Off the Map

A recent article that’s hovered on the frontpage of Yahoo! the last few days has upset me in what its headline communicates.  The article is titled “Personality Set for Life By 1st Grade, Study Suggests” and it is by the LiveScience staff.  This is a lesson that headlines need investigation before retelling their stories ..

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If you just read the headline, life looks pretty bleak.  Your personality is set for life.  The trouble is, the term “personality” is a pretty general term representing various collections of characteristics.  Ask one person what characteristics umbrella under the term “personality” and you get one answer; ask another person, you get another answer.  So just what is “set for life”??

If you read the article, you learn that umbrellaed under the term “personality” in this particular study are just four characteristics:

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They examined four personality attributes — talkativeness (called verbal fluency), adaptability (cope well with new situations), impulsiveness and self-minimizing behavior (essentially being humble to the point of minimizing one’s importance).

So to these researchers, your personality is just your talkativeness, your adaptability, your impulsiveness, and your self-minimizing behavior.  Let’s forget about your charm, your generosity, your sense of humor, your nationality, and other things one might think of also as “personality.”

I’m not so much rivaling the definition of “personality” used in this study because the researchers were forced to look at particular aspects of personality in order to make a judgment.  That is, the researchers were forced to “get extensional” in defining their term “personality,” much as a mathematician might define a term by listing the items defined by it.  (E.g., an even number is “0, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, …”) Instead of rivaling the definition of “personality,” I’m rivaling the headline, which is much too general and as a result misleading to someone who doesn’t care to read the actual article.

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I have images of sitting in background holding when another actor tries to emphatically argue that personality is set in the first grade, without knowing the particular aspects the study said seem “set.”

Reading headlines required delayed reactions (symbols reactions).  Without using them, the facts don’t always get through.  In fact, many facts simply don’t.

See also: delayed-reactions, extensional-orientation, headlines, mathematics, personality, science, symbol-reactions