[Merengues]

I recently took Jordan Peterson's personality test, and the results surprised me a little. Nevertheless, after a brief reflexion, I realized that they are correct for the most part.

I scored low at conscientiousness and typical/moderately high in neuroticism. I can't see any positives to the impact of those on myself. They are hindering my self-development big time.

Does anyone have experience in changing any of Big Five personality traits?

If so, how did you manage to change them?

To what degree are we changeable in regard to the traits?

I realize those are somewhat constant characteristics but looking forward to seeing the insights of the others.

[tomzestatlu]

delete

[MMX2010]

High Neuroticism means that you constantly develop very long-winded (but ultimately false) justifications as to why certain forms of self-improvement either don't work, or don't work quickly enough.

Low Conscientiousness means that you become very bored, very quickly while doing certain (or maybe every?) self-improvement tasks.

Battling both means admitting that the part of you that makes you very fun at parties shouldn't be in control of your Daily Life. And it also means never trusting your emotional reactions while performing self-improvement tasks.

Convince yourself to do the totally boring things that you know you're supposed to do, without worrying over whether that makes you a Boring Person.

[Montrose]

Changing your Big5 is like learning to write with your left hand when you’re right handed. You can achieve it with a lot of effort but it will never be completely natural.

To be less neurotic practice meditation. And enjoy the fact that neuroticism increases ambition.
To be more conscientious make plans and schedules, check every boring detail, define your objectives precisely, write down how you’re going to achieve them, follow up on them very strictly, be always on time, and shine your shoes every day.

[Guitarman]

Can you post a link to the test please? I'd like to have a go.

[heavy]

I could be wrong but I would guess JP wouldn't necessarily think there are "bad" personality traits, just different.

You may be better off simply understanding the traits and how they manifest in your life, then tweaking your life to either utilize the traits as strengths or see where those traits are weaknesses.

[H1N1]

I'm always a little skeptical as to what these kinds of personality tests are meant to achieve. We are enormously complicated creatures. The idea that we can 'understand ourselves' based on just 5 personality traits has a whiff of absurdity to me.

One of my criticisms of Peterson is that for someone who advocates the primacy of the individual, and the dangers of totalising systems (in which he is obviously correct), he spends an awful lot of time constructing prisms through which to view the world, and trying to simplify and provide systems of interpretation for a world that is irreducibly complex. The idea that you can just understand yourself based on 5 personality traits, somewhat vaguely defined, seems symptomatic of that to me - particularly as it cannot allow for the external circumstances and stressors that may bring elements of your personality to the fore at different times.

The unfortunate truth, as I see it, is that we are not yet, as a species, fully up to the task of contending with all the insane complexity and arbitrary tragedy of the world we inhabit. This is then compounded by the fact that we realise that we can, and will in fact be, up to it at some point in the not very distant future. Peterson's appeal, I think, is that he offers a simple solution to the impossibly difficult, indeed currently intractable, problem of life - ironically in much the same way some of the systems he is so critical of do. What he offers - the idea of complete personal responsibility - is just complex enough, but also just attainable enough, to seem like it might be a real solution.

The personality test seems no different. The idea is that if you understand yourself, you can then put yourself right (perhaps by taking the various self authoring suites). It's a nice Idea, but it also seems like nonsense in practice, and much of what Peterson says about us being in thrall to our biology appears to me to contradict it anyway.

[Montrose]

The Big5 theory is based on a very precise protocol. It is a Principal Component Analysis of a large number of behavioural observations of humans. The principal components statistically calculated based on that analysis are fairly robust.

The Big5 never claimed to explain 100% of psychology. It is just a descriptive statistical analysis of certain behaviors and their correlations.

[gework]

I am thinking of writing a post relating to this at a later date.

I wasn't tested as a child, but I am fairly sure I would have been 95/100 agreeable, as my life considerably revolved around putting myself before other people to the point I would deliberately loose games etc., as I didn't want to make people feel bad. I learnt this as my model for behaviour was my parents and my father engaged in a similar pattern where he would never rock the boat with my mother. I recently tested on Big 5 and am now 15/100 for agreeableness...

