In "Spent." Geoffrey Miller wrote a few introducing pages on the "Central Six". The following is an excerpt of these lively formulated pages:
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A century of psychology has identified six major dimensions of variation that predict human behavior and that are salient to us. These are the key individual differences that distinguish human minds. These are the mental traits that can be measured with good reliability and validity, that are genetically heritable and stable across the life span, that predict behavior across diverse settings and domains (school, work, leisure, consumption, and family life) and that seem to be universal across cultures and even across many animal species. If you know how somebody scores on each of the "Central Six" traits, you can infer a lot about his character, capabilities, virtues, and vices.
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G is for general intelligence, the first of the Central Six traits. It is also known as smarts, brains, general cognitive ability, or IQ. Shortly after Charles Spearman's key work in 1904, intelligence became the best-studied, best-established trait in psychology. Higher intelligence predicts higher average success in every domain of life: school, work, money, mating, parenting, physical health, and mental health. It predicts avoiding many misfortunes, such as car accidents, jail, drug addiction, sexually transmitted diseases, divorce, and jury duty. It is one of the most sexually attractive traits in every culture studied, for both sexes. It is socially desired in friends, students, mentors, coworkers, bosses, employeees, housemates, and especially platoon mates. It remains ideologically controversial because its predictive power is so high, and its distribution across individuals is unequal.
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The other members of the Central Six are the Big Five personailty traits: openness, conscientiousness, agreeableness, stability, and extraversion. These are more recent discoveries, dating back from arount 1980, and they have revitalized the study of human personality. They clearly and efficiently map the main individual differences in human behavioral dispositions, and they are much more reliable and valid than other ways of describing human personality in psychology or marketing. Like general intelligence, they are genetically heritable, stable across life, and universal across cultures. Like intelligence, they are very salient when we choose social or sexual partners. They can be represented by the letters O, C, A, S, and E, and they can be reliably measured by several different personality questionnaires.
O is for openness to experience: curiosity, novelty seeking, broadmindedness, interest in culture, ideas, and aesthetics. ... People high on openness tend to seek complexity and novelty, readily accept changes and innovations, and prefer grand new visions to mundane, predictable ruts.
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C is for conscientiousness: self-control, willpower, reliability, consistency, dependability, trustworthiness, and the ability to delay gratification. Conscientious people pursue long-term goals. They fulfill their promises and commitments, resist impulses and bad habits, and feel embedded in a network of mutual social obligations. In Chinese terms, they tend to build strong guanxi - a strong, reliable social network. They like to make plans, keep everything organized, seek perfection, crave achievement, and prefer doing one focused task at a time. People low in conscientiousness tend to be more comfortable with spontaneity and chaos. They accept things, people, and achievement levels that are "good enough" rather than "optimal," and they shift more easily among ongoing tasks. Yet they also show lower levels of drive and ambition. Conscientiousness predicts regular attendance to school and work, completion of assignments on time, cooperativeness in professional relationships, and civic engagement. It predicts eating a healthy diet, exercising regularly, avoiding drug addiction, and staying healthy. Along with intelligence, it is one of the two traits most desired by employers. On the other hand, because conscientiousness predicts effective contraception use, it is strongly disfavoured by natural selection in the modern world. Extremely high conscientiousness shades over into obsessive-compulsive disorder and results in overwashed hands, whereas extremely low conscientiousness shades over into reckless impulsivity and results in long criminal records. Low conscientiousness is moderately related to one of the two main dimensions of mental illness: the "externalizing" dimension associated with childhood "conduct disorder" (deliquency), adult "antisocial disorder" (psychopathy), and "substance abuse" (alcoholism and drug addiction).
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A is for agreeableness: warmth, kindness, sympathy, empathy, trust, compliance, modesty, benevolence, peacefulness. Saints are very agreeable; psychopaths are very disagreeable. People high in agreeableness tend to seek harmony, adapt to others' needs, and keep their opinions to themselves when doing so avoids conflict. People low in agreeableness tend to seek glory or notoriety, persue their own needs, and express their opinions forcefully. Agreeableness is perceived not just as peronality trait, but as a moral trait. It corresponds to what most people would call "good" as opposed to "evil", "altruistic" as opposed to "selfish", "peaceful" as opposed to"aggressive". (Personality psychologists hate to sound judgmental about traits, so they try to avoid such moral terms.) Agreeable people often make much more pleasant long-term sexual partners, friend, relatives, in laws, co-workers, and babysitters, so we often value agreeableness in others. In game-theory terms, the agreeable make better reciprocators, and contribute more to public goods, because they value other people's well-being ("subjective utility"), not just their own. ... Disagreeable people, on the other hand, can often take social and sexual advantage of others, so there can be major evolutionary benefits to disagreeableness, especially for males. (This is why most wild animals are rather disagreeable, and why most humans, like other domesticated species, are much more agreeable.) People low in agreeableness can be cold, distant, aggressive, irritable, selfish, and arrogant; they lie, cheat, steal, rape, and kill more often. ... Low agreeableness, even more than low conscientiousness, is related to the externalizing dimension of mental illness (deliquency, psychopathy, alcoholism, drug addiction), and with various nasty behaviors that impose high costs on others (promiscuity, philandering, wife beating, child sexual abuse, reckless driving). Both agreeableness and conscientiousness tend to increase from early adulthood to middle adulthood, while externalizing decreases.
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S is for stability, especially emotional stability. Stability means adaptability, equanimity, maturity, stress resistance. People high in stability are resilient: usually optimistic, calm, at ease, and quick to rebound from setbacks. People low in stability are neurotic: anxious, worried, self-conscious, depressed, pessimistic, quick to anger, quick to cry, and slow to rebound from setbacks. Low stability coresponds with the "internalizing" dimension of mental illness that is associated with distress (major depression, dysthymia, generalized anxiety disorder) and fear (phobias and panic disorder). High stability correlates positively with general mental health and general happiness, including job satisfaction and marital satisfaction. In fact, in the developed world, emotional stability predicts overall life satisfaction more strongly than does income or any of the other Central Six traits.
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E is for
Extraversion: how friendly, gregarious, talkative, funny, expressive, assertive, active, excitement seeking, and socially self-confident one is. Extraverts are social; introverts are loners. Almost all psychlogists from Carl Jung onward have agreed that extraversion is a key dimension of individual differences. Shyness arises as a combination of low extraversion and low stability. Extraverts also show higher "surgency" - higher levels of activity, power, dominance, and self-confidence. They show a lot of positive emotions, prefer working with and trusting others, enjoy leadership, and prefer being physically active. They go to parties more and drink more. They are more sexually adventurous and unconventional. Low extraversion is not just associated with shyness; its also associated with social passivity and low levels of social status seeking. People low in extraversion tend to suppress positive feelings, prefer working alone, prefer being physically passive, and are less trusting and less inclined to seek leadership roles. Since extraverts are more active and meet more people, they tend to have more friends and sexual partners.
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Spent. Geoffrey Miller; 2009
