their happier brethren, and avoided being eaten or making the leaders of the tribe angry and being expelled from the group.

High scorers tend to direct their negative emotions towards themselves, leading to low self-esteem. Neurotics think `it was my fault', everybody hates me', or 'I will never succeed' in reaction to bad events. A high scorer is constantly wondering if (s)he did the right thing and often changes their identity and goals throughout life.

High scorers fear dangers faced in the past - rejection, illness, open spaces, strangers, and unspoken negative intentions of others. In the long run they have a slightly increased risk for heart disease, gastric disorders, and hypertension. They have less satisfactory marriages and work lives. Their negative emotions can bring about the very result they fear, such as a wife who worries and nags her husband due to her fear he'll leave may give him reason to do just that.

Nettle posits this trait is selected for to protect us, and the threshold of what's appropriate to worry about is constantly changing depending on what sort of world we're born into. Perhaps those who score low have a higher mortality rate because they're not worried enough.

Although this trait usually harms careers, a neurotic open person might write as a form of therapy. Their fear of failing motivates them to strive (as long as they aren't too disorganized or feel too awful to function). Nettle writes that neurotics "see the problems of the world starkly, in all their equivocal complexity".

He concludes "High scorers should not just wish their worry away, but, just like any other trait, understand the strength, sensitivity, striving, and insight that it may give them. There are niches in the world where these are very valuable. They do come at a cost of often awful suffering through many days of their lives. The art is to manage these costs, to live with them, and to limit them so they do not become overwhelming".

Controllers

High scorers are conscientious and high scores predict better than any other trait occupational success in any kind of work, as well as living longer - up to 30% more than someone who scores low.

Low scorers have impulse control problems and are more likely to succumb to one or more of gambling, drug dependencies, irresponsible behavior, law breaking, and antisocial personality disorder. They're more impulsive, spontaneous, and have weak wills. A low score in this trait is the most likely predictor of addiction problems.

Addictions happen when a person can't stop a once-rewarding behavior. There may be no euphoria involved, because their brains have become so used to the addictive substance. They just can't stop their habit.

Agreeableness

Agreeable people can sort out complex descriptions of how people are feeling. Nettle gives these two examples:
Tom hoped that Jim would believe that Susan thought that Edward wanted to marry Jenny (4th level nested description).
John though that Penny thought that Tom wanted Penny to find out whether Sheila believed that John knew what Susan wanted to do (5th level nested description).


It turns out that people who do best at understanding the last sentence tend to have a larger network of friends than those who don't do well. Young children with this skill are perceived by their teachers as getting along well with other kids.

Empathizers pay more attention to the mental states of others and tend to be helpful, social, warm trusting behavior. They tend to have good relationships, good social support, and rarely fall out with or insult others. They're quick to forgive, and slow to anger even with people who deserve it. Often they end up in careers as counselors, social workers, or volunteer work.

Those who score low are less likely to trust or help others, can be cold or antagonistic, have less harmonious relationships, and at the very bottom, psychopathy.

Psychopaths are egocentric, dishonest, feel no remorse, can't love, and tend to use others for their own ends. They have no qualms about being aggressive. Of the three traits, empathy for others is the most important in preventing psychopathy.

But to be a full-blown monster, you'd also need to score low on conscientiousness and anxiety. Without empathy, the person still might not do harm because they're not impulsive and will realize the likely consequences of their actions. If he's also low in neuroticism, he'll feel no fear - now all the barriers are down and this can result in some very bad people. Fortunately it's rare for someone to be very low across all three traits.

Autistics are not psychopaths. Although they have trouble with social relationships, and struggle to understand the mental state of others, they tend to be helpful to others in distress. Psychopaths can predict others mental states just fine and use that knowledge to manipulate and deceive.

Nettle speculates that being a good group member is a very important trait - being ostracized from the group in the past could be a death sentence.

He doesn't discuss why psychopathy would exist, but I've read elsewhere that psychopaths are the only people unafraid in battle, and our history is one of constant skirmishes, so this trait would be useful throughout most of history if these people were channeled into the military.

Being too agreeable tends to lessen success a bit, since you're spending more time than average maintaining a wide network of relationships, which takes time away from work, or lessens the ambition to rise in a career since that isn't as important as friendships. Nettle refers to two studies that showed nice guys finish last. Some ruthlessness is required to reach the highest positions in corporations perhaps.

