Making the Connection: Strategies to Build Effective Personal Relationships (Collection) (69 page)

1. Remember our common humanity and the way personalities develop.

2. Make a Big Five profile and notice what stands out.

3. Look for potentially troublesome patterns.

4. Make a moral assessment using universal and cultural standards.

5. Listen to the person’s story and relate it to what you observe.

6. Integrate what you’ve found.

By following these steps, I bring order to my observations and my intuitions. Having built this overall view, I can then take note of those situations in which the person deviates from their general way of being, and I can enrich the picture by incorporating information about the person’s inconsistencies. The result is a living picture of the person that amalgamates the pieces I’ve added in this stepwise manner, and that, once formed, I come to see as a whole. Although I can always deconstruct the picture to add some critical new bit of information, I access it in my mind as an organized form of intuition, and one that allows me to put myself in the person’s shoes.

Understanding and Change

Systematically building a picture of a personality doesn’t just help you understand a person—it also helps you think more clearly about one of the biggest questions you may have: Can this person change?

The answer to that question depends on the characteristics you are concerned with. Big Five traits tend to stabilize in young adulthood and become even more stable by middle age,
¹⁰
as do personality patterns. So when you’ve got a clear picture of someone’s traits and patterns, it’s best to assume that what you see is what you will continue to get.

But values, which are strongly influenced by culture, can sometimes change a lot. This happens less frequently in stable traditional cultures than in more open ones, such as contemporary America, which encourage personal experimentation. Although much of this experimentation goes on
in adolescence and early adulthood, some people raised in a subculture that emphasizes autonomy may later be drawn to one that emphasizes community and divinity and may even be “born again.” Others raised in a religious subculture may abandon it in favor of a secular one.

Stories, and the sense of identity that they express, can also be modified. Here important life circumstances can be very influential. Marriage can have a significant effect, as can divorce. The birth of a child can be an important turning point, as can a child leaving home. Getting a great job can be transformative, as can losing it. In each case, the major event alters environmental factors that stabilize a personality, and this provides an opportunity to reconsider who we are and where we’re headed.
¹¹
Psychotherapy may also stimulate the revision of a personal narrative, and its success appears to depend on it.
¹²
So if you pay attention to a person over long periods of time, you should be prepared to see some changes in his or her personal myth.

But the changes you are probably most interested in are more immediate and personal. They are the changes you may be hoping for in your current relationship with someone you’re close to. They are the changes that would progressively transform their day-to-day behavior in ways that would please you.

If you have been hoping for such changes, it may help to rethink this in light of what you’ve learned in reading this book. What do you now believe is bothering you about the person? How does this fit into the overall structure of their personality as you now see it? Is it situational? Is it cultural?
Is it a response to specific environmental factors? Are you doing something to bring it out?

These questions are not designed to show you how to change this person. They are, instead, designed to clarify your understanding of the course the person is already on. They are designed to highlight the characteristics you admire and those you do not. They are designed to help you see the person in the context of those others you have also come to understand.

What may, however, change in the process is the way you choose to relate to this person. Although moment-to-moment relationships with people are always ad lib, it can be helpful to first figure out what you think of someone and how you intend to deal with him or her. Spontaneity is essential, but preparation helps. As Dwight D. Eisenhower put it, “In preparing for battle, I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.”

But in the end, the greatest value of making sense of people transcends practicality. It is the pleasure we get from understanding their differences from others, as well as their ultimate sameness. It is the pleasure we get from more fully appreciating the humanity of those with whom we share our lives.

Endnotes

Introduction

1
. Bargh and Chartrand (
1999
), and Bargh and Williams (
2006
) sum up evidence that we engage in most of our social interactions without conscious awareness. Gigerenzer (
2007
) and Gigernezer and Goldstein (
1996
) emphasize the advantages of being guided by unconscious gut feelings. Gladwell (
2005
) calls this a “blink” and “thinking without thinking.”

2
. Wilson (
2002
) makes a lucid comparison of the conscious and unconscious mental processes we use in sizing up people. He views the unconscious processes as rapid pattern detectors that have the advantage of great speed but are more prone to errors than the slower conscious processes that rethink these immediate impressions. Whereas the unconscious processes are concerned with moment-to-moment assessments and are automatic, unintentional, and effortless, the conscious ones take more time; are controllable, intentional, and effortful; and can ultimately be very useful. Epstein, et al. (
1996
), have described individual differences in intuitive and analytical thinking styles, and Frith and Frith (
2008
) have examined differences between implicit (unconscious) and explicit (conscious) processes in social cognition.

Chapter 1

1
. Klein (
2002
).

2
. Allport and Odbert (
1936
).

3
. This dictionary-based investigation of personality traits is called the lexical approach. Its history is summed up by John, et al. (
1988
), and Digman (
1990
).

4
. Allport (
1961
), p. 355.

5
. Craik, et al. (
1993
), review the early history of personality research. John and Robbins (
1993
) and Nicholson (
2003
) emphasize Allport’s contributions, including his interest in both building blocks of personality (traits) and the uniqueness of each whole person.

6
. Long before Allport and Odbert published their findings, Galton had made a preliminary survey of “the most conspicuous aspects of the character [his word for what we now call personality] by counting in an appropriate dictionary.” In
Measurement of Character,
an article he published in 1884, he estimated that the dictionary “contained fully one thousand words expressive of character, each with a separate shade of meaning, while each shares a large part of its meaning with some of the rest.”

