Looking at the first portion of the podcast, when they are interviewing newlyweds, they have people to describe the personality of the person they had decided to marry. Some people said outspoken, sensitive, introverted, kindness, or loyalty. Two statements stood out to me:
- Unidentified man number 4 said “I don’t think people change too much. I think their attitudes towards things change. But the root of who they are is so firmly entrenched”.
- Unidentified man number 5 said “If anything, your personality is your core. It’s not – that’s who you are”.
I think those two statements really relate to this course the most because a lot of personality theories seem to believe that your personality—your core—doesn’t change much throughout your life. The first quote does discuss how people can change based on new knowledge or a new situation which is also a reflection of personality.
I thought the second part about Dan was most interesting. The way Delia describes his personality, as “completely charming, playful, fast talking, fast thinking, very poetic, creative…” which to me, if you didn’t know the context of the story at this time, you would think they are meeting in a bar on a date or something. But once Delia finds why Dan is in prison, for rape, she doesn’t know what to do. “If you were able to do that, there had to be some, like, permanently rotten part of you”, because Dan’s action don’t seem to lineup to Delia’s impressions of Dan. Dan said people would see his poetry and when they find out his history and why he is in prison, they vanish. Dan says he’s gotten used to it. Delia felt like there must be some permanently rotten part of Dan that he could do such a horrible thing. Spiegel then asks how we should think about people like Dan. Do we see their crimes as a product of their personality? When you tell the story of someone, there is a personality that is fundamentally, who they are.
Next, they interview Walter Mischel who transformed how psychology thinks about what makes someone become who they are. To recap, Mischel “argues that some basic traits do persist over time, but little evidence exists that they generalize from one situation to another” (McDowell PowerPoint) and he says that classifying individuals as extraverted, conscientious is one way to define personality, but it also fails to explain a person’s behavior. They discuss the marshmallow test and how it predicted which kids would go on to become successful later in life and which kids were mostly likely to become obese. Mischel says that there is one problem with this interpretation, “that iconic story is upside down wrong – that your future is in a marshmallow – because it isn’t” (Mischel, invisibillia podcast 2016).
They go back to 1961 when Mischel was teaching a course on personality. He felt puzzled by the literature on personality. It was all basic assumptions. “The first was that people did have different personalities and that those different personalities could be defined by looking at their traits – traits like you heard at the beginning of the show” (invisibillia podcast 2016). And at the time, personality researchers argued over which were most important, but the thing they almost never argued about was that whatever traits you had were stable over time and consistent across different situations. “For example, a friendly person is someone who should be friendly over time. So if he’s friendly at 20, he should be friendly at 25. And if he’s friendly, he should be essentially friendly across most situations in which friendliness is a reasonable and accepted way – possible way of being”. (Mischel, invisibilia podcast 2016). Mischel found that all the research showed people are not consistent over time. How is that explained? A study done by Hartshorne and May said a child may cheat in one class but would be a fantastic student in other classes. The results were inconsistent with what personality researchers believed.
Going back to Delia and her conflict over working on TEDx in prisons with Dan, he didn’t want to definitely define his personality. He felt during his crime, he was not the same person that he is now and says it took two years to change himself but people are always going to see him as a rapist.
Next, they interview Lee Ross, who read Mischel’s book and agreed with his views of questioning why people believe that personality is consistent. Lee Ross proposed a theory that said “we see consistency not because of this thing inside people – their personality – but because people are usually embedded in stable situations, like our jobs and families that hold us in place and those specific dynamics ask us to be the same kind of person at work and the point is that ultimately it’s the situation – not the person – that determines things”. Mischel said that we feel better if we believe the idea that personality is stable because it makes you feel better. So if you think about it – the idea of discomfort with instability was the biggest reason why Delia was struggling with Dan. Delia believed in a core consistency and through her life, she’d observed that consistency in the people around her all her life. But Dan said he was different, and the only way to really know was to interact with him.
