The Complexity of Personality: From Snowden to Superman
Up to now, I have criticized simple theoretical models of personality and the way in which the complexity of human personality has largely been ignored in personality research as well as in the field of computational personality. Let me try to describe pe
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The Complexity of Personality: From Snowden to Superman
Up to now, I have criticized simple theoretical models of personality and the way in which the complexity of human personality has largely been ignored in personality research as well as in the field of computational personality. Let me try to describe personality by adopting a more complex, dynamic and one may even say radical approach. My first argument is that personality is not a monolithic and static object but a heterogeneous dynamic system. Therefore, personality exhibits several stable states (e.g. attractors) rather than one. This means that, when studying human personality, we cannot aim to exhaust it by using a single or even a few fixed personality tags (e.g. extravert). Rather, personality as a dynamic system is like a landscape we tour and where we “rest” in various valleys. In addition, personality may be described as a “dissipative dynamic system” that is governed by non-linear dynamics. Non-linearity is easy to prove. What we describe as the dimensions of personality cannot be modeled as linear functions of other variables where a constant change in the independent variable is expressed as a constant change in the personality dimension. Think, for instance, about being open to experience as a personality dimension. Can you imagine a linear model that explains this variable by expressing a constant change as a response to a constant change in another variable? Is it possible to argue that openness to experience is a linear function of liberal education? Is it possible to argue that an obsessive personality, or what the old Freudians called an “anal” personality, is a function of tough parenting practices during toilet training, as they hypothesized? The idea of personality as a dissipative system (or structure) is a little more challenging. A dissipative system is far from equilibrium and its structure is characterized by symmetry-breaking and complex structures. What has this physical terminology got to do with human personality and its study through computational tools? Think about the irreversibility of time. Our sense of self is to a large extent governed by an autobiographical memory through which we try to make sense of our experiences as individuals by weaving them into a coherent story. This effort is made because time is irreversible and because our self-concepts cannot be formed along a symmetrical axis. For example, as a young man I cannot truly see © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 Y. Neuman, Computational Personality Analysis, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-42460-6_8
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The Complexity of Personality: From Snowden to Superman
myself as an old man by placing a symmetrical axis at the midpoint in my life, in the same way that, as an old man, I cannot truly see myself as a young man but only through the constrained spectacles of my present situation and past memories. Time flows in a reverse order only in fiction, such as in Philip K. Dick’s story “Your Appointment Will Be Yesterday,” and therefore symmetry-breaking a
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