Personality Trait Instance Archive

[a327ex]

I've found myself thinking more and more about big 5 personality traits this year, as I've found more and more situations that can be trivially explained by them. In fact, I would say that most situations that have to do with human beings interacting can be better understood by having a personality trait based analysis applied to them. Given that that's the case, I've decided to document all instances of behavior that can be explained by personality traits that I keep finding randomly. This post will be updated with more instances as they happen over time.

2020/11/09 - 4chan, Trump and Contrarianism

With the current election drama going on and seeing how /pol/ has been reacting to it, I started thinking a lot about how contrarianism actually operates. People who are contrarians are low in agreeableness, especially politeness, and high in openness. Their low politeness makes it so that they don't have any respect for authority, traditions or norms created or imposed by other people, and their high openness means that they're always interested in new ideas and concepts.

Out of all well known social media sites out there, 4chan is probably the one with a community that matches that personality trait combination the most. Ever since it got started it has been a wildly contrarian and unpolite website, and also wildly creative. The entire Internet was populated by people like this initially, as those people are the ones who will be more open to try out new things that seem goofy or not accepted by society at large (if you're too young and you don't know, there was a stigma in common society against the Internet for maybe a decade or two before normies started using it more).

The mechanics of a community like this are interesting to think about. Generally it starts with some new set of behavior that is interesting/funny, so people start doing it more and more. This could be a meme image, a phrase, some kind of activity on the Internet, whatever. It gets more popular and more popular, but as soon as people outside the community start doing that activity, the contrarian nature kicks in and suddenly it is deemed as uncool and it starts getting made fun of relentlessly, until it stops happening inside the community at all. To some extent this process happens with every group, as people change interests and what was once cool naturally becomes less interesting. But it's more obvious and more pronounced here.

One good example of this is how /pol/ has been reacting to Trump (supposedly) losing. A good portion of users, who are contrarians at heart, are relentlessly making fun of Trump supporters in the board, even though they themselves likely wanted Trump to win as well. Why? Because that's what their contrarian nature leads them to do. It's very funny to see people so invested in Trump that they can't really take a few jokes. What's more interesting though, is that after a few days of this relentless "cope posting" (saying "cope" to anything Trump supporters say), you have a counter wave of "bidenbros....?" posts whenever any kind of positive news in regards to Trump's chances appears. In reality, there are almost no true Biden supporters in the board, it's just Trump supporters having fun with each other, but it's curious to see how this contrarianism plays out in real-time in contentious situations like this.

These kinds of dynamics, in my opinion, make for a very healthy community. One of the problems with most communities out there is that they're not really self-reinventing. Once the community is established, people in it have to be polite and respect each other, except that when you have politeness you also limit creativity, and so new cultural artifacts (be they memes, phrases, activities, whatever) have a harder time being created, which makes the community stagnant and over time makes it more likely to die. A number of boards, due to extreme moderation, have been essentially killed out of their contrarian nature and as a consequence nothing really interesting or new happens from them. A good example of this is /v/, which used to be a board that would find new cool games all the time, but now they're always lagging behind the rest of the Internet in terms of having threads up about new, relatively unknown, interesting games.

I'm not really sure if I have any point here, other than to ponder about the mechanics of low politeness and high openness communities... I guess another point is that it's not surprising that 4chan at large would support Trump, given that he is an extremely unpolite character that seems to be fairly high in openness too. A contrarian type of character like Trump winning the presidency in 2016 was deemed impossible, yet it happened anyway, so that's basically contrarian porn.

As I said in this article, if I were American I would have definitely voted for Trump in 2016, but wouldn't have voted for him this year because of his handling of COVID (and because I've come to conclude that democracy is pointless also, but that's another story). Still, because Trump himself is a character that is very close to me personality wise, I can't help but sort of root for him, even though I wasn't paying attention to the elections at all and only started looking into it during election night to see who would win. It's just a natural sort of need to want to see the contrarian succeed at being a contrarian. And it's even more interesting to see what would happen if he won now, after already having essentially lost. It would be 2016 levels of contrarian porn times 1000.

2020/10/14 - Traits needed for geniuses other than IQ

[8:49 AM] adn: https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1316083185076371457

Zero HP Lovecraft 🛡 (@0x49fa98)
"It is also clear that intelligence, while necessary for genius, is not sufficient. This is obvious since there are far more people with very high IQs than there are geniuses."

[8:49 AM] adn: https://twitter.com/hasturized/status/1316097280923987968

hastur (@hasturized)
@trycypress @0x49fa98 According to John Cleese (see "Creativity in Management") creativity is a mode of operating where one is open to new perspectives, patterns, and novel combinations. Openness, I would argue, is the drive to inhabit that mode. IQ enables the traversal of idea space with speed.

This is a fairly simple observation that IQ is not all that matters. Most people who have higher than average IQ intuitively understand this, because they generally tend to have problems with discipline, which is mainly commanded by the trait conscientiousness. IQ is very lightly correlated with openness, so people with higher IQs will naturally be a bit higher in openness, but not always.

In general I agree with both tweets above, but I don't think that openness is all that matters. You definitely need openness to be considered a "genius", since you need to come up with new ideas that are actually useful (and that's defined as creativity). And you definitely need a high IQ to traverse that space of ideas faster. But I would argue that you also need a good mix of fairly high industriousness, not too high orderliness, and fairly low politeness.