It seems to me that the personality is considerably formed by you learning to extract pleasure from the world. Children trial and error in the world as ways of getting what they want: attention, food, a wipe of their behind etc. How parents lead that testing is highly instrumental in the formation of personality. That gets more complex as you get older and your desires increase. This contributes to the formation of the persona (or conscious) and your frustrations as well as many other things are suppressed into the shadow/id (or unconscious).

You mention very little about yourself, but if you are low in consciousnesses it's possible that your parents and other authority figures in your life made it very easy to extract pleasure from the world and you haven't been able to use those models or adapt new ones in the real world. Thus there was little reason for you to develop a work ethic etc. Consider the Chinese: hard parents driving their children create highly conscientious people. The personality is learned and can be re-configured.

For me, my father gave me little of anything, my mother was frugal and my grandmother was an arch-conservative who was raised in a remote Catholic convent in the British Empire. So I was made to work a lot to get physical things and I also imposed on myself an incredible self-austerity due to my hyper-agreeableness. So the trial and error that formed my personality taught me to be highly conscientious. And as an adult I've spent most of my life working 60-100 hours / week. So that trait has grown, while my agreeableness has inverted.

How to change. You're at the first step, you've identified you have issues and you probably want things you don't have. Formulate specifically what you want and make a plan to get it. You are going to have to consciously re-program your personality with your higher-faculties of cognition and will. These are both able to overwrite your lower parts to a considerable degree. As you take this path you'll need to come up with mechanisms that will re-program your ways of getting pleasure (what you want) from dysfunctional to functional. Jordan Peterson's Self Authoring quite looks good for this. You also should identify what has formed your dysfunctional personality, i.e. your childhood and the models you learnt there.

The way I went through such a dramatic personality shift with agreeableness was due to about 8-9 year of programming that led me to find out that being agreeable was a bad aspect to have in the world I was operating in. It wasn't a conscious effort. I just followed the path of least resistance to what I wanted and that gradually changed my personality to one that was functional for my path.

If you are familiar with JP, you probably know his allegory of the dragon who is challenged by the hero. And this confrontation is used to represent fighting monsters in the chaos of the world and when you fight monsters and win you get tremendous rewards (gold). In Peterson's case he is fighting the dragon of political correctness (chaos) and the gold has been becoming the highest earning, best known and most consulted psychologist in the world. The order he is forming in this battle with chaos is reason and logic. The difficulty with this is you have to fight in a world complex beyond all comprehension and with many contenders and adversaries. This allegory can also be turned inwards where your chaos is your own monster or dragon - your unconscious - the part of you where you put all the things you don't want to know about yourself. And if you go in there and fight to bring order to your own internal chaos you will receive gifts in the form of fortitude, willpower, responsibility, reasoning, logic and so on. And the order is the incorporation of the parts of you that you suppress in a functional manner. And for you that's your consciousnesses aspect for one.

But just as there is great danger in going out into the world to slay dragons, there is great danger in going into your unconscious. That's why most people never go in there and drop their psychoanalysts when they want the client to look at how they have fucked themselves up and not place blame on others. Within your unconscious is utter horror. It contains all the parts of yourself that are millions of years old, that you can't understand with words, such as the desire to march all your enemies into a pit. And this is where I think seriously mentally ill people go and get stuck in dysfunction.

Taking agreeable people as an example, they all have a giant disagreeable side they suppress, which means they can't consciously control it (likely dysfunctional). If you push agreeable people they will tend to go silent. You've pushed them into the space between conscious and unconscious. But at this point you will typically start to see considerable changes in their body language as their unconscious bubbles up. They have no conscious model for dealing with your pressure. If you continue to push you will collapse their persona, which is their known and presented self including their ways of dealing with the world, and the unconscious is unleashed, which in this case is a particularly aggressive and unmanaged monster. These people will later say something like "I'm sorry. I don't know what came over me.", which was their life time of suppressed anger that agreeableness causes. And being so agreeable they are so terrified of that aspect they don't dare admit it exists or look at it. And you see that theme in abundance among the left. If they dug down and fought that monstrous part of themselves they would come back with gold - to manage or change their agreeableness, not be ready to fly of the handle or be passive aggressive and not feel the need to go along with other people.

