Big 5 personality traits reflect positive effects for religiosity

Faith & Science Conversation
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This topic was current when I first joined here but I don’t remember being interested then. Like @jammycakes in his posts, my response then would have been dismissive and so uninterested. I also found @Christy’s comments interesting now and I may read some more of this eventually but I would also like to see if there is any current interest in discussing this ir any of the other popular personality trait measures, especially as they pertain to religion.

I took this test online yesterday and am still looking into what it may mean to me. But then, in a weird coincidence, I got an email from another reader of Iain McGilchrist who is also part of a weekly online Zoom where we discuss his writings in light of a number of interesting topics. In it he attached a number of sources including this one:

McGilchrist makes a passing reference to the Big Five in the last section of the last appendix, subtitled “Religious belief and the health of individuals and societies”. He wrote:

“The religious or spiritual are markedly better at dealing with adversity [and] enjoy much greater well-being… being religious or spiritual has a protective effect against depression, anxiety, substance abuse and suicide. It is correlated strongly with personality traits of conscientiousness, agreeableness, extraversion and openness to experience, and is inversely correlated with psychoticism and neuroticism. …In their examination of the role of religion and spirituality in the lives of American teenagers, Smith and Denton write: ‘the differences between more religious and less religious teenagers in the United States are actually significant and consistent across every outcome measure examined: risk behaviours, quality of family and adult relationships, moral reasoning and behaviour, community participation, media consumption, sexual activity, and emotional well-being’.”

Thought that might be of interest for some here but I’d also like to know what insights others may have gained into this or similar tests.

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I’ll take the bait, Mark.
I’ve only done Meyers-Briggs, at least 4 times formally (two work settings, premarriage counseling and part of the adoption process); ISTJ… And then the Science and Religion Quiz here: Science & Religion Quiz: Where are you? - #9 by Kendel, which made me feel like I failed something important.
Never did the enneagrams thing.

I find the 16 Personalities website useful for understanding personality traits and types that are different from mine and looking for help relating. I also find their additional trait (assertive/turbulent) a very helpful addition to M-B: assertive.

I don’t see these as the be-all and end-all by any means, and I understand there are plenty of objections to them. At the same time, even getting us to think a bit deliberately about how we tick and what might make relationships more challenging for us with certain people (rather than just condemning them as faulty humans) can be very useful.

I am interested in exploring this bit from IM. I am not particularly agreeable or open to experience, and I am in no way an extrovert. I do tend to be conscientious (about things I care about).

Tried this 5 traits test and got these results, which once again, seem not all that much like I took the quiz. Sometimes, I think the results would be better, if 5 people who knew me well took the quiz about me.

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And that brings up another topic entirely: how to gain good data, particularly when dealing with highly subjective topics.

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I can attest to the positive effect of faith in Christ. My personality is negative/neutral evil (not according to the aforementioned website). If I removed my faith in Christ, what would remain would be nihilism, violence, pain and an unhealthy obsession with showing people how absurd their existence is. I already struggle every day to love people. And I often fail. (Just cut me off in traffic and I’ll immediately want to use my car to pin you to a wall). If I didn’t just kill myself, I’d probably be in jail.
God and thus morality existing though, gives me a reason to be better. Not only does it “save my skin” from terrifying consequences, it causes me to pause and reflect. Like that one friend who holds you back when you’re about to fight a massive bloke at the pub. You can’t back down, but you’re going to get destroyed. Christ gives me the opportunity, the reason, to avoid the confrontation in the first place (that’s my attempt at a metaphor).

Basically, Christ gives me hope for a better world and the ability to see Humans as more than a plague.
My testimony is not unlike David Wood’s then, in a way.

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Two of those big five seem pretty different from the version I took. Contientiousness, extroversion and agreeableness look the same but I wonder how openness and neuroticism match up with your Intellect/Imagination and Emotional Stability. I’m still just getting a feel for it.

