Five Factor Personality Model

Five Factor Personality Model

Applied psychology accepts and uses the five-factor model (FFM) as an objective measure of personality among people [Hoff, et al. 2021]. Despite the subjective ranking by people’s responses to a set of questions, there is objective agreement among researchers about personality differences. These subjective self-determinations show both the objective mean of each factor within a sample as well as the variability about that mean.

Although researchers use any number of different words for the five factors, most studies use some variation of the following personality factors or their complements:

1. Confident or Emotional Stability vs. Anxious or Neurotic

2. Social or Extraversion vs. Independent or Solitary

3. Creative or Open vs. Conforming

4. Agreeable vs. Assertive

5. Conscientious vs. Impulsive

Researchers will note but do not typically rank a number of characteristics that go along with each person even though these characteristics are also very important parts of what makes up each personality. These characteristics are: 

1. Intelligence; 50% genetic

2. Gender; 99% genetic

3. Education; free choice, but linked to intelligence

4. Well Being; free choice, but depends on good health

5. Looks; largely genetic, but can be enhanced

6. Family; free choice, but depends on well being

7. Religion; free choice, but depends on parents, too

8. Job; free choice, but depends on education, intelligence, looks

However, looks and gender are mostly genetic, while half of intelligence is genetic, and the remaining characteristics are largely free choices of education, wellbeing, family, religion, and job. In fact, our feelings determine the free choices that we make and those free choices in turn make up our personality factors. 

In addition to personality factors and characteristics, it is also important to have an emotion model for feeling. Emotions are what give us feeling and it is feeling that gives us free choice. Five emotion complements are:

1. Pleasure vs. Anxiety

2. Compassion vs. Free Choice

3. Joy vs. Misery

4. Serenity vs. Anger

5. Pride vs. Shame

While there are many other emotions, they map onto this set as laughter (joy), sorrow (misery), disgust (shame), love (compassion), hate (anger), as well as feeling pain (misery) or rapture (joy). Free choice is the emotion that not only determines outcomes of action, free choice also inhibits action. While we are born with nearly uninhibited free choice, we learn inhibitions to that free choice as we mature. Our first awareness of inhibited action by about age 2 shows us the permanence of things since that is when we learn that things continue to exist even when we do not immediately see them. It is after all very important to learn to inhibit actions that do not result in desirable outcomes.

We learn further social inhibitions by about age 6 or so and these inhibitions form the basic moral and ethical archetypes for the rest of our lives. From age 6 on, we acquire long term memories based on those archetypes and continue to learn even further inhibitions. At age 6, Formal education begins along with intellectual, social, and physical development. Sexual maturity in particular entails a large number of inhibitions necessary for social bonding. Finally, at 18, we have learned enough inhibitions to bond with others and effectively contribute to civilization. We also have learned how to handle the inevitable social conflicts that occur with others.

A recent personality model study [Hoff, et al., 2020] showed the changes in personality over 12 years in Iceland for two different gender-balanced populations: sample 1 of 485 ages 15 to 27 and sample 2 of 1,290 ages 17 to 29. The study looked at how the FFM correlated with the three outcomes of education, prestige, income, and gender. However, there were very interesting high correlations for gender as some of the largest correlations of the study. For example, men had higher income than women even though women had more education than men.

Women having lower income than men is consistent with women being more agreeable than men, since agreeable people are satisfied with the status quo and less likely to seek higher income and less likely to change jobs as well. In contrast, men are more assertive and therefore less agreeable than women and are more inclined to seek higher income and that may mean even changing jobs.

These gender correlations are statistically significant, but gender differences still fall well within the factor ranges of both men and women. This plot shows men and women social scores are shifted normal distributions with the same standard deviations. The means of men and women shift by -/+beta*SD, respectively, where beta is the slope of the social correlation regression.

The next plot shows that women are more agreeable than men regardless of age, but both men and women become more agreeable with age. In fact, agreeableness changes peaked at ages 16 and 23 and agreeableness changes were much lower at ages 20 and 26. Agreeableness correlations are consistent with teenage conflicts with parents and authorities at ages 17-22 and partner conflicts at ages 24-27.

