I had a really interesting conversation with a tutor here about psychology, and the most widely recognized metric that is used nowadays is called the Big 5. It measures people’s personalities on a scale of openness, contentiousness, extroversion, neuroticism and agreeableness. Psychopaths rank very very highly on only one scale, neuroticism, with no balance offset by the others, which is why they only make up about 1 or 2 percent of the population. Alternatively, most people are balanced to some extent, forming well-rounded individuals. This means that the days of finding my personality type on buzz feed are over, as that metric is almost entirely false according to my new friend. I wonder how they measure that, is it just a series of multiple choice or ranking questions like the old personality test? Or is it a much more scientific affair?
I wonder also how much the results would change as an individual grows up, I definitely used to be a lot more shy and introverted but I would say i am to a much lesser extent now. Still not an extrovert by any means, but i enjoy company and conversations more than i used to, and will even seek that out when before that was something that would cause me a lot of anxiety. We also talked about how evolution has selected traits that foster community over those that do not, as antisocial people in tribes were often cast out for not contributing to the group dynamic. This means that community forming capabilities were therefore a preferred trait, and bigger communities greatly increased chances of survival, hence why we are a social species today despite the best efforts of technology and tech moguls. It’s crazy to imagine how much the human landscape has changed in so little time, for when you compare human existence to the rest of time on a model of a 24 hour clock, i think it measures up to about a few seconds.
