SustainablyAlpha January Edition

The Puzzle of Personality
We’ve all heard people say things like “He has a funny personality” or “She’s a shy person”,
these all describe how a person acts in different situations but what are they actually
referring to when they say this? This write-up aims to do just that, explore the less spoken
about and often unexplored parts of human behaviour.
How does one think?
So, what IS personality? Well, in a nutshell it is how one person looks at the world around
them. Each one of us has a completely unique perception of the world around us. An
employer might get mad at his/ her employee for taking frequent sick leaves from work,
which is causing problems but on the other hand, they might be more compassionate, not
pressuring the employee and dealing with the workload some other way. Both are
completely rational and acceptable approaches to dealing with a problem, but our
personality is one of the things which predisposes us to choose one approach over the
other. So learning about it can not only help us understand what we value more but also
help us predict our response to a certain situation better like in the employer – employee
dilemma above.
While there are many psychologists who theorise different ways to evaluate a person’s
personality, I want to talk about the ‘OCEAN’ or ‘The Big Five’ Model which divides our
demeanour into 5 traits each with unique attributes associated with them.
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