Of course, the job type is very important for income and so personality factors that impact job preference also impact income. The next figure shows that women are more social than men and so women tend to choose more social jobs and men therefore tend to choose less social jobs. Since incomes are lower for social jobs like health care or teaching than for less social jobs like science and engineering, this means women have a lower income because of the social factor.

Note that social peaks at age 18 for both men and women and decreases from then on for both men and women as well. This seems to be consistent with people making friends and choosing partners from 15 to 18 and then having fewer friends as they age from 18 to 27 and begin families.

Confidence is another strong correlation with income, but confidence is also strongly correlated with education and yet men are more confident than women, which is consistent with greater income for men. However, women have higher education than men despite having lower confidence. Evidently, women have higher education because they are more agreeable and more social, not because they are more confident.

Note that while men become less confident with age, women become more confident with age and by age 27, men and women show equal confidence. This convergence of confidence may be due to men and women as partners and beginning families together with convergent goals.

The above plots were only from sample 1 and yet sample 2 also showed these same trends. While sample 1 did not show a significant difference in creativity for men and women, sample 2 did. For sample 2, women were more creative than men at 17 as well as less creative than men at 29 as the plot shows. Other studies [Costa et al. 2001] also tend to show higher creativity for men than women, which is consistent with the age 29 results of sample 2. These results seem to suggest that while women tend to lose creativity with age, men tend to become more creative with age.

The complement to creative is conforming and so sample 2 shows boys are more conforming than men and that girls as less conforming than women.

Summary

The five factor model is a very useful objective measure of the variation of personality within gender-balanced sample populations as well as for gender-balanced sample populations over time. The FFM’s find statistically significant differences between men and women, but also show that those differences fall well within one standard deviation of either men or of women. This paper shows correlations of education, prestige, income, and gender with each of the five personality factors: confidence, social, creativity, agreeableness, and conscientiousness.

The women are the largest correlate of education outcomes and men the largest correlate of income outcomes. The women personality factors are anxious, social, and agreeable while the personality factors for men are confidence, independence, and assertive. However, the largest personality changes with age for women are increasing confidence and increasing conscientiousness with age. The largest personality changes for men with age are increasing anxiety and increasingly impulsive with age.

Obviously, the study associates women’s anxious, social, agreeable personalities with their higher education but lower income than men. Men’s confidence, independence, and assertive personalities are then why men have higher income, but lower education outcomes than women.

Personality Changes Predict Early Career Outcomes: 

Discovery and Replication in 12-Year Longitudinal Studies

K.A. Hoff , S. Einarsdóttir, C. Chu, D.A. Briley, and J. Rounds

Psychological Science, 32(1), 64–79, 2021.

Costa PT, Terracciano A, McCrae RR (August 2001). "Gender differences in personality traits across cultures: robust and surprising findings". Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 81 (2): 322–331.

Carlo Rovelli...Understanding Consciousness within the Known Laws of Physics

Carlo Rovelli...Understanding Consciousness within the Known Laws of Physics

Rovelli is a very smart quantum physicist who likes to push the boundaries of what we can know about consciousness as well. However, consciousness is not a very useful term since it has no well accepted single meaning and instead, has many different meanings in different contexts. Understanding free choice instead of understanding consciousness then makes more sense...

Our minds are very useful for processing and remembering sensations along with memories and those archetypes then enable free choice. The mind is then key in our survival because the free choices we make shape our reality. Since people can agree about the meaning of free choice, understanding free choice is possible. In contrast, people do not now and never can actually agree about the meaning of consciousness because at the core of any well founded belief in consciousness lies belief that is unfounded.

At the core of all well-founded belief, lies belief that is unfounded. — Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1951.

Correspondingly, at the core of well-rationalized free choice lies free choice that is not rational at all. In fact, you either believe in free choice or you believe that free choice is an illusion, but the free choice outcomes are the same irrespective of which belief you have. Free choice is how we as conscious agents act from memory and feeling from a large number of low entropy precursors that open up a large number of free choice outcomes. An objective basis for the subjective quantum free choice bridges between the mind and body and gives meaning to meaning. Known physical laws provide a complete context for free choice, but there is still a role for a quantum transcendence in free choice as well. 