I think a lot of people get stuck in the silent zone between the conscious and unconscious and I think that is the cause of a lot of depression. Something is wrong, but they don't want to look, don't want to do anything, don't want to think or feel. Depression appears to be a collapse of the persona, which is why depressed people are considerably devoid of personality and pleasure seeking. It's a signal they need to go into the underworld to clean up their rooms.

I agree with heavy, none of the traits are necessarily good or bad. It's weather they are functional or dysfunctional; that is, do they help you constructively or hinder you on your life path. If you were Mick Jagger, your personality traits might be a highly functional for a rock star, but if you were Trump you'd probably be a highly dysfunctional president.

I don't know what you want to do, but I'm guessing it has something to do with money and work and for that there are certainly advantages of having an easily accessible neuritic side, i.e. to be flamboyant and charming. But you also have to consciously incorporate other aspects into yourself.

[Montrose]

(02-15-2018 01:04 PM)gework Wrote:  

I agree with heavy, none of the traits are necessarily good or bad. It's weather they are functional or dysfunctional; that is, do they help you constructively or hinder you on your life path. If you were Mick Jagger, your personality traits might be a highly functional for a rock star, but if you were Trump you'd probably be a highly dysfunctional president.

Very true. Many artists are high neuroticism and low conscienciousness. Conscienciousness tend to stifle creativity because you focus too much on your tasks at hand.

[H1N1]

(02-15-2018 12:56 PM)Montrose Wrote:  

The Big5 theory is based on a very precise protocol. It is a Principal Component Analysis of a large number of behavioural observations of humans. The principal components statistically calculated based on that analysis are fairly robust.

The Big5 never claimed to explain 100% of psychology. It is just a descriptive statistical analysis of certain behaviors and their correlations.

Sure, but the fact that you can perform a valid mathematical exercise doesn't necessarily imbue the exercise itself with any intrinsic value, or indeed necessarily provide you with a tool that can be used to any constructive purpose.

It can be precise, mathematically sound, and not particularly useful in any practical sense - and JP does intend it to be used for a practical purpose. Indeed, the overhaul of your personality that the OP might like to do is about as practical an attempted application as one could imagine.

We are not all things that we might be at all times. To suggest that something as complex as our personalities, which are not confined to the purely rational, can be well enough gripped by a bit of PCA to allow us to make radical personal changes seems to me to be a stretch.

[Montrose]

True H1N1 but in addition to the robustness of the method I find the resulting model insightful and fairly predictive.

[H1N1]

Insightful for what, and predictive of what? I don't mean to come across combative - I am genuinely interested in the debate.

To me, a model that is vague and and intended to be predictive, is always likely to be superficially compelling - after all, gypsy women have been operating on this principle for centuries.

We want to understand ourselves, why we do what we do, why have the predilections we do, the exasperating self-defeating behaviours we can't seem to shake; and since time began we've been looking to prophets, shamans and fortune tellers to give us some special insight. I wonder whether, in this case, we aren't simply exchanged 'cross my palm with silver' for 'cross my wallet with bitcoin'.

[Montrose]

Example : once you find out that someone is (say) Introvert, you can predict their behaviour in socia occasion (not perfectly, but pretty well), you can understand some of heir aspirations and functioning, and you can deal with them more efficiently.
I use Big5 all the time for game (actually I use MBTI but it’s correlated and the same general idea)

[Merengues]

(02-15-2018 10:18 AM)MMX2010 Wrote:  

High Neuroticism means that you constantly develop very long-winded (but ultimately false) justifications as to why certain forms of self-improvement either don't work, or don't work quickly enough.

Low Conscientiousness means that you become very bored, very quickly while doing certain (or maybe every?) self-improvement tasks.

Battling both means admitting that the part of you that makes you very fun at parties shouldn't be in control of your Daily Life. And it also means never trusting your emotional reactions while performing self-improvement tasks.

Convince yourself to do the totally boring things that you know you're supposed to do, without worrying over whether that makes you a Boring Person.

I'm also low in extraversion so rarely am I very fun at the parties unless in a very good mood or with a certain type of people. I do try to desensitize myself from emotions towards my tasks, but indeed it comes hard for me.

