What is personality? A definition, and how it is measured

What is personality?

In one sentence: personality is the pattern of thinking, feeling and behaving that makes a person recognisable across situations and over time.

The definition usually quoted comes from Allport, whose 1937 monograph is the conventional citation for the trait concept: personality as an organisation within the person of the systems that produce their characteristic behaviour and thought (Allport, 1937). Three words there are doing work. Within, so it is not just a reputation held by others. Organisation, so the parts hang together rather than sitting in a list. Characteristic, so what counts is the pattern that recurs.

The modern field keeps that core and studies the ways people differ that are consistent enough to be worth measuring, how those differences arise and what they lead to (Funder, 2001). Everything it reports is a tendency, not a rule about an afternoon.

What are the three levels of personality?

A useful framework splits the field into three levels, each answering a different question (McAdams & Pals, 2006).

• Dispositional traits. Broad, comparative tendencies such as Extraversion or Conscientiousness. They place you against other people and are the most stable and most heavily measured level.
• Characteristic adaptations. The goals, values, skills, roles and habits a person builds in a particular life. Two people equally high on Conscientiousness can express it as a spotless kitchen or a finished thesis.
• Life narratives. The story a person tells about who they have been and where they are going, which gives the other two levels their meaning.

Most personality tests measure the first level only, which is worth knowing when a report feels thin.

What is a personality trait, and what is it not?

A trait is a tendency to think, feel and behave in a certain way more often than other people do. It is comparative, measured in degree, and an average over many situations rather than a rule about any one of them.

That last point is the one most often lost. Someone high on Extraversion is not sociable at every moment; they are sociable more often, and they still have quiet evenings. Behaviour in the moment follows the situation as well as the disposition. When people are asked to act more extraverted than usual, they report more positive emotion while they do it, and that holds for those low on the trait as well as high (Fleeson et al., 2002).

A trait is also not an explanation. Saying someone missed a deadline because they score low on Conscientiousness restates the pattern rather than accounting for it. And a trait is not a category: scores are spread continuously, with most people near the middle, so the question is where you sit and by how much.

How is personality different from character, temperament and mood?

The four words get used interchangeably in ordinary speech and mean different things in research.

• Temperament is the early-appearing, biologically based part: differences in reactivity and in the effortful control tied to the brain's executive attention networks, which are linked to the Big Five traits of adulthood (Rothbart, 2007).
• Personality is the whole adult pattern, temperament included, shaped by what a life has done with it.
• Character is the evaluative slice: the qualities we praise, such as honesty, fairness, courage or perseverance. It overlaps with personality but carries a judgement about what is admirable.
• Mood is a state, not a trait. It lasts hours or days and moves with events. Personality is the tendency underneath, which is why a good questionnaire asks how you usually are rather than how you feel today.

Where does personality come from?

From both of the usual places. A meta-analysis of behaviour genetic studies puts the heritability of broad traits at around 40 percent, meaning about that share of the differences between people can be attributed to genetic differences (Vukasović & Bratko, 2015). The remaining 60 percent is attributed to environmental influences, and none of it makes a trait fixed.

Personality also develops in a regular direction. Across longitudinal studies, adults tend on average to become more conscientious and more emotionally stable through adulthood, mostly between 20 and 40, and more agreeable mainly later in life, while the sociable and lively side of Extraversion rises in adolescence and declines in old age (Roberts et al., 2006). That is a gradual group average: individuals move at different rates and some move the other way.

So personality is neither fixed at birth nor freely chosen. It is a set of dispositions with real biological roots, pushed slowly by age, roles and effort. The can personality change page covers what the intervention studies found.

How do psychologists measure personality?

Mostly by asking. A person rates a set of short statements for how accurately each describes them, several statements per trait, and the ratings are averaged and compared with a reference sample. The method is unglamorous and it works, provided the scale is long enough: reliability rises with the number of items, and very short measures lose predictive power (Credé et al., 2012).

Self-report is not the only source, nor uniformly the best. People know their own inner life better than anyone else does, while those around them are often more accurate about the visible parts of how they come across (Vazire, 2010). Ratings from people who know you well predict behaviour about as well as self-ratings, and better for some outcomes such as academic achievement and job performance (Connelly & Ones, 2010). A self-report is one good view, not the whole truth.