Free choice is a poorly understood complex physical phenomenon, but free choice is nevertheless a result of knowable physical laws: For each free choice, either we excite or we inhibit an action. There are many possible EEG spectra that we somehow reduce to either excitation or inhibition of a single action. Free choice outcomes come from a vast number of EEG precursors, and it is free choice that is what defines meaning and purpose. In particular, Shannon’s relative information theory along with Darwin’s relevant information theory objectively define the meaning of meaning. Quantum phase makes objective matter equivalent to subjective free choice action and so there is no singularity with free choice just as there are no singularities with any quantum transition. Free choice is simply a natural consequence of the meaning of meaning.

Morality and ethics are a very important part of the meaning of meaning and there is much more to morality and ethics than just the narratives of Shannon and Darwin. This means that morality and ethics involve a large number of further narratives besides just Shannon and Darwin. In fact, different narratives emerge to bond people to different civilizations that then share those narratives with other civilizations. As different civilizations share narratives, they bond or conflict with each other until a compatible morality and ethics emerges. Compatible morality and ethics allow different civilizations to coexist and bond with each other and from that bonding eventually emerges a new civilization.

The only singularities inside of the classical relativistic universe are black holes, but black-hole singularities are simply due to the limitations of continuous space and time. In the discrete causal set of quantum matter action, there are no black-hole singularities. There are a very large number of particles and actions that make up the discrete causal set universe, all related by quantum phase.

Entropy is a count of the number of states of the universe and so entropy determines that outcomes always come from precursors in our approximate macroscopic reality of space and time. Yet the microscopic actions of quantum charge are all reversible and quantum reversibility seems to defy entropy time arrow. However, there is a continuous spontaneous localization that decays quantum phase as a part of quantum gravity. Therefore, it is actually quantum phase decay that orders free choice outcomes from precursors in the universe.

The many possible free choice outcomes create a neural entropy from those free choice outcomes and it is free choice that gives meaning to meaning, which is the metacognition of thinking about thinking. The emergence of a single thought free choice outcome from the universe of precursors increases entropy and therefore shows the direction of time from precursors to outcomes. How we feel about any single thought is, in essence, the metacognition of thinking about thinking and is the basis of free choice.

It seems strange to ask if quantum free choice has any meaning since Science knows that all microscopic outcomes are subject to quantum phase uncertainty. The real question is actually how a seemingly determinate macroscopic reality emerges from all of these ostensibly reversible microscopic quantum outcomes. The universe seems determinate albeit chaotic even though a universe with quantum gravity would still be subject to quantum phase uncertainty. Quantum phase uncertainty means that even though there are precursors for all outcomes in a causal universe, it is not possible to know the transcendent quantum precursors for all outcomes. Thus, the harbinger of free choice embeds quantum phase noise within the classical Shannon noise of chaos.

The brain is a quantum system that operates at body temperature with macroscopic decoherence of neural phase. Macroscopic decoherence of neural phase means that quantum phase noise plays a role in thought. Neural resonances do show dephasing just like the quantum resonance decay of a macroscopic laser. While a single photon of light emission is a microscopic quantum decay, a macroscopic laser decay is also quantum decay even though it involves large numbers of photons and ions. 

A subjective thought is an objective coherent resonance of about 1e12 neural action potentials that manifests as an EEG spectrum. A subjective thought is a macroscopic objective EEG resonance with an objective quantum decoherence time. Just like a macroscopic laser represents a coherent quantum decay, a macroscopic thought also represents a coherent quantum decay that determines the width of the EEG resonance just as laser decay is also an objective quantum decoherence.

As a result, the decoherence of macroscopic neural resonance is indeed a quantum decoherence. Just as with quantum emission spectra, the resonance of an excited state decays by exchange of that excitation with the universe as well as decoherence of its quantum phase with the universe.