(02-15-2018 10:28 AM)Montrose Wrote:  

Changing your Big5 is like learning to write with your left hand when you’re right handed. You can achieve it with a lot of effort but it will never be completely natural.

To be less neurotic practice meditation. And enjoy the fact that neuroticism increases ambition.
To be more conscientious make plans and schedules, check every boring detail, define your objectives precisely, write down how you’re going to achieve them, follow up on them very strictly, be always on time, and shine your shoes every day.

After having read Scott Adams "How to fail almost everything and still win big" I implemented the system method. It worked to some degree, especially with activities I enjoy (lifting weights, learning a foreign language, keeping a diary). Nevertheless, right now I have a specific task to do which is extremely boring and has no intrinsic value for my life. I should have implemented a system to this one for example 'spend 2 hours daily on x' but I cannot sit down and focus on it, so I start to procrastinate and fall into the vicious circle of self-loathing.

If neuroticism increase ambition then low conscientiousness decreases the will to make things done. So I end up being an ambitious person but without necessary work ethic to make things done.

Thank you for the meditation tip, I will give it a try.

(02-15-2018 11:01 AM)heavy Wrote:  

I could be wrong but I would guess JP wouldn't necessarily think there are "bad" personality traits, just different.

You may be better off simply understanding the traits and how they manifest in your life, then tweaking your life to either utilize the traits as strengths or see where those traits are weaknesses.

I don't think they are bad per se. It seems to me that I cannot find a thing in my life where I could apply those traits and gain benefits.

For example:

Game - by being neurotic, I tend to feel slightly anxious to approach, don't have a very energetic vibe and overanalyze things. Low consciousness causes lack of will to approach more and step up my game and I'm falling into complacency.

Work - neuroticism makes it harder to tackle unusual problems and situations. Worrying that something bad might happen, being slightly passive is common. Low consciousness causes lack of persistence, hard work and commitment. Likely to be a procrastinator and need for outside supervision.

I simply can't find an appliance to those traits and I seriously wonder whether any profession/career/jobs exist where I could leverage this type of personality.

(02-15-2018 01:04 PM)gework Wrote:  

It seems to me that the personality is considerably formed by you learning to extract pleasure from the world. Children trial and error in the world as ways of getting what they want: attention, food, a wipe of their behind etc. How parents lead that testing is highly instrumental in the formation of personality. That gets more complex as you get older and your desires increase. This contributes to the formation of the persona (or conscious) and your frustrations as well as many other things are suppressed into the shadow/id (or unconscious).

You mention very little about yourself, but if you are low in consciousnesses it's possible that your parents and other authority figures in your life made it very easy to extract pleasure from the world and you haven't been able to use those models or adapt new ones in the real world. Thus there was little reason for you to develop a work ethic etc. Consider the Chinese: hard parents driving their children create highly conscientious people. The personality is learned and can be re-configured.

For me, my father gave me little of anything, my mother was frugal and my grandmother was an arch-conservative who was raised in a remote Catholic convent in the British Empire. So I was made to work a lot to get physical things and I also imposed on myself an incredible self-austerity due to my hyper-agreeableness. So the trial and error that formed my personality taught me to be highly conscientious. And as an adult I've spent most of my life working 60-100 hours / week. So that trait has grown, while my agreeableness has inverted.

That is a splendid analysis. My father is a self-made, successful entrepreneur and grew up in poor conditions. My mother grew up poor as well and she is highly neurotic. They divorced when I was in my early teens due to my father following 'work hard, party harder' rule towards life which caused his absenteeism in the most crucial period of my upbringing. However, I never lacked any material things and my life was lavish especially in comparison to my peers in a second world country I lived in due to his finacial success. After the divorce, he quit drinking, became religious but he did not press me into hard work. I just had to have decent grades, not fuck up big time and my life was comfortable. Recently, I felt resentment for the fact he did not teach me work ethic and he just admitted that he is shit at raising children so it is highly likely that my younger siblings will be spoiled as well.