Which brings up the conundrum of finding an ideal partner - women would like someone who's kind and empathic, but also someone successful - and these traits don't usually coincide. As Nettle puts it "the kind of person who could give you a glittering lifestyle is quite likely not the kind of person you would wish to share such a life with".

One of the most documented and proven differences between men and women score higher in Agreeableness than men - the average man scores lower than 70% of women. When women are given testosterone, it reduces their empathetic behavior.

Openness

High scorers are more likely to read books, and go to art galleries, theater, and music events than the average person. This trait is correlated with intelligence, but it's not the same as intelligence. People who score high tend to be imaginative and pursue artistic endeavors.

In several pages of writing about Ginsberg's poem "Howl", Nettle conveys the trait of openness with a bit of poetry himself. He thinks that those who score high in openness have fewer, more permeable filters that allow broader associations. Those high in openness are more likely to challenge social norms, try out many different jobs, philosophies, and lifestyles. They also have a strong sense of spirituality, or even supernatural belief.

Often they have a schizotype personality - they're of sound mind but more psychotic than the rest of the population. They might hear voices, have perceptual disturbances where everything seems strange or significant, magical ideas (supernatural forces, feelings of telepathy). Or they might have unusual experiences and aberrant thoughts and even some beliefs similar to those of schizophrenics, but not have other aspects of schizophrenia like emotional flatness or social withdrawal and lack of motivation. High-scorers are more likely to have psychosis-like experiences. They tend to be politically liberal and avoid orthodox institutions, with strong idiosyncratic supernatural or spiritual beliefs. They're more likely to experiment with exotic religions or creeds, New Age ideas, or believe in the paranormal. They're more likely to have beliefs that run against the mores of their time and less governed by taboos or social acceptability. They're relatively susceptible to hypnosis.

Advantages: "Geoffrey Miller argued in his book, "The Mating Mind", that verbal creativity became a potent mate-selection trait. ...Individuals would tend to select mates displaying the quality of their brains through unusually complex verbal and symbolic" ways of writing or speaking, driving up general intelligence in the population, as well as openness.

How we come to have our personalities

Except for genetics, studies with identical twins, fraternal twins, and siblings have shown that parents have very little effect on our personalities. In normal households that is, clearly an abusive or violent upbringing might have lasting effects.

"This is a stunning finding, and it has caused quite a stir. It is probably the most important discovery in psychology in recent decades, not least because it is counter-intuitive and overturns many entrenched beliefs. Out must go all simple notions about how cold mothers or absent fathers or large families or farm living shape our personalities".

Then he knocks out birth order and prenatal effects.

The main thing that seems to make a difference is your own traits:

"The extent to which one should be neurotic about sources of harm depends in part on how fleet of foot one is, how good one's immune system is, etc. Whether one should pursue risky rewards depends a lot on whether one is strong and attractive. The former makes one able to cope if things go wrong, whilst the latter is a big determinant of success if the rewards pursued are social or sexual ones. Whether one needs to be very conscientious in working hard at problems depends in part how smart one is; very quick-witted people can probably prepare on the fly. Basically, it makes a lot of sense that evolution would have built into us a capacity to modulate our personalities in response to our health, intelligence, size, and attractiveness".

There is some evidence for this - extraverts are more symmetrical, implying fewer mutations or environmental stressors during development, and they're perceived as being more attractive. Men increase in extraversion when they're tall, though this isn't the case with women. Large men also seem to be slightly less nice, on average, perhaps because large men can get away wit breaking rules.

Conclusion

All of us vary in each of the 5 dimensions, just like we do with weight, height, or intelligence. Nettle posits that if we could measure people with ten distinct points along each of the five personality scales, there'd be 105, or 100,000 possible personalities. So even though life would be much simpler if we could wedge everyone into a few categories, we'd be wearing blinders to the true complexity of our fellow human beings.

If you took the 100,000 personalities literally, there'd be 1,500 other women just like me in the USA. But they won't be like me.

Nettle speculates that though they'll have more similar lives and relationships than a random sample, their lives will be very different because they've all found different ways of expressing the traits they have. There are many ways of expressing extroversion.

Even more importantly, there's the level of one's subjective life story. We all tell our story of who we are, what we're doing, and why differently in our personal stories. This unique narration has a considerable effect on identity. Nettle gives the examples of someone who never married could either tell this story as a tragedy or a comedy. Another who was never successful in a career, but had great varied experiences could either tell their story as one of failure or how they'd escaped the rat race and had a much better time.