The hard problem of classical subjective free choice is that our knowledge of the world is inherently subjective but the classical universe has an apparent objective existence and not a subjective one that depends on observation. Classically, an approximate objective matter universe exists in and of itself and is never a subjective illusion of the mind. Therefore, classically, objective matter cannot make up subjective free choice, which and must come from something else and this is the hard problem of free choice. 

However, we actually live in a quantum universe that has both objective matter as well as the objective quantum phase that links matter and action. We are neural agents and so are made of the same quantum matter, action, and phase as the rest of the universe. Since we only know about the universe with our own quantum matter, action, and phase, this limited knowledge is what we call subjective knowledge. 

Our subjective knowledge limits what we can know about the objective quantum universe, which exists outside of our mind but also includes our mind. Therefore, we use our free choice to make up most of what we see and rationalize that free choice as meaning and purpose. This is both meaning of meaning as well as thinking of thinking...

It is very exciting to read a prominent quantum physics paper that finally really unifies charge and gravity forces...or at least is on a viable path for unification. Tejinder Singh has published a series of papers on his quantum matter gravity (QMG) theory that not only unify gravity and charge, but he also shows many measurements that then validate QMG. Furthermore, the principles of QMG are consistent with my quantum matter action theory (shown below, published in three years ago) as well as with the well known continuous spontaneous localization (CSL) theory...QMG is so, so sweet...

Singh’s quantum matter gravity (QMG) unification of gravity and charge is therefore a very exciting development and is especially so for me since QMG has many of the same puzzle pieces as does my quantum matter action universe puzzle. Although QMG is not quite right yet and has not been thoroughly validated by Science, it will be. Basically, QMG defines aikyon particles as the generic aether of the universe and so QMG builds electrons, protons, neutrons, and all else with either fermion or boson aikyon. An 8-D octanion matrix represents each fermion and boson and has the correct quantum spin symmetry for both charge and gravity. Here is the basic action integral, S, which is proportional to the integral of the gravity trace dynamic mass or velocities of fermions and bosons:

Then QMG uses Connes time, t , and classical Euclidean or atomic time emerges from QMG. As a result, QMG defines a new constant of t = 1.0e17 s or 3.2 Byrs, but in Connes time, not atomic time. Alain Connes proposed t  as thermodynamic time, i.e. entropy or temperature time, as have many others in the past. This is a universe or cosmic time that defines the evolution of the universe and so now cosmic time is different from atomic time.

Another key to QMG is in continuous spontaneous localization, CSL, which is a very well know way to collapse the quantum wavefunction conundrum. So CSL is how the reality of classical gravity relativity emerges from QMG. That is very fun…

The 1e-39th scaling between gravity and charge emerges from the ratio (L_P/L)², and both L and L_P are characteristic lengths that each come from known constants. The Planck length is L_P and QMG length L is L = ћ/(c m), a characteristic length that scales with inverse mass ћ/c * 1/m. Here is the QMG Lagrangian equation of motion:

Dark matter simply emerges as a vector gravity from QMG and does not therefore need a new particle at all. However, there are many pesky singularities with many aspects of QMG, but QMG does manage to dodge the renormalization problem from gravity in quantum field theory.

Octonions are eight dimensional matrices that unify gravity and charge in this hypothetical 8-D space. Instead of atomic time, Singh uses thermodynamic or entropy time, t , which was proposed by Alain Connes and so Singh calls t  Connes time, but many others have proposed entropy as the time arrow as well. Of course, the classical evolution of the universe is what drives thermodynamics and entropy and so Connes time is also equivalent to that universe time as well.

The deep dive of QMG into octonion algebra is quite complex and it is not yet clear if the really simple QMG assumptions really justifies the rabbit hole of octonion complexification. A classical 4-D spacetime emerges from the QMG trace of just half of the 8-D octonion matrix and then quantum spin emerges from the other octonion half. The QMG introduces 4-D aikyons to represent fundamental octonion fermion and boson particles along with QMG length (L), gauge (a ), and fermi matrices (b₁, b₂). Each 4-D fermion has progress variables that scale with QMG L, q_F  and mass from momentum of velocity q̇_F and each 4-D boson is on a path, q_B with mass q̇_B. The dot above the q is a single derivative in Coones time, which is an 8-D velocity and proportional to momentum and therefore mass, and so q̣̈ is the double derivative, which is acceleration.