(02-15-2018 01:04 PM)gework Wrote:  

How to change. You're at the first step, you've identified you have issues and you probably want things you don't have. Formulate specifically what you want and make a plan to get it. You are going to have to consciously re-program your personality with your higher-faculties of cognition and will. These are both able to overwrite your lower parts to a considerable degree. As you take this path you'll need to come up with mechanisms that will re-program your ways of getting pleasure (what you want) from dysfunctional to functional. Jordan Peterson's Self Authoring quite looks good for this. You also should identify what has formed your dysfunctional personality, i.e. your childhood and the models you learnt there.

That is an extremely good hint to gid deeper in my childhood and models learnt during that period. I will have to figure it out.

(02-15-2018 01:04 PM)gework Wrote:  

If you are familiar with JP, you probably know his allegory of the dragon who is challenged by the hero. And this confrontation is used to represent fighting monsters in the chaos of the world and when you fight monsters and win you get tremendous rewards (gold). In Peterson's case he is fighting the dragon of political correctness (chaos) and the gold has been becoming the highest earning, best known and most consulted psychologist in the world. The order he is forming in this battle with chaos is reason and logic. The difficulty with this is you have to fight in a world complex beyond all comprehension and with many contenders and adversaries. This allegory can also be turned inwards where your chaos is your own monster or dragon - your unconscious - the part of you where you put all the things you don't want to know about yourself. And if you go in there and fight to bring order to your own internal chaos you will receive gifts in the form of fortitude, willpower, responsibility, reasoning, logic and so on. And the order is the incorporation of the parts of you that you suppress in a functional manner. And for you that's your consciousnesses aspect for one.

Would it mean pushing myself into discomforts and my biggest fears through hard work?

(02-15-2018 01:04 PM)gework Wrote:  

But just as there is great danger in going out into the world to slay dragons, there is great danger in going into your unconscious. That's why most people never go in there and drop their psychoanalysts when they want the client to look at how they have fucked themselves up and not place blame on others. Within your unconscious is utter horror. It contains all the parts of yourself that are millions of years old, that you can't understand with words, such as the desire to march all your enemies into a pit. And this is where I think seriously mentally ill people go and get stuck in dysfunction.

[...]

I think a lot of people get stuck in the silent zone between the conscious and unconscious and I think that is the cause of a lot of depression. Something is wrong, but they don't want to look, don't want to do anything, don't want to think or feel. Depression appears to be a collapse of the persona, which is why depressed people are considerably devoid of personality and pleasure seeking. It's a signal they need to go into the underworld to clean up their rooms.

I recently applied an attitute that everything in my life is my fault and gives me a feeling of being at inner peace at least. Nevertheless, it is still unclear to me how to go into my unconscious. I can't agree more on depressed people being devoid of personality and pleasure seeking.

(02-15-2018 01:04 PM)gework Wrote:  

I agree with heavy, none of the traits are necessarily good or bad. It's weather they are functional or dysfunctional; that is, do they help you constructively or hinder you on your life path. If you were Mick Jagger, your personality traits might be a highly functional for a rock star, but if you were Trump you'd probably be a highly dysfunctional president.

I don't know what you want to do, but I'm guessing it has something to do with money and work and for that, there are certainly advantages of having an easily accessible neuritic side, i.e. to be flamboyant and charming. But you also have to consciously incorporate other aspects into yourself.

The thing is how do make the traits I have functional. The test gave me results but no indication how I can leverage my personality in real life, especially career-wise.

So far, my life was a mixture of hedonism, laziness, comfort seeking and general fucking-around-this. Ultimately, I woked up dissatisfied with my lack of achievement and lack of marketable hard skills.

Now I'm wondering what is something that I could do that would bring me a sense of accomplishment and some decent money. The only thing I could come up with is a career in sales but again I have no idea if I could succeed on this path with my traits.

I think Mick Jagger analogy is fine. However, during 24 years of my life, I haven't noticed any acumen for creating art in spite of my appreciation of good music, paintings, literature etc.

Besides, I scored very low at agreeableness, low at extraversion and average/moderately high at openness for an experience. I hope it is helpful to some extent.

[SteezeySteve]

I think we all would love to go deep into our brains and see the fucked upness in there and get to work on fixing it like an engine,but i'm not sure how this could be done. The only things we really have access to that allow us to do this are testing your physical limits,learningsocializing(if its a social skills/persuasion issue),and meditation. I'd say that those 4 things are pretty much the 4 pillars of self improvement and changing "who we are".

