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In this series’ previous post, I wrote about using Wordle to help identify word usage and phrasing trends by people as a prelude to identifying personalities in a real-time sense. In this series’ first post, I wrote about using everyday conversation to identify personalities. In this post, I will combine the two concepts to validate our findings, which I call extrapolation. Essentially, we try to predict responses to our questions by changing topics.

For example, after listening to someone, we notice he talks extremely pragmatically about things. Extrapolating, we can ask him a couple decision-related questions such as, “Why do you like your house?” In our minds, we predict a pragmatic response. If he does respond with answers such as, “It’s close to work,” “In the school district we want,” and “We were able to get a good price,” then they support our findings. However, if he responses with, “The setting is beautiful,” “We liked the ambiance when we walked in,” or others, we know we need to work further.

Again, the challenge is being able to spot trends in word usage. The series’ previous post lists five other word pairs in addition to the one here: pragmatic versus emotional. Another challenge is avoiding iron-clad perceptions of people; our observations and conclusions should be ongoing and fluid as new discussions arise. It is quite possible for people to assume different personalities in similar situations depending upon their moods.

For instance, people will often behave one way when they’re happy and another when they’re angry. That’s why results from classical self-reporting personality assessments can vary. The book Was That Really Me? by Naomi Quenk does an excellent job highlighting this phenomenon.

However, this only reinforces the persistent point that personality assessment requires ongoing practice and modification.

Other posts in this series:

• Assessing Personalities thru Everyday Discussions (1.0)
• Real-time Personality Assessment (Pt 2): Important Qualities
• Real-time Personality Assessment (Pt 3): Word Themes

As I had mentioned in a previous post, who we are (WWA) is different from who we think we are (TWA), an important concept behind intuitive approaches. It can explain many of the contradictions we observe in what people say and do and explain the problems with self-report personality assessments. Awareness of TWA-WWA will help us minimize erroneous conclusions when predicting human behavior.

Who We Are is Different From Who We Think We Are

Whereas TWA resides in our conscious, WWA resides primarily in our subconscious and is much greater. Consequently, TWA only represents the tip of the iceberg in terms of our potential. We often only discover aspects of WWA when we are challenged to learn or face a crisis.

On the downside, TWA holds much of what others (parents, friends, educators, community, etc.) teach us or condition us to believe about the world and us. Consequently, TWA can impede us from doing what we really want to do by causing us to ignore, deny, discount or suppress it. Pragmatically, the TWA-WWA difference will often account for the many errors we find in all kinds of surveys (quality service, market research, etc.). On an interpersonal level, it will account for much of the hypocrisy we see in others.

We learn WWA by listening to what we say, observing what we do and interpreting what we think; we can do the same with others. It works because we cannot consciously control every aspect of what we say, do and think. There are gaps; our subconscious fills them. It’s this “filler” that provides clues to WWA; it’s a matter of learning to read these clues. Many times this can only be done through direct interaction with the person so we can make ancillary observations; something surveys often don’t do.

In the last two weeks I ran across articles in The Atlantic and The Economist about online dating: “Take the Data of Dating” and “Love at First Bite” respectively. Regardless of your relational status, the surveys and profiles people are completing to facilitate the process are instructive in understanding the pitfalls of objective personality tests (also known as self-report inventories). Contrast these to the projective tests I discussed in a previous post.

The basic problem with most kinds of self-reporting is that it assumes people are consciously aware of their tendencies. In reality, there usually is a significant difference between “who we think we are” and “who we are.” We often observe this disconnect in others as hypocrisy. Thus, simply answering a series of questions similar to another person doesn’t mean we are even remotely similar.

Things like upbringing, culture, religion, politics and education can condition us to like certain things that we might not like on a deeper level. This can affect our emotional health and our social and interpersonal interactions. Yes, it’s possible to match up objective factors such as income, profession and education, but subjective factors aren’t so easy.

For example, people who talk a lot will often vehemently claim to dislike those who do. Its psychological underpinning is similar to the one in the Shakespearian line from Hamlet (III, ii, 239), “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.” That’s why we should not be surprised to find vehement protesters of an action to be conducting the action themselves.

It’s these kind of personality traits that self-reporting inventories, such as online dating surveys, have difficulty capturing. These can often lead to faulty matches.

A CEO of a 150-employee services company made this astute observation: processes reduce the need for top talent, and thus, reduce labor costs. This company requires highly talented professionals to deliver its services. Historically, management allowed them to work without defined processes because the employees knew what to do. However, as the company grew, finding such talent became harder and more expensive.

Processes become the path to training and developing in-house talent. They are analogous to painting by numbers or following recipes in cooking; they improve the output produced by individuals who don’t have a grasp on the entire work. However, just as we wouldn’t confuse painting by numbers with being an artist and following a recipe with being a chef, we shouldn’t confuse executing the steps of a process with being talented. Processes allow the breakdown of a task without necessarily needing to understand the task itself. It’s like following a series of directions; you don’t need to know your destination.

Since an employee doesn’t need to understand the whole task to follow a process, he does not need the talent that that understanding requires. Essentially, the process is making the decisions for him as embodied by its rules and procedures. As a result, the company does not have to pay a premium for that talent.