(Originally posted August 30, 2023)
What’s that you say? You’re ready for another RIP? Well, let’s do it!
For RIP #3, I want to share a major paper in personality psychology that (I find) most people outside of personality psych don’t know about — Ozer & Benet-Martinez (2006).
Some of you — especially if you attended the workshop — have heard me talk about nomological networks and, essentially, how we “define” the psychological constructs that we’re studying by triangulating what, precisely, they are related to.
Now, you all have heard over and over (and over, and over, and over) again that the Big Five is really the dominant model of personality. And, when you talk to people who use the Big Five, they’ll often rattle off a huge list of associations/correlates of each of the Big Five. “Oh, extraverts live longer, are happier, are rated as more attractive…” etc. etc.
How the heck do personality psychologists know all of this stuff? Are they just really good scholars? Did they read a thousand Big Five papers and memorize all of the things that the Big Five correlate with?
In my experience, the answer is: nope! I can guarantee you that they all read the attached paper and, to this day, use it as a cheat sheet. After this paper, you too will be able to hang with the best of them in long-winded cocktail party conversations about the Big Five. You may even get mistaken for a personality psychologist (as unflattering as that may be!).
With that, please do read (and enjoy) “Personality and the Prediction of Consequential Outcomes” by Dan Ozer and Veronica Benet-Martinez. Make sure to really check out Table 1, but the whole piece is genuinely worth a very close read — it is extremely accessible, rich with big ideas, and actually really, really relevant to all of our lives well beyond simple research curiosity.
Ozer, D. J., & Benet-Martínez, V. (2005). Personality and the prediction of consequential outcomes. Annual Review of Psychology, 57(1), 401–421. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.psych.57.102904.190127