Personality can be a fun topic to explore—we take online personality quizzes, predict which traits our friends will score highly on, and scrutinize how accurate we think our results are. Sometimes you really know yourself, and sometimes you learn something from the results! While some of these exercises are truly just for entertainment, there is science supporting our understanding of personality and how it reflects in our values, preferences, and behaviors.
You’ve probably been told that your personality is unique, and that’s true -- if we all had the same one, we’d all be behaving the same way, and that would get boring really quickly. Also, different personalities fit well with different types of jobs – you can imagine the personality of a computer scientist may not be the same as that of a circus clown (even if they both wear big huge glasses). In the following section, you’ll read the description of an imaginary person’s job and create a five factor model of their personality that you think they’ll need to do their job as best they can. There’s no right or wrong answer here -- but you do have to explain your reasoning!
Do you think you feel everything that touches you all day? Of course you feel your pencil in your hand, the warm water of a shower, a high-five with a friend. But what about your clothes—do you feel them on your body? You probably do now because I mentioned it. Most of the day, though, we don’t even think about the sensation of our clothes, even though they’re touching a great deal of our skin. The reason for this is sensory gating, your brain’s ability to ignore irrelevant signals.
