An Inside Look at Personality Traits Quiz

Answer: Openness to experience

Openness to experience, as the name suggests, is concerned with one's receptivity and liking for new and unfamiliar things. Artists and scientists tend to be high in openness. The Big Five factor missing from the four answers is called conscientiousness.

Answer: Sensation-seeking

Sensation-seeking concerns one's desire for stimulation and novelty. This trait does not seem to fit in neatly with either Eysenck's model or the Big Five. Eysenck argued that agreeableness and conscientiousness from the Big Five are components (at the low end) of a broader trait he called psychoticism, which refers to a general tendency to disregard social norms. Eysenck did not think that openness to experience was really a personality trait at all, as he thought it represents an aspect of cognitive ability.

Answer: Honesty-humility

The "dark triad" is a name coined to refer to a trio of traits associated with antisocial and offensive behaviour. Psychopathy refers to disregard for the rights of others. Narcissism refers to a grandiose sense of one's importance and superiority to others. Machiavellianism refers to willingness to manipulate others for one's own self-aggrandisement, and is named after philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli, who advocated political ruthlessness. People who show high levels of honesty and humility tend to be low in all the dark triad traits.

Answer: Neuroticism

The name of this trait provides a clue, as it refers to one's tendency to be neurotic, i.e. emotionally disturbed. Extraversion and conscientiousness tend to have a positive influence on mental health, whereas openness to experience tends to be more neutral.

Answer: Self-transcendence

The name of this trait provides a clue, as many spiritual traditions talk about transcending the boundaries of the individual self in order to have an experience of being part of a greater reality. Cloninger's model features four "temperament" traits, thought to be inborn, and three "character" traits, thought to be shaped by experience. Self-transcendence is considered to be one of the character traits, along with cooperativeness and self-directedness.

Answer: Absorption

Absorption is defined as a person's tendency to experience episodes of "total attention" when they seem captured by some stimulus, whether internal or external. Feelings of absorption can occur in response to beautiful music, a sunset, or deep meditation for example. People prone to absorption tend to respond to hypnosis more readily than others. Absorption is related to fantasy proneness, but the latter concept was not developed to help understand hypnotisability. Schizotypy refers to a person's tendency to have peculiar experiences that resemble mild symptoms of schizophrenia or psychosis. Need for cognition refers to enjoyment of intellectual activity.

Answer: The interpersonal circumplex

The interpersonal circumplex refers to a set of traits describing how a person relates to other people, such as whether a person is generally dominant versus submissive, and warm versus cold. Timothy Leary wrote an influential book about this subject in 1957 called "Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality" while he was still a respectable psychologist.

Answer: Honesty-humility

In the last decade or so, some psychologists have argued that the traits comprising honesty and humility together form a major dimension of personality that is distinct from the other more well-established Big Five factors.

Answer: Openness to experience

This finding was published in a paper called "Mystical experiences occasioned by the hallucinogen psilocybin lead to increases in the personality domain of openness." Participants were assessed on all of the Big Five traits before taking the drug and again 14 months later. Openness to experience was the only personality factor that changed significantly, suggesting that psilocybin may well indeed be "mind-opening." The term "Freakiness" I just made up! Authoritarianism was not assessed in this study, but tends to be associated with low levels of openness to experience.

Answer: Conscientiousness

Conscientiousness is associated with self-discipline and achievement motivation. Highly conscientious people work hard to achieve their goals and so tend to earn higher grades at school and to be rated as better workers by supervisors than less conscientious people, who may be more laid back but have lower standards. "Conservation" is not an actual personality trait as far as I know.