Which brings up the topic of change - what if we don't want to be shy worried irresponsible hostile conformists?

Luckily, as we age, all of us tend to get slightly more agreeable and conscientious, and slightly less open, extroverted, and neurotic. We have the power to change ourselves, to stop destructive or dangerous behaviors.

It's easier when the changes we try to make go along with our nature, like an extrovert switching from riding a motorcycle to driving a sports car. But even an introverted person can change themselves against the grain, by finding work or social activities that involve being around lots of people.

And above all, we can spin our own personal stories to see our lives in a better light.

Alas, Nettle says, those who most need to do this - those high in neuroticism -- have the hardest time seeing their lives in anything but a negative light (though they're more realistic than low scorers). Those most likely to be unhappy about their personalities tend to neurotics who infuse everything with suffering. He recommends neurotics try meditation, exercise, yoga, cognitive behavior therapy, and medications to work around their fears and anxieties.

Nettle concludes by reminding the reader that no one should regret the constellation of personality traits they have - all have their advantages and disadvantages, which he has illustrated throughout the book. Though these speculations about why a trait might be good or bad given different environments is the least scientific part of the book - but then there's still much to be learned, and we can hope this new grouping of traits will lead to better testing.

I was not able to tell from reading the book if this new "big 5" concept was a major revolutionary shift within the personality field and adopted by the vast majority of researchers. Wikipedia says that "The model is considered to be the most comprehensive empirical or data-driven enquiry into personality".

Wikipedia gives these main criticisms:
1) This is not a theory, just data-driven descriptions of traits
2) Not all traits are included (i.e. Religiosity, Honesty, Thriftiness, Conservativeness, Sense of humor, etc)
3) There are 3, or 18, or 7 factors, not 5

So it looks like personality research has a long way to go to reach more scientific credibility. Bottom line, this book was useful to me, because it stated more clearly than any book I've read what it's like to be weak or strong in these dimensions, and I recognized myself and so many others in the descriptions - it's somehow satisfying to know that I share these traits, both good and bad, with so many others, and to have another tool to understand others with.

I also liked Nettle strongly emphasizing throughout the book that there is no best profile to have, not even being average in all of them. Your best bet is to make the best of the hand you've been dealt - maximize your strengths and minimize your weaknesses. Your basic dispositions are a resource, not a curse.

This book is a superbly written and lucidly organized exposition of the current psychological understanding of basic personality traits. Nettle tells you what they are; he provides neurological or genetic background where appropriate; he theorizes about the adaptive value of these traits in human populations. His discussions of the relative contributions of nature and nurture are especially illuminating.

"Personality" is so well-written that it is easy to read quickly. Regardless of the speed with which you devour it, I recommend a second reading, to appreciate all of the information which the author weaves so skillfully into his fluid account.

Highly recommended to anyone who wants to learn some basic, current, but by no means oversimplified psychology.

I really enjoyed Daniel Nettle's previous book, Happiness: The Science behind Your Smile, so I knew I had to read this one as well. Here is the premise: "This book is about the psychology of personality. I aim to vindicate the idea that people have enduring personality dispositions which partly predict what they will do, and which stem from the way their nervous systems are wired up. I also wish to introduce the science behind the study of personality - how we measure personality, what the measures mean, what they predict, and why personality variation exists in the first place."

Just as Nettle did in Happiness, he takes an evolutionary psychologists approach towards explaining why variation exists within the classic Five-Factor personalities. Each Chapter, from 3 through 7, is devoted to explaining each of the traits (just remember this helpful trick OCEAN = Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism). What's more, Nettle believes that there might actually be Neural Correlates for why these five, and only these five, exist in the first place: "Thus, it can no longer be said that the big five personality traits are simply descriptions of behavior or self-image. It is very likely they will turn out to be shorthand for suites of differences in neural structure and function across multiple brain regions." I thought this was a very interesting idea.

In sum, I don't believe there are many books like Nettles out there so I would definitely pick this book up. It's very remarkable! I also appreciated Nettles chapter entitled, "The Other Half" which addresses the non-genetic components to personality formation (Twin studies - Identical twins and Fraternal twins, parenting styles, etc.) and environmental influences - it really served to balance out the book. Also included at the end of the book is the Newcastle Personality Assessor (NPA) which is fun to complete so you can see where your personality falls in the full OCEAN spectrum.