Industriousness is one half of the conscientiousness trait, and it pertains to how much discipline you have, roughly. Being higher in this will let you get more work done and I think that most geniuses get a lot more work done than most people, despite people thinking that all they do is have that One Great Idea and that's all.

Orderliness is the other half of conscientiousness and it pertains to how much you value things being organized, in their place, tidy. Someone high in this will be a very process oriented person that likes the more procedural aspects of life. I personally think that this is a bad trait to be high in if we're talking about geniuses, since it contradicts openness. You can think about openness vs. orderliness as no borders vs. borders. And to generate new and interesting ideas you need concepts to have no borders between them, so that they can be mixed and matched more freely. Ordered processes hinder that and so they go against useful idea generation.

Finally, politeness is the half of agreeableness that has to do with respect to rules and authority. To come up with new ideas that are useful you need to be willing to go where other people aren't going, and to do that you can't be bound by the constraints set by other people. I would say that universities are a terrible place for geniuses to exist in, as they're very ordered and constrained places, going completely against the spirit needed for new useful ideas to be generated. I personally think this is why not many new advances in technology have been happening over the last decades and why our society is experienced essentially an early form of technological decline.

Update: this section of this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2nG7-eXxko&t=42m07s adds to the last paragraph above. This series of tweets does the same https://twitter.com/palladiummag/status/1317554070949818368.

2020/10/11 - Confusion between agreeableness and openness in individuals who are high in both

[3:11 AM] ☕: @adn https://twitter.com/Kearsey_Morton/status/1314853844308824065

Gravitational Waves 🌊🌊🌊30-50 ANTIFA Rogue Waves (@Kearsey_Morton)
@GeneralAkAbA @pcgamer If you don't even want to experience a game from a different perspective, when it's risk free, what are the chances that you are interested in others point of views in real life? You know, showing empathy and other stuff that really matters?

[3:12 AM] ☕: is this train of thought high openness low agreeableness or high openness high agreeableness
[3:12 AM] adn: people very casually confuse openness with empathy
[3:12 AM] adn: even other personality tests sometimes have them together
[3:13 AM] ☕: isnt empathy an agreeableness thing
[3:13 AM] ☕: or at least, placing an importance on it
[3:13 AM] adn: trying out other games when its risk free = openness, showing empathy = agreeableness
[3:13 AM] adn: theyre not correlated to one another
[3:13 AM] ☕: yes
[3:13 AM] ☕: this is why i'm asking
[3:13 AM] ☕: i can tell it's high openness but is it related to agreeableness
[3:14 AM] adn: generally people on the left who you see online will tend to be high openness and high agreeableness
[3:14 AM] adn: like this guy probably is
[3:14 AM] ☕: or is this maybe the cause of the problem, a high openness individual mistaking their own openness for empathy/agreeableness :thinkEyes: maybe this is the key
[3:14 AM] adn: so he just thinks that trying out new things is the same ability as being compassionate
[3:14 AM] adn: since hes high in both
[3:14 AM] ☕: they have been led to believe that openness is empathy
[3:14 AM] ☕: interesting

This is a simple instance of a very common confusion people have, which is that openness to new experiences is correlated to empathy. Generally people who are high in both traits will seem to think they're the same thing, since they're both generally positive emotions. But they're not the same!

The drive to inhabit the mode of being open to new perspectives, patterns and novel combinations is captured by the openness trait. The drive to deeply care about other people's feelings, to sacrifice your own well being for them, to truly share their pain (compassion means literally "shared pain") is captured by the agreeableness trait. Those are fairly distinct things that have little to do with each other other than being considered positive emotions (both have big drawbacks which are generally ignored by society at large though).

You can be high in openness and low in agreeableness, like me, and that makes me a creative type of person interested in new ideas and experiences, but it also makes me enjoy conflict, look out for my own interests above anyone else's and essentially be a contrarian if I see an opening for it. You can be high in agreeableness and low in openness, which would you make someone not very interested in trying out new things that often, but you'd also be a highly compassionate and caring person. The point is, they're not the same things and it's important to understand that they aren't.

2019/07/14 - Don't do psychotropics if you're an indie developer and you have trouble finishing games

Indie game developers are already selected for high openness, given that openness is the personality trait most related to creativity and interest in aesthetics and ideas. The video above mentions that taking psychedelics has the effect of increasing someone's levels of openness by one standard deviation permanently after one year of taking the drug once, which is an absolutely huge increase. And so if you have an indie game developer, and you have them take psychedelics, chances are that you'll have a person who is now in the very top percentiles for openness compared to the rest of the population.

The way this manifests itself in real life is that indie developers who are higher in openness will be more likely to be hyper interested in the discovery part of making a game, but once the game is established enough, their inherent need to be working on something new (driven by high openness) will override everything else and they'll find themselves unable to see any projects through completion and will be stuck in a loop of always starting a new game. This is a well known problem among indie developers and it happens with many people who are just naturally high in openness without the involvement of drugs.

So my idea is that if indie developers want to be more likely to finish games, they should avoid taking psychedelics, especially if they can already notice in themselves this tendency to keep trying out new things all the time and never committing to a single one.