What makes you, you? Psychologists like to talk about our traits, or defined characteristics that make us who we are. But Brian Little is more interested in moments when we transcend those traits — sometimes because our culture demands it of us, and sometimes because we demand it of ourselves. Join Little as he dissects the surprising differences between introverts and extroverts and explains why your personality may be more malleable than you think.
*The Big Five personality traits, also known as the five factor model (FFM)
The five factors have been defined as openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion,agreeableness, and neuroticism, often listed under the acronyms OCEAN or CANOE
“A Performance of Integrity.”
Each of us is unlike anybody else, but none of us is completely unique. Psychologist Brian R. Little has mined the field of personality science and helped re-shape the old way of thinking about character types. He discusses his findings with Steve Paikin.
In the past few decades, personality psychology has made considerable progress in raising new questions about human nature―and providing some provocative answers. New scientific research has transformed old ideas about personality based on the theories of Freud, Jung, and the humanistic psychologies of the nineteen sixties, which gave rise to the simplistic categorizations of the Meyer-Briggs Inventory and the “enneagream.” But the general public still knows little about the new science and what it reveals about who we are.
In Me, Myself, and Us, Brian Little, Ph.D., one of the psychologists who helped re-shape the field, provides the first in-depth exploration of the new personality science and its provocative findings for general readers.
