Making Sense of People: Detecting and Understanding Personality Differences

Tranquility—Be not disturbed at trifles, or at accidents common or unavoidable. • Chastity—Rarely use venery but for health or offspring, never to dullness, weakness, or the injury of your own or another’s peace or reputation. • Humility—Imitate Jesus and Socrates.

“[O]n multiple measures of personality and temperament, occupational and leisure-time interests, and social attitudes, monozygotic twins reared apart are about as similar as monozygotic twins reared together.”

high Conscientiousness has the potential downsides of oppressive perfectionism and the inability to abandon well-practiced

routines in the face of changing circumstances.

Many of us find it difficult to articulate our views of personalities—not only to others, but also to ourselves. There’s so much to consider, and it’s hard to convert what we know in our minds into a useful verbal picture.

There appears to be a widespread preference for people who are honest, courageous, emotionally stable, flexible, productive, modest, generous, trusting, sociable, and only moderately quirky—the sorts of individuals with none of the ten flaws on the list.

moral instincts—the instincts that lead us to behave in ways that benefit other individuals or the general social order—evolved because they also benefit those who express them.

Repeated testing shows considerable stabilization of a person’s Big Five scores by age 20, significantly more stabilization by age 30, and a little more stabilization until about age 50.50

behavioral differences between individual people—our distinctive intellectual abilities and personality traits—might also be inherited.