During Lecture and Discussion both, we covered the Big Five dimensions of personality. In Lecture it was mentioned how everybody has all the dimensions, but the differences in the values of even a single dimension results in drastically different individuals. In discussion we just saw the effect of 1 differing trait in practice.
Personality quizzes in general remind me of the Strengths Quest test- a test I had to take for Orientation. While the Big Five worked at least during discussion, I still have to wonder at the accuracy of the Strengths Quest quiz. The goal of the Big Five is just to explain how people act in a given situation - if you have socially undesirable traits then it's not an issue, you just aren't the ideal. Strengths Quest on the other hand attempts to force people to have positive traits (ALL my traits sounded good; I was not allowed to just be "low-low"), and appears to function on relativity - that is, "Are you a better leader than you are a woo-er?" rather than "Are you a leader?". While I can see how the traits are probably more specific sub-categories of the Big Five, I have to wonder if they're really accurate or if the need to choose the five best traits (rather than all traits that exceed a certain threshold) skews results.
I have no idea how the Strengths quest quantifies their data, but the fact that everyone gets exactly five traits makes it feel like the algorithm would not consider if traits near the cutoff-line had only a small difference between them, like my 0-1 results in the discussion inventory. Personally, I got the traits "Strategic" and "Command". During the Welcome Week presentation on Strengths it was stated that command people would tend to be excited about the presentation while deliberative people would tend to be skeptical of the whole thing. Clearly one prediction had to be wrong, and overall the huge number of possible results made things overly complicated and potentially contradictory.
What I have to wonder is if Strengths Quests' huge number of traits makes things too complex to be accurate, or if it just gives conflicting results because it did not control for a specific situation like the inventory in class. I believe the official statement was that the assigned traits are not necessarily ones we have yet, but are instead traits that we may develop, but that explanation is less satisfactory - Just because my strength is not "Harmony" doesn't mean I can't learn to be an arbitrator or help people get along. In the textbook the potential for personalities to change is mentioned, but it does not sound either controllable or reliable, so I also have to wonder how that plays into the stance that Strengths are things for us to develop. Sure Strengths are smaller than a Big Five dimension so there's more wiggle room, but it should still take considerable effort to alter.
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