Study guide: Self-Knowledge, Personality, and Careers

1. Forms and Uses of Self-Knowledge

Analytical self-knowledge is propositional knowledge that predicts or explains a person's preferences or behaviours, whereas experiential self-knowledge describes how sensations, emotions, and thoughts interact.

• The course presents knowing oneself as relevant to career exploration, including understanding personal strengths and interests.

Analytical knowledge explains preferences; experiential knowledge describes lived inner experience.

2. Psychometric Test Foundations

Key Concepts & Definitions

• Construct validity: Asks whether a test measures the construct it claims to measure.
• Internal consistency: Asks whether items within the same dimension are correlated with one another.
• Predictive validity: Asks whether a measure predicts an outcome.
• Test-retest reliability: Asks whether people obtain consistent results across time.

3. Personality Models and Cultural Variation

★ Must-know

• The Big Five dimensions are:

  • Extraversion
  • Openness to experience
  • Agreeableness
  • Conscientiousness
  • Emotional stability

• Tests based on the Big Five, such as the NEO-PI-R, generalise well across cultures, although replication errors can arise from poor-quality data, linguistic nuances, and the cultural significance of concepts.

Further detail

• The lexical hypothesis is associated with Galton (1884), and Allport and Odbert extracted 4,504 adjectives from a dictionary in 1936.

• Allport first used the term personality traits in 1937.

• Cattell reduced the list to 171 adjectives in 1943, and factor analyses yielded 16 traits.

• Fiske (1949) and Tupes and Christal (1961) found five personality factors, initially interpreting the result as a replication error.

The HEXACO is presented as an alternative six-factor personality model to the Big Five. - Lee, K., & Ashton, M. C., 2004

• A study of the Tsimane found evidence more consistent with a Big Two structure oriented around prosociality and industriousness than with strong, consistent support for the Big Five. - Gurven, M.et al How universal is the Big Five?, 2013

4. Predictive Validity and Life Outcomes

★ Must-know

• A synthesis of 15 meta-analyses reported that conscientiousness and emotional stability, and possibly extraversion and agreeableness, predict job performance. - Barrick, M. R., Mount, M. K., & Judge, T. A., Personality and performance at the beginning of the new millennium: What do we know and where do we go next?, 2001

Further detail

• Emotional stability, extraversion, and conscientiousness are strong predictors of well-being. - Barrick, M. R., Mount, M. K., & Judge, T. A., Personality and performance at the beginning of the new millennium: What do we know and where do we go next?, 2001

• Extraversion, openness to experience, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and emotional stability are associated with many positive outcomes, including proenvironmental attitudes and behaviours. - Soutter, A. R. B., Bates, T. C., & Mõttus, R., Big Five and HEXACO personality traits, proenvironmental attitudes, and behaviors: A meta-analysis, 2020

• Measuring personality aspects or facets, such as assertiveness and enthusiasm within extraversion, increases predictive power compared with measuring only broad traits.

Psychometric tests assess traits using validity and reliability criteria, whereas nonscientific personality tests are presented as a contrasting category whose predictive performance is questioned.

5. Personality Stability and Change

★ Must-know

• The rank-order stability of personality traits increases substantially throughout early childhood before reaching a plateau in early adulthood. - Bleidorn, W., Schwaba, T., Zheng, A., Hopwood, C. J., Sosa, S. S., Roberts, B., Personality stability and change: A meta-analysis of longitudinal studies, 2022

Further detail

• Many people want to change their personality, and young people are particularly motivated to do so. - Miller, T. J., Assessing the desire to change personality across methods, 2022

• Personality change goals can be specific to particular traits. - Thielmann, I., & De Vries, R. E., Who wants to change and how? On the trait-specificity of personality change goals, 2021

Repeated states contribute to stable trait levels, while traits can still change over time.

6. Skills, Habits, and Personality Change

★ Must-know

• The course describes personality as involving motivations, skills, and opportunities.

• When motivations, skills, and opportunities are present, a person can enter a state of openness to experience; frequently repeated states contribute to a high openness-to-experience trait.

• To support behavioural change, new skills must be turned into habits through practical opportunities to use the new behaviour.

Further detail

• Social, emotional, and behavioural skills are presented as skills underlying personality traits. - Soto, C. J., Napolitano, C. M., Sewell, M. N., Yoon, H. J., & Roberts, B. W., An integrative framework for conceptualizing and assessing social, emotional, and behavioral skills: The BESSI, 2022

Social desirability does not mean that less socially desirable personality traits are useless or have no reason to exist.

Memory Hook

Motivations, skills, and opportunities enable states; repeated states become traits.

7. Interpreting Career Assessment Results

Essential Points

• The assessment results are based on person-environment fit.

• A percentile indicates how a person's score is situated compared with a standard population.

• The three assessments are:

  • The Big Five
  • RIASEC professional interests
  • Work values based on Schwartz values