Monday, March 5, 2012

Personality traits

In looking through some of the terms used to describe personality traits, I found it difficult to assign any concretely to myself. While looking through them, I wondered how subjects were able to honestly attribute any of them to people they claimed to know well. It's easy to say that we know people without taking into account how we know these people. A person can pretend to be considerate or cooperative in order to seem agreeable for their own means. In fact it's not out of the ordinary to act out of our comfort zone if only to fit in. Work places are a good example of misconstrued perceptions we may have of people. Fellow co-workers can seem kind and organized but if we were to take a look at their home or life, we might see a different picture. It's also interesting to note that these traits are considered stable over time, despite the situation. The only way to be entirely sure, in my opinion is if an intense study were enacted, taking place over the course of a longer length of time as opposed to a few minutes. Perhaps a closer estimation to the personality of a person could be assigned and behavior patterns could be correctly predicted. However, that isn't to say that situations couldn't affect personality traits. The Stanford Prison experiment proves that. 

Article can be found here.

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