Blog on Trait Theory

Blog on Trait Theory
One of the major personality theories that every human carries is the trait theory. This trait theory has five other traits that are “known as the Big Five.” (allpsych.com) They are: 1) Openness to experience, 2) Conscientiousness, 3) Extroversion/Introversion, 4) Agreeableness, and 5) Neuroticism. This also makes an acronym of the word OCEAN and they are considered the basic traits that underlie the trait personality. Each on has its own definition of what it means and how it shows through someone’s personality.
Openness to experience means to be outgoing, interested in whatever is new around them, having an open imagination, and liberal. Conscientiousness means to be organized, weak willed, determined to be careless, and even careful as well. Extroversion speaks of a person who would rather be with groups of people such as around many of their friends rather than staying home alone and hanging out. They are the type that would much rather go out and have a good time with friends and family. Agreeableness shows the extreme suborn against the very easy going type of person. These types of people are very sympathetic, helpful and even more understanding than others.
Last but not least is neuroticism. When someone is neurotic, they will show their instability in their emotions, relationships and even interaction amongst others. When someone is not that neurotic, they will show that they are more reserved, unemotional, and even calm. This is something that I can see very common amongst people who has a job that doesn’t interact with other people.
What stood out to me the most was the fact that Carl Jung was focused on this but was trying to see if these traits were inborn traits. In another words, if we were born with these traits because they were genetically prone to them. These types of traits are called temperaments. (Dr. Boeree, C. George) Jung then had two students that were mother and daughter and they came up with the most famous personality test of all time that shows the introversion and extraversion traits of people.
What was good about the test that Meyer and Briggs came up with was that it was a test on any walks of life. It doesn’t matter what cultural background you came from. If you were showing to be an introvert which means to stay to one’s self or an extravert that meant you would like to be out in the world trying out new things.
This test showed that many people were more likely to being extraverts because of our society is so pro-extravert. This is where Jung felt that people were either one or the other due to being born this way. He felt that people couldn’t be both and felt that this would be the way you would behave for the rest of your life. When it comes to cultural differences and how this would affect people in different ethnicity groups, there is no proven factor of this being the reason as to why people behave as they do. I found that any type of behavioral and or genetic issue, it does not discriminate who or what you are. It doesn’t care if the person is female or male, just as long as it has a place to live.
There are many types of census out there to figure out the ever growing population of different cultures that are residing in the United States, but that doesn’t mean that they are showing different cultures that are residing in the United States, but that doesn’t mean that they are showing trait theories due to different cultural backgrounds. This does raise many questions to one’s mind when it comes to this type of information that is being released into the public. I often wonder since trait theory is something that Carl Jung felt was genetic, how is it that when a couple of one ethnicity adopts a child of another ethnicity, this child will have no signs of being the race it is? The child will have traits of his or her biological father and mother, but the child will not exhibit what biological parents are doing or acting like in their country. The child will definitely show if he or she is introvert or extrovert on their own because it is genetic. So how is it important what race we all are in life when we solely show what we were given in our genetic pool?
Putting people in a box of race is just one way to surrogate each person by their race and not of their genetic life of their past family members. This seems to be unfair to everyone and showing that we only matter when it comes to the color of our skin and cultural background.

References:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK19934/ http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/genpsytraits.html http://allpsych.com/personalitysynopsis/trait_application.html

References: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK19934/ http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/genpsytraits.html http://allpsych.com/personalitysynopsis/trait_application.html