The Big Five: A Holistic Approach to Understanding Personality

Most psychological (and coaching) approaches developed in the 20th century by leading psychologists such as Adler, Horney, Fromm, Erikson, Rogers, Maslow, Kelly, Rotter, Bandura are not considering dispositional traits. They are mainly interested with Characteristic Adaptations, a concept explained in the article. Others were interested in narratives and their meaning when working with people. McAdams and Pals (2006) explains the importance of embedding a wholistic approach to understanding personality (for coaches and therapists). They explain that personality is conceived as a combination of evolutionary-designed dispositional traits, characteristic adaptations, and self-defining life narratives situated in cultural and social contexts (McAdams & Pals, 2006). Their approach is very insightful, so I thought I’d summarize their key points.

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Personality Traits

The 5 Factor Model organizes individual differences in social and emotional life into five factorial categories, labelled extraversion, neuroticism, conscientiousness, agreeableness, and openness to experience (Goldberg, 1993).

• Extraverted people are generally high in energy, sociability, and warmth. They are enthusiastic and dominant, usually with high self-con?dence, assertiveness, and positive emotion. Extraversion is also positively correlated with divergent thinking and everyday creativity.
• Neuroticism encompasses traits such as anxiety, depression, and negative affect in general, as well as self-consciousness, impulsivity, irritability, and vulnerability.
• Conscientiousness regroups traits such as self-discipline, dutifulness, dependability, achievement striving, preference for planned, organized behaviour, and deliberation (low impulsivity).
• Agreeableness is typically de?ned using traits such as compliance, cooperativeness, modesty, tendermindedness, altruism, and straightforwardness. Openness to experience is highly correlated with high imagination, aesthetic sensitivity, preference for variety, intellectual curiosity, and unconventional thinking.
• Openness to experience is sometimes called intellect and is related to similar traits, such as artistic imagination, introspective re?ection, and intellectual knowledge. Other authors also include independence and nonconformity in openness.

These traits articulate broad variations in human functioning that are recognizable, in part, for their evolutionary significance, they are stable over time, and their psychobiological underpinnings and efficacy is predicting significant behavioural trends and life outcomes (Matthews et al., 2003; Wiggins, 2003). ?Traits are generally viewed as broad dimensions of individual differences between people, accounting for interindividual consistency and continuity in behaviour, and characterise the overall style of a person’s adjustment to and engagement with the social world. People's traits are helpful when the following information is considered about an individual: Are they socially dominant (extraverted)? Are they inclined to be negative, moody, and unstable (neuroticism)? Are they likely to be friendly and cooperative (agreeableness)? Can they be trusted and counted on for their commitment to work (conscientiousness)? Are they open to change and learning (openness to experience)? The Big Five factors seem to address the big questions that are likely to arise in the socially intensive patterns of group life that human beings have evolved to live (Goldberg, 1993).

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Characteristic Adaptations

Beyond dispositional traits, characteristic adaptations affect human behaviour via a wide range of motivational, social–cognitive, and developmental adaptations contextualized in time, place, and/or social role. Characteristic adaptations include motives, goals, plans, strategies, values, virtues, tasks, and other aspects of human individuality that are driven by motivational, social–cognitive, and developmental concerns (McAdams & Pals, 2006). Characteristic adaptations influence people's values, what they deem desirable, what they seek out, what they want and avoid, and how they develop plans, goals, and programs for their lives. They also explain how people think about and cope with the challenges they face. Hence, characteristic adaptations are what psychologists today address through research and theory. Characteristic adaptations are characteristic because they reflect the individual's enduring psychological core and help the individual fit into the ever-changing social environment. Characteristic adaptations and configurations vary tremendously across cultures, families, and portions of the lifespan (McCrae & Costa, 1999).

Most psychological approaches developed in the 20th century, including behavioural, cognitive, humanistic, and more, are mainly concerned with characteristic adaptations, as they are more implicated in situationally anchored personality processes and everyday personality dynamics than traits, and hence, they are more likely to change over time and through therapy than do traits (McAdams & Pals, 2006). For example, Cantor (1990) distinguished between the “having” side of personality (traits) and the “doing” side (characteristic adaptations), which is most directly implicated in the dynamics of goal-directed, cognitively mediated, role-anchored, and/or developmentally informed everyday behaviour. In summary characteristic adaptation refer to specific patterns of behavior that are influenced both by dispositional traits and by situational variables (McCrae & Costa, 1999).