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I’ve always liked MBTI. I took this test again and scored ENTP-A, which is what I always come out (though the assertive part is new), though I am lower on extroversion and thinking than I have been in the past. I think the stressfulness of life and working hard at being more in touch with my feelings have made me want more personal space and be less rationally focused.

Where is the info on the Big Five @MarkD I feel like I have done it at one point, because I do ALL the personality tests, but I can’t remember it.

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Yikes. I thought I put in links. My bad. I’ll go get it.

This is the site I used though there are others. The Big Five Personality Traits | Truity

Here is the link to the test itself.

These were my scores the second time I took it on my own and less rushed. When I my therapist recorded the results the first time online my scores were 90%, 52%, 56%, 65% and 15% so pretty similar.

Openness
Openness describes a person’s tendency to think in abstract, complex ways. High scorers tend to be creative, adventurous, and intellectual. They enjoy playing with ideas and discovering novel experiences. Low scorers tend to be practical, conventional, and focused on the concrete. They tend to avoid the unknown and follow traditional ways.

81%

Conscientiousness
Conscientiousness describes a person’s ability to exercise self-discipline and control in order to pursue their goals. High scorers are organized and determined, and are able to forego immediate gratification for the sake of long-term achievement. Low scorers are impulsive and easily sidetracked.

48%

Extraversion
Extraversion describes a person’s inclination to seek stimulation from the outside world, especially in the form of attention from other people. Extraverts engage actively with others to earn friendship, admiration, power, status, excitement, and romance. Introverts, on the other hand, conserve their energy, and do not work as hard to earn these social rewards.

54%

Agreeableness
Agreeableness describes a person’s tendency to put others’ needs ahead of their own, and to cooperate rather than compete with others. People who are high in Agreeableness experience a great deal of empathy and tend to get pleasure out of serving and taking care of others. They are usually trusting and forgiving. People who are low in Agreeableness tend to experience less empathy and put their own concerns ahead of others.

69%

Neuroticism
Neuroticism describes a person’s tendency to experience negative emotions, including fear, sadness, anxiety, guilt, and shame. While everyone experiences these emotions from time to time, some people are more prone to them than others. High Neuroticism scorers are more likely to react to a situation with fear, anger, sadness, and the like. Low Neuroticism scorers are more likely to brush off their misfortune and move on.

12.5%

I guess I’m too cheap to pay for the personalized evaluation. Maybe I will.

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This is good if you haven’t seen it before

(the segment of the video at 24:30-30:00 is pure gold… as in Gospel gold :grin:)

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Mark, which one did you take? THere were a bunch. I just closed my eyes, and clicked on one.
[EDIT] I see you have now provided the link. THanks!

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Well, we’re both assertive and we tend to think a bit. The rest helps “explain” why we interact SO differently here.
I don’t have any of the documentation from testing I’ve done in the past, so I can’t back it up with anything. But I know my T score has moved much closer to the middle, maybe even moves into F depending on recent contexts. “Storms of life,” listening better to people whose lives are very different from mine and maturity have helped there a lot, I think. Thinking about some conversations when I was much younger, I realize there were good reasons people called my sister to talk about personal issues, not me.

That strikes me as humorous. Why do you do them all?
I was looking at sites for the enneagram stuff last night, and honestly, that felt like I was looking for stuff on crystals and chakras. I hope there’s something less occult-feeling out there, if I”m going to be participating in this discussion.

And the Truity 5 Traits test results this morning:

Openness

83%

Conscientiousness

67%

Extraversion

69%

Agreeableness

67%

Neuroticism

17%

As usual, I think the results are more reflective of what I feel the right answers are and my ability to envision how the right answers fit my cherry-picked examples I have in my head.
For example, the description of “Openness” for which I scored high, is entirely reverse of what I think my score should be:

Openness describes a person’s tendency to think in abstract, complex ways. High scorers tend to be creative, adventurous, and intellectual. They enjoy playing with ideas and discovering novel experiences. Low scorers tend to be practical, conventional, and focused on the concrete. They tend to avoid the unknown and follow traditional ways.