Aside from that i'm not sure if we have discovered the ability yet to change a lot of things. I'm sure its possible,but we just haven't discovered how. I remember mike cernovich talking about sitting in a dark room with no electronics,no books,and pure silence for figuring out whats going on in your head. If you really wanted to maybe you could go in a dark room for an hour or so every day and try to brainwash yourself,and meditate on the idea of being more agreeable or less neurotic. Focusing on one goal at a time. Personality traits are pretty set so I don't think there's an easy way to go about this so it would take consistency and would be a strain on your brain.

Who would have though you could take a skinny kid and make him gain 45 lbs of muscle with progressive over load. Who would have thought you could be a socially awkard introvert and learn game by just going out and talking to a bunch of different girls. Maybe you'd need to visualize yourself being more agreeable or less neurotic while you did this. Personality is pretty set but there's gotta be methods to do this that we haven't figured out yet.

[WannaBang]

Interesting post OP! Discovering the big 5 (via Jordan Peterson) was a very recent event for me so I know where you are coming from. You see these 'high in this,' 'low in that' and all of a sudden you think you can change them like a slider in some audio editing software.

If only There is for sure some truth to the big 5 anecdotally. I did the test and felt a bit bad after because the results were not exactly flattering. I got a friend who I consider one of my closest whom I have known since I was a kid to do the test on my behalf to QC what I put down - a sort of gross error check to make sure I was not too hard on myself (though be careful, he or she might be too nice!). Definitely do that if you can! But it has to be a good friend who knows the 'real' you - not someone you have met recently. If you are in your mid-20s plus I would wager like most you wear a mask designed to show the best of yourself as a natural adaption to the madness of the world you learned to live in.

I am in the top 1% percentile when it comes to neuroticism. It made sense - I'm super emotionally reactive and was known as being 'overly sensitive' at school. You can't change that shit. Jordan Peterson might say you were the 'bottom lobster' at school (in the dominance hierarchy_ which led to suppressed serotonin levels perhaps as some biological incentive to change that (I am obviously no expert - just pontificating). After you reach puberty that never really changes. Women are more neurotic naturally due to being smaller and weaker and many other reasons. Instead of trying to beat it (you can't) try to 'work with it.' In another thread a member suggested being high in neuroticism can mean you have great powers of self-analysis and self-reflection. At the same time you can train yourself using for example 'game as therapy' - building up a track record of positive experiences to use as reference experiences. Associate actions with pleasure. It could be something dumb like in my case, if i get blown out 10 times in a row I buy myself a treat like a cappucino in Starbucks as a consolation prize. All jokes aside you could also get a full male hormone panel to ascertain that your testosterone etc. are all good so you can be sure that is not a bottleneck and is not exacerbating your neurotic personality trait.

Anyway, I am sure you get where I am going with this. If you are low in conscientiousness like me perhaps try and gain greater control over your daily to do lists - organise things using wunderlist so you have a tick list of shit to do each day which quickly can become addictive and maybe even fun. If you are high in introversion as opposed to extraversion check out game sources designed for introverts - like Mike Cernovich's podcast who has quite a few good things to say about this.

Anyway, hope this helps. Don't think you are inferior with those traits. I reckon a lot more of us have such traits than you think but it is not everything as others have said. You can work with them even if you can only change them slightly - you can only piss with the cock you've got.

[captain_shane]

I think a lot of this personality stuff is confirmation bias. Brain says you've been a certain way for such a long time, that's you.

Start visualizing the person you want to become and it's entirely possible. I used to be a shy introverted loser that no one liked, to running real estate teams and getting job offers left and right simply because I've changed my personality. I'd say i'm in the top 5% of extroverted people compared to bottom 5% in the past.

Read psycho-cybernetics to understand what the self-image can accomplish or destroy.

[Montrose]

@merengues you could look into MBTI model. There are some tips on personal development and careers.

You are likely an INTP (possibly ISTP)

http://www.personalitypage.com/INTP.html

http://www.personalitypage.com/ISTP.html