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Narrative and Culture

??????????? Culture, society, and the environmental arrangements of everyday life make up the more immediate, proximal contexts within which individual lives find their characteristic designs and likely shape the phenotypic expression of traits (Roberts & Caspi, 2003). The expression of extraversion differs between Japanese and Americans, as culture provides demand characteristics and displays rules for the behavioural expression of traits (McAdams & Pals, 2006).

The sociologist Giddens (2013) argued that under cultural modernity’s complex social and psychological conditions, a person’s identity is found in the capacity to keep a particular narrative going. Narrative identity is an internalized and evolving narrative of the self that incorporates the reconstructed past and the imagined future into a coherent whole that provides the person’s life with some degree of unity, purpose, and meaning. It is the story of the person who tries to “keep going” (Giddens, 2013).

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The combined approach for understanding personality

If dispositional traits sketch the outline and characteristic adaptations fill in the details of human individuality, then narrative identities give individual lives their unique and culturally anchored meanings. A full accounting of a person’s life requires an examination of the unique patterning of dispositional traits, characteristic adaptations, and life narratives that characterize that life, all grounded ultimately in the evolutionary demands of the species and, at the same time, complexly influenced by culture (McAdams & Pals, 2006).

Although ignored by most psychological and coaching approaches, traits are extremely important in understand a person’s psychic, for example a person that is not identifying and considering their traits might focusing on the wrong career goals and while they might achieve them, they would still be frustrated and unhappy. Beyond the dispositional traits, Characteristic adaptations spell out many of the details of psychological individuality as contextualized in time, situations, and social roles. Goals, coping strategies, values, beliefs, relationships, and other motivational, developmental, and social–cognitive versions of characteristic adaptations are activated in response to everyday social demands. The psychosocial construction of narrative identity moves personality from broad trends (dispositional traits) and specific responses to daily life demands (characteristic adaptations) to the challenge of making meaning out of one’s life. Lastly, culture influences the development of traits, adaptations, and life narratives by providing display rules for the phenotypic expression of trait tendencies, influencing the content and timing of characteristic adaptations, and providing the canonical narrative forms out of which people make meaning of their lives (McAdams & Pals, 2006).

An approach for working with people via coaching or therapy must account for people's traits, their characteristic adaptation and narratives in the contexts of their culture. Not accounting for all of these dimensions when working with a person is like trying to fix a flat tyre by only examining the car’s engine. Psychologists, therapists and coaches are invited by McAdams and Pals (2006) to include all these dimensions in research and development of therapeutic and coaching frameworks.

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References

• Cantor, N. (1990). From thought to behavior: "Having" and "doing" in the study of personality and cognition. American Psychologist, 45(6), 735-750. https://doi.org/10.1037//0003-066x.45.6.735
• Giddens, A. (2013). Modernity and self-identity: Self and society in the late modern age. John Wiley & Sons.
• Goldberg, L. R. (1993). The structure of phenotypic personality traits. American Psychologist, 48(1), 26-34. https://doi.org/10.1037//0003-066x.48.1.26
• Kluckhohn, C., & Murray, H. A. (1953). Personality in Nature, Society, and culture. Knopf.
• McCrae, R. R., & Costa, P. T., Jr. (1999). A Five-Factor theory of personality. In L. Pervin & O. John (Eds.), Handbook of personality: Theory and research (pp. 139 –153). New York: Guilford Press.
• Matthews, G., Deary, I. J., & Whiteman, M. C. (2003). Personality traits. Cambridge University Press.
• McAdams, D. P., & Pals, J. L. (2006). A new big five: Fundamental principles for an integrative science of personality. The American Psychologist, 61(3), 204–217. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.61.3.204
• Roberts, B. W., & Caspi, A. (2003). Understanding Human Development, 183-214. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-0357-6_9
• Wiggins, J. S. (2003). Paradigms of personality assessment: An interpersonal Odyssey. Journal of Personality Assessment, 80(1), 11-18. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327752jpa8001_08

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