The next step is to renormalize q_B and q_F into q₁ and q₂ to make things pretty and avoid some ugly math...with an even deeper rabbit hole, so buckle up. The QMG aikyons are now either commutating bosons [q_B, p_F] from which classical gravity relativity emerges or noncommuting fermions {q_F, p_F} as quantum field theory emerges. The QMG paths q₁ and q₂ now have both symmetric and antisymmetric superpositions as well as momenta and all show the classic quantum uncertainty noncommutation: [p, q] = -iћ...and voilá! The Hamiltonian wave equation follows with frequency eigenvalues and so oscillating wavefunctions...oops, QMG still has some convergence issues hiding here and there...and so there are many more papers to write…

The QMG goes down a very deep rabbit hole because multiplying 8-D matrices results in two 64-D matrices with a total of 128 matrix elements. Wow! This will be a lot of papers in the future...

Although QMG has many of the features of quantum gravity, it is not yet completely clear if the complexity of octonion algebra is really necessary. After all, matter action has many of the same features, but only uses 3-D, not 8-D. Matter, action, and quantum phase unite into a very nice quantum universe with a Lagrangian, density matrix, and creation/annihilation operators. The quantum matter action causal set has all of the properties such as a Lagrangian for action. It could be that simply including the Fermi spin matrices in the action integral will provide for spin within just matter and action.

The matter action photon is the basic dipole exchange particle for charge and the universe biphoton is the basic quadrupole exchange particle for gravity. Just like the QMG aikyon, matter action has a pervasive aether particle that makes up the whole universe. Instead of using the dimensionless QMG L_P / L for gravity scaling and QMG Connes time, t , matter action uses the dimensionless universe radius over the Bohr radius, radius R_u / r_B. Thus, instead of an arbitrary QMG L, matter action uses the actual universe radius for its dimensionless scaling. 

Connes or entropy time represents the primary QMG quantum time dimension, t  = 1e17 s or 3.2 Byrs. Matter action universe time is t  = 1.2e-17 s, but comes from the time pulse of the universe size, R_u. Atomic time emerges from both QMG and matter action as the classical time of gravity relativity, and so the second primary dimension of universe time plays a key role in quantum gravity relativity.

The QMG length L is inversely proportional to particle mass and so for hydrogen, L = 2.2e-16 m, which turns out to be too small for CSL hydrogen. Matter action defines the characteristic CSL length as 7.0e-8 m, which is the radius at which hydrogen dipole-induced dipole attraction, which goes as 1/r⁶, equals hydrogen-hydrogen gravity attraction, which goes as 1/r². Thus matter action completely agrees with CSL while QMG L for hydrogen CSL seems to be a billion times too small.

The QMG constants are action as ћ / c and time t  = 1.0e17 s from which length emerges proportional to inverse mass. Matter action constants are action the matter scaled Planck constant as 

ћ_ae = ћ / c² 

with units of [kg s] and aether particle mass m_ae as

with units of kg, which scales as the ratio of gravity and charge and inversely with the hydrogen Bohr time, t_B. A universe cosmic time, T_u = ½ * h_ae / m_ae = 13.4 Byrs, emerges from the transform of the universe pulse length of matter action. However, the inverse Hubble constant determines our current cosmic time as T_a = k / Hubble = 1.2e17 s = 3.4 Byrs with a matter-action luminous distance correction, k. The matter-action luminous correction is not a new constant but simply expresses the acceleration of matter-action light over cosmic time.

Finally, Singh's QMG gives Science a truly significant unification theory. It is very pleasing to finally see this happen, but Science will now fight the coming QMG revolution quite fiercely as well it should...eventually, Science will accept something very similar but much simpler than QMG to finally show unification at long last...