How to Use the Science of Personality to Make Better Decisions About People

SOME of the biggest decisions we will make involve judgments about people—who to hire, who to marry, which friends to have, what job to take, or which business partner to take on. Good people judgment becomes a critical skill in all aspects of life.

There are hundreds of ways to describe someone’s observable behavior. On the whole, these can be cumbersome and confusing. Instead, organizational psychologist Richard Davis writes in Good Judgment: Making Better Business Decisions with the Science of Human Personality we can use a manageable personality framework that allows us to identify patterns of behavior and quantifiable characteristics according to an individual’s personality traits.

Research into human behavior has determined that we can distill personality down to just a handful of five traits called the Big Five: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. As the science shows, we can describe our personality as a function of all five dimensions. We tend to be higher or lower in certain dimensions than in others, and we also tend to manifest specific traits differently in our behavior.

Even so, the Big Five are not enough, and no personality test can capture the complexity of human behavior. As Davis states, “It’s one thing to understand whether a person has a given trait, quite another to know how that person will express that trait in their actual behavior, which is what we ultimately care about.”

Using the Big Five as a guide, Davis has constructed a personality blueprint for judging character. The five categories briefly explained are:

1. Intellect — How People Think

This category “describes the manner in which people process information, make decisions, and solve problems.” This is not about just how smart we are but also “How impulsive or restrained they are, how practical their thinking is, and how organized their ideas are. Can they handle ambiguity?”

2. Emotionality — How People Express Emotions

This is about how people go through life emotionally. Considering their general mood, sensitivity, and resilience. Emotionality describes “the extent to which trait-emotions affect behavior. Note that I’m not talking here about how emotional people may be when you meet them, but rather how they tend to typically experience or express their emotions.”

3. Sociability — How People Engage with Others

Sociability is how people engage with others. “This category addresses communication, interpersonal capabilities, and how someone gets along socially. To understand a person, it is essential that we capture how they come across to others—the words used, the interpersonal impact they have, how sociable and gregarious they are, and how effective they are in communicating their thoughts.”

4. Drive — Why People Do What They Do

“To really understand someone, we must understand what motivates their behavior. The more I understand what impels you, the better I am able to adjust my approach in dealing with you.” It considers your perspective on money, how much initiative you show, do you easily give up, and whether you are conservative or progressive.

5. Diligence — How People Get Stuff Done

How do you perform what you need to get done? “Some of us have a highly structured, disciplined approach to life, while others of us are much more laid-back and spontaneous. Understanding someone’s dispositional leanings will clue us in to what to expect from them.”

These five categories are not independent but come together to make up who a person is. Context matters. “The specific ways that individuals express their personality traits also help to determine if those traits are helpful or disruptive. So much rides not just on the specific traits people appear to express but on their ability to master whether and how they express them in everyday situations.

Personality isn’t permanent as described here.

We can decide to push back against our latent tendencies if we wish, disciplining ourselves to behave differently and developing workarounds.

We should embrace who we are but also try to be our best selves, incrementally moderating our behavior to account for our limitations. The best performers in any field do precisely this, taking responsibility for the parts of themselves that aren’t so attractive and striving to improve them.

So, how do we use this information? Casual conversations work well for understanding others’ personalities if you know how to conduct them. Like a journalist conducting an interview, we can employ five strategies to enhance our perception: build rapport, get people to talk about their past, ask power questions, interpret what you are learning and how it fits into one of the five categories, and calibrate the interpretation to the context and the way they present themselves. Consider too your own biases when judging others. And above all, be curious.

Davis details each of these strategies, the questions we should be asking, and how we might best interpret the information we gather.

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Posted by Michael McKinney at 04:51 PM
Permalink | Comments (0) | This post is about Human Resources , Personal Development