7
. Goldberg (
1990
,
1992
,
1993
).

8
. Denissen and Penke (
2008
) believe each of the Big Five reflects the activity of a brain system that controls a particular social or general motivation. In their view, Big Five scores “reflect stable individual differences in
their motivational reactions to circumscribed classes of environmental stimuli. Specifically, extraversion was conceptualized as individual differences in the activation of the reward system in social situations, agreeableness as differences in the motivation to cooperate (vs. acting selfishly) in resource conflicts, conscientiousness as differences in the tenacity of goal pursuit under distracting circumstances, neuroticism as differences in the activation of the punishment system when faced with cues of social exclusion, and openness for experience as differences in the activation of the reward system when engaging in cognitive activity.”

9
. Mischel (
2004
) has emphasized the fact that there are consistent individual differences in the expression of a trait in specific situations, which he calls “
if ... then ...
situation-behavior relationships.”

10
. Funder (
1995
,
2006
) has demonstrated the value of averaging together our behavioral observations to form judgments about a person’s relative rankings on each Big Five trait. Mischel (
2004
) has acknowledged that this averaging process “has proven to be of much value, especially for the description of broad individual differences on trait ratings of what individuals ‘are like on the whole.’” But he points out that a great deal can also be learned by observing the person’s distinctive pattern of “
if ... then ...
behavior” in specific situations. See also Mischel and Shoda (
1998
) and Kammrath, et al. (
2005
).

11
. In making assessments, you will probably find a great deal of variation among the men and the women you know, with no obvious gender differences in their profiles. Although Costa, et al. (
2001
), and Schmitt, et al. (
2008
), detected gender differences in Big Five studies in dozens cultures (women, on average, tended to score a little higher on N, E, A, and C), there was a great deal of overlap. The magnitude of the gender differences varied from culture to culture. Surprisingly, “sex differences in personality traits are larger in prosperous, healthy, and egalitarian cultures in which women have more opportunities equal with men” (Schmitt, et al. [
2008
]).

12
. McCrae and Costa (
2003
) reviewed the history of the NEO-PI-R, the test they designed to be administered and interpreted by professionals (
Costa and McCrae, 1992
) that is widely used by clinicians and in research on personality. The test has been translated into many languages and found to be useful in many cultures (D. P. Schmitt, et al. [
2007
]; McCrae and Costa [
1997
]).

13
. Questionnaires made up of phrases rather than adjectives are not new. Hans Eysenck (
1965
), a British psychologist, used them in his pioneering studies of personality traits. So did Katherine Briggs and her daughter, Isabel Briggs Myers, who created a widely used personality test called the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) (
Myers, 1980
), which is the foundation of David Keirsey’s (
1998
) popular book on personality. One reason academic psychologists prefer the NEO-PI R is that it assesses all of the Big Five, whereas the
MBTI leaves out Neuroticism (
McCrae and Costa, 1989
;
McDonald, et al., 1994
).

14
. Buchanan, et al. (
2005
); Goldberg, et al. (
2006
).

15
. Johnson (
2005
). Internet questionnaires have also been studied by Gosling, et al. (
2004
).

16
. Hitchens (
1999
) provides an extreme example.

17
. Obama (
1995
,
2006
).

18
. Klein (
2010
).

19
. Dowd (
2010
).

Chapter 2

1
. American Psychiatric Association (2004).

2
. I have used the term Compulsive, which is what this pattern was called in the third edition of DSM (DSM-III), rather than Obsessive-Compulsive, which is what it is called in DSM-IV, to avoid confusion with the mental disorder called Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD). OCD refers to recurrent obsessions or compulsions that cause marked distress or significant impairment and that the person recognizes to be excessive or unreasonable. In contrast, people with a compulsive personality pattern are proud of their commitment to orderliness, perfection, and control. Although some people have both OCD and a prominent compulsive personality pattern, these are distinct entities without a lot of overlap (Mataix-Cols [
2001
]; Miguel, et al. [
2005
]; Samuels, et al. [
2000
]).

3
. The American Psychiatric Association is presently working on a fifth edition of the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual
(DSM-V) that will change some of the ways it describes these personality patterns and personality disorders (
Holden, 2010
).

4
. Most researchers now agree that there is a great deal of individual variation in the expression these patterns and that they are not sharply defined categories. For a discussion of this, see Livesley, et al. (
1993
); Livesley (
2001
,
2007
); and Skodol, et al. (
2005
). But others, such as Weston, et al. (
2006
), argue that these prototypical patterns are still useful ways of thinking about people and talking about them with others. Spitzer, et al. (
2008
), found that clinicians find it easier to identify personality disorders by using prototypical patterns than by using dimensional traits.

5
. Oldham and Morris (
1995
) have taken the position that “much as high blood pressure represents too much of a good thing, the personality disorders are but extremes of normal human patterns, the stuff of which all our personalities are made.” They call adaptive versions of these patterns personality styles and named them as follows: adventurous (antisocial), sensitive (avoidant), mercurial (borderline), conscientious (compulsive), devoted (dependent), dramatic (histrionic), self-confident (narcissistic), vigilant (paranoid), solitary (schizoid), and idiosyncratic (schizotypal).