You May Not Be Who You Think You Are
We’ve all taken personality tests, whether it’s a scientific test like the Myers-Briggs or a slightly less scientific test like, “Which Kardashian Are You?” These kinds of tests are pretty straightforward: answer the questions about your personality as you believe them to be true.
But how well can these tests actually describe who you truly are? Isn’t it pretty easy to lie to get results you might have been looking for? For example, if an intelligence test simply asked people questions about their ability to solve problems and notice patterns, the results would probably show that 90 percent of the world has an IQ above 200.
Bypassing this mental mechanism is at the heart of David Osmon’s research, a psychology professor at UW-Milwaukee. The way we describe ourselves is called our explicit personality. This encompasses how we perceive our character, but can sometimes get muddied up by social expectations. This is why if researchers surveyed people asking them if they are smart or not, they would be hard-pressed to find somebody admitting to being a moron. There is an innate problem with this method of assessment, however.
“All of the measures that we use for the Big Five are explicit,” Osmon says. “All it’s telling us is what you’re willing to say to somebody else about yourself.”
What Osmon is interested in finding is the implicit personality. This is a more accurate description of who you actually are, unrestricted by any mental processes or social constructs. The clever method of extracting implicit personality was explained in this series’ previous article.
Osmon used a test to measure people’s implicit and explicit results on the Big Five Personality Test. The Big Five Personality Test is a pretty well-rounded questionnaire that is often remembered as OCEAN: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. The test prompts subjects to respond on a “Strongly Disagree” to “Strongly Agree” spectrum regarding statements along the lines of, “I am outgoing and sociable,” “I am sometimes moody,” and “I am a creative thinker.” Each statement takes the temperature of the test taker’s personality regarding the five categories.
Osmon’s test had participants take the Big Five test to measure their explicit personalities as the first part of his study. The second part involved using the implicit personality test explained in the previous article. Participants were first shown a word like “neurotic” or “stable,” and then measured their reaction times when presented with the “Me or Them” task in immediate succession.
Comparing explicit to implicit personality is the big idea here. If a participant scored low on the neuroticism category in the explicit test but had a delayed reaction time after being primed with the word “stable,” that would be a strong indicator that the participant is not fully aware of their true personality. Statistical evidence supports this, as found in Osmon’s work.
“The discrepancies between implicit measures and explicit measure of personality predicted the average elevation on the MMPI by a large percent of the variance,” Osmon says. “That was pretty cool, no one had ever done that before.”
So what’s the big deal in measuring the difference between these personality thermometers? For one, it might help you understand better how others perceive you compared to how you think you’re perceived. Maybe your tendency to finish a job to absolute perfection is less “cute” and more “straight-up neurotic.”
Perhaps more importantly, though, is that the discrepancies between your personalities could help determine what kind of therapy or self-development paths you should follow. Maybe you would find out that you’re a bit more neurotic than you thought, which can be a motivator to strive for excellence, but hurts you in your social life. Maybe you would find out that you aren’t as conscientious as you thought, which explains why you can never remember where you put the damn keys.
“One thing that hasn’t been explored in psychology is – how well do you know you yourself?” Osmon says. “We haven’t had measures that get behind the social mask.”
Self-knowledge is a major component to growth. People with mental health issues like anxiety and depression can use Osmon’s research as a way to find out what’s going on in their head.
With the rise of pharmaceutical drugs being prescribed to treat nearly every ailment, self-knowledge and subsequent appropriate growth strategies can provide a way to work through these problems without the use of drugs. Pharmaceuticals may treat the symptoms of anxiety and depression, but they are not intended to tackle the cause of the symptoms, which can create an endless cycle of dependency and personal stagnation.
“Managed healthcare these days is all about how quickly you can get better, so it doesn’t encourage exploratory psychological therapy,” Osmon says. “Even though psychotherapy is just as good as medicine, and it lasts longer. People who go through psychotherapy are much less likely to be depressed two years down the road than those who took medicine.”
The reason for that is because once they get better, they stop taking the medication, and then it all comes rolling back in because it didn’t treat the cause of depression. Depression is often caused by a negative mindset, and the often the only thing that can change that is careful introspection.
“If you have psychological difficulties, and you have this large discrepancy between implicit and explicit personality, that tells you what kind of therapy might be best for you – a type of therapy where you dive in and explore yourself,” Osmon says.
Here ends the four-part series on Osmon’s psychological research. If you would like to hear more from this topic, post to our Facebook page and tell us your thoughts.
As always: Cheers, nerds.
