The Shape of Personality

Kristen at mediatinker has suggested an interesting bit of introspection, and with my birthday just passed a little introspection seems like a good idea.

Her concept runs like this: Charting the Big 5 Personality Traits on a spiderweb graph against age should form a conceptual shape revealing your personality changes over time.

She admits that it has flaws, but it is a work in progress, and one that intrigues me right now, so I thought I'd give it a try.

In case you aren't familiar, here is a rundown of the Big 5:
* Openness - appreciation for art, emotion, adventure, unusual ideas, imagination, curiosity, and variety of experience.
* Conscientiousness - a tendency to show self-discipline, act dutifully, and aim for achievement; planned rather than spontaneous behaviour.
* Extraversion - energy, positive emotions, surgency, and the tendency to seek stimulation and the company of others.
* Agreeableness - a tendency to be compassionate and cooperative rather than suspicious and antagonistic towards others.
* Neuroticism - a tendency to experience unpleasant emotions easily, such as anger, anxiety, depression, or vulnerability; sometimes called emotional instability.

With that in mind, here's my chart.

Openness The sample openness items are like a description of my life! This is by FAR my strongest personality trait I think. At least the one that tends most towards my positive attributes. I rated myself fairly high at all points in my life for this trait, but highest in my 20's when I was in art school and at my highest creative output. I was also swimming in ideas at that time and constantly searching for new outlets and concepts. I waffled just a bit on the rank for the present, almost dropping it to a 7 because in some ways my current creative output, and my quest to be creative has diminished a bit. Signs for the next year are looking good though. With my comic book project and a few other new creative outlets growing... it didn't feel quite right to drop it just yet.

Conscientiousness
So let's follow that up with the trait that reflects most negatively on me. I mean, look at these traits! I'm messy. Chaotic in my lifestyle. I can't keep a schedule to save my life. Yeah... bad. I've gotten somewhat better about it over the years, peaking (if you want to call it that) during the period that I was living with BFE Michelle probably. It will likely go up again if/when I ever move in with Kid Flash. But for now... low.

Extroversion I'm just on the positive side of the fence with this one. The traits are certainly not my strongest. I'm not the most outgoing. I am awkward in social situations with strangers or people I don't know well, and it has only gotten progressively worse over the years. That ability to chit-chat and interact with strangers is something that I've long envied in other people.
Agreeableness Again, a fairly strong set of traits for me. I think this is the area of my life where I've fluctuated the least. I've always been a fairly empathic person, with the ability to understand other's feelings almost to a degree stronger than my ability to understand my own. I'm more likely to cry when someone wins on a game show than I am for something that happens to me personally. At the same time I have a tendency to stick my foot in my mouth sometimes, and to insult people without meaning to, so I can't rank myself TOO highly here.

Neuroticism I'm not neurotic. I don't worry. I don't stress. I'm even keeled. I don't get depressed easily. I had a slight boost in that towards the end of grad school which is why I ranked that era slightly higher, but all in all, I've never been much for excessively dark moods or worry.

As an exercise... an interesting one. I agree with Kristen that I'm not sure this is the ideal way to measure this. So after some tinkering in Photoshop here is another look at the same chart.

Shifting the traits to the flat sides of the chart and coloring in wide areas shows me something more like a progression, where I as stronger personality wise at certain points in my life, and where I was weaker. The 10 Year Blue is completely subsumed, as I guess you'd anticipate, personalities become stronger over time. And the Extroversion trait shows the expansion ad retraction that I've mentioned, peaking at the 20 Year Old Purple, an dthen retracting by decade to the current green. It is now easier to see that I was both more neurotic and more conscientious in my 30's (yellow) and both of those traits have relaxed as I've aged through them.

1 Response to "The Shape of Personality"

  • Kristen Says:

    Clever axis shifting and solidifying the colors. I want to try doing small multiples of filled shapes to see the definitely shape of each decade. This has a lot of interesting potential as art, if not psychiatry. :-)