Introversion Unbound | Harvard Magazine Jul-Aug 2003

A century ago, psychoanalysts declared that the human personality was largely fixed by age five. More recently, biologically oriented psychologists have detected characteristic signs of temperament in infancy. Even so, personality psychologist Brian Little, lecturer in psychology and a former Radcliffe Institute fellow, is “wary of spurious genetic postulations and claims of a genetic basis for fixed traits.” Another of psychology’s pioneers, William James, M.D. 1869, asserted that our psychological traits are “set like plaster” by age 30. Little counters that James was “only 50 percent correct—we are half-plastered. There is a heavily genetic aspect to the first stratum of personality. But our brains evolved a neocortex, which enables us to override these biological impulses to act in a certain way.”

In a series of papers and a forthcoming book, Human Natures and Well Beings, Little bucks the current trend of biological determinism in psychology. He argues for the existence of “free traits”: tendencies expressed by individual choice. Little ticks off the “Big Five” personality traits—openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism—and suggests thinking of them as musical notation. “Fixed traits are like a chord, five notes played at once,” he explains. “But you need to extend personality temporally. Over time, traits might be expressed more like an arpeggio, with one or another note dominant at any given time.”

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Introversion Unbound | Harvard Magazine Jul-Aug 2003.