I am practical, conventional and focused on the concrete. Maybe this is all relative? Is there anyone who is more practical, conventional and concrete? Hard for me to imagine that……

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I’m pretty adamant about not trying to give them what I think they like but that still leaves so many choices about how to answer. For example if I answered based on what I think of as my starting nature I’m sure my extroversion score would be much lower. But I tend to think of instances and patterns which affirm the progress I’ve made in keeping my center in social settings and that bumps it up I believe.

I remember taking the Meier’s Briggs as I neared graduation at Cal but I can’t recall now how it came out. Next slow time that comes around maybe I’ll try it again.

… said the lady with the F&T fixation. :wink:

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  • who is constantly asking:
    “So, what do I make of this F&T book? What do I do with it?” and desperately making connections to other things I’ve learned (particularly about Communism and Marxism)

  • Who shuns (nearly all) threads of speculative theology. This can be confirmed by the threads I am absent from or never look at (don’t respond to). There were two I can think of, that I participated in. One had direct (if real) implications for me, against which I was willing to argue tooth and nail. The other one involved more curiosity in the author’s thinking.

  • Who has NO PATIENCE for most discussions that she has classified as “odd imaginary things that gearhead boys argue about when there is no possible way to know, or if it even exists.” This can be confirmed by the threads I am absent from or never look at (don’t respond to).

Maybe it’s relative. That makes me curious what a more practical, conventional and focused on the concrete thinker would be like.

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Yeah … ain’t nobody got time for that foolishness. :wink:

And yet you don’t mind exchanging verses from Cummings (darned auto capitalization - AI my arse!) Why we skip those discussions isn’t because no sense can be made of any such questions. It can be but not in any simple minded way that would permit one person to grab another by the lapels and demand that they recognize our logic.

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Cummings isn’t practical, conventional and focused on the concrete?

:heart_eyes:

What is more practical, conventional and concrete than existence, being human, love, interpretive typography?

:smiling_face:

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Well you’ve got me there. But on the surface it’s easy to see why some may put it in the non essential bin.

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I was 100 Openness, 37.5 Conscientiousness, 96 Extroversion, 60 Agreeableness, 8 Neuroticism

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Because it is part of my personality to be unendingly curious and distractable and seek new and interesting input all the time, probably.

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Yes, some of it is total New Age woo. As I understand it, it was originally developed by ancient monks as some kind of spiritual direction tool. But then it got rediscovered by some hippy-dippy person who re-popularized it as part of some hodge-podge modern Eastern spirituality thing. But then some Christians went back and re-situated it in the ancient Christian context for use with Christian spiritual direction again, and those are the only people whose stuff I have actually read on it.

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I forget if you are a Richard Rohr fan or not … but if so - and when you decide you want to be distracted for hours and hours from something else you really ought to be doing instead … try his “introduction” to Enneagrams. I put “intro” into scare quotes because the part 1 of this (yes - I said part 1) is a couple hours long! But once you start listening to him, if you’re like me, you can’t stop. It isn’t because I was so much into Enneagrams as I was how he was talking about them. By the time he’s done, you’ll have figured out where you are in all that too. If it had some New Age woo in it … it was certainly presented in a solidly Christian context here by Rohr - who also does give some of the history of all that.

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My results

Openness: 79%
Conscientiousness 42%
Extraversion 52%
Agreeableness 67%
Neuroticism 31%

Looks like I have most of you edged out in the Neuroticism department! :crazy_face:

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Don’t know myself, Merv. From the blurb I read on The Universal Christ I don’t imagine so. But I could still try to find hours and hours, or at least a little time to start out with, to see what I think of his “intro” to enneagrams. I suspect you would have recognized new age woo, if it had been there. The stuff I was finding was new age woo. Rohr’s name didn’t come up with it.

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