A measurement should report a position rather than a label, with the questions and the norms described openly enough to judge. The methods page sets out how that is done here.

Why is the Big Five the standard description?

Because it was found rather than designed. Researchers started from the words people use about each other, on the assumption that anything important about human differences leaves traces in language, and asked which descriptions cluster together. The same small set of broad clusters kept reappearing across samples and methods (Goldberg, 1990), out of decades of lexical work rather than any single study (Goldberg, 1993), and the taxonomy was then tied to questionnaire measures and decades of findings (John & Srivastava, 1999). A sixth factor, Honesty-Humility, comes back from a wider set of adjectives in several languages, which is what the HEXACO model adds (Ashton & Lee, 2007).

Each has a page of its own: Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Emotional Stability, Openness to Experience and Honesty-Humility. Short definitions of every term used on this site are in the glossary, and the narrower sub-traits beneath each dimension are on the facets page.

What does personality predict?

Enough to be worth measuring, and less than a horoscope would claim. In a review comparing predictors head to head, broad personality traits forecast outcomes such as mortality, divorce and occupational attainment at a level comparable with socioeconomic status and measured cognitive ability (Roberts et al., 2007). A wider survey maps those effects across individual, interpersonal and social-institutional outcomes (Ozer & Benet-Martínez, 2006), and they accumulate over a lifetime because a disposition acts again and again.

Two cautions belong with those numbers. They describe average differences between groups, so no trait score forecasts what one person will do. And they are associations rather than mechanisms.

How does Wellington measure personality?

Wellington is a science-based personality assessment from Therabot Labs LLC. It measures personality as continuous traits, built on the Big Five and HEXACO models, and writes the results back as a personal report rather than a type.

The free Snapshot asks 60 questions and takes about 7 minutes. Each statement is rated on a 5-point accuracy scale, each of the 6 dimensions is the average of several statements rather than one, and that average is reported as a percentile against the reference sample, in one of three bands: Quiet below the 30th percentile, Balanced to the 70th, High above it. The bands and the Portrait names exist to make the result easier to talk about; the percentile is the measurement, and it is always shown alongside. Those norms are provisional while the norming sample is completed.

In the written report, every dimension has three pages, one per band, prepared in advance by the writing and psychology team, and your answers decide which one you read. The Wellington Membership adds the facets beneath each dimension and the 24 VIA character strengths, 90 traits in all.

The first ten Snapshot questions are answered before anything is asked of you; after question ten you sign in with an email address so answers are saved and results can be shown. No card is needed. Wellington is a wellness tool for reflection, not a medical or psychological diagnosis, and it does not replace care from a qualified professional. It is not built for hiring, and you can export or delete your data at any time.

Questions people ask

What is the simplest definition of personality?

The pattern of thinking, feeling and behaving that makes a person recognisable across situations and over time. The classic formulation describes it as the organisation within a person of the systems that produce their characteristic behaviour and thought (Allport, 1937). Modern work adds that everything measured is a tendency, not a rule about any single moment (Funder, 2001).

What is the difference between personality and character?

Personality is the whole pattern of how a person tends to think, feel and behave. Character is the evaluative part: the qualities a community praises, such as honesty, fairness, courage or perseverance. They overlap heavily, and the difference is that character carries a judgement about what is admirable while a trait is described without one.

Is personality genetic or learned?

Both. A meta-analysis of twin and family studies puts the heritability of broad traits at roughly 40 percent, so most of the remaining variation comes from environment, measurement error and the particular course of a life (Vukasović & Bratko, 2015). Traits also shift in a regular direction with age, becoming on average more conscientious and more emotionally steady through adulthood (Roberts et al., 2006).

Can a questionnaire really measure personality?

It can measure the trait level reasonably well, provided it asks several statements per trait and compares your answers with a reference sample; short scales lose accuracy (Credé et al., 2012). What it cannot do alone is see how you come across, which people around you often read more accurately (Vazire, 2010), or capture the goals and life story above the traits.