What A Lovely Personality You Have!

For one of my classes, the professor asked that we take the Big 5 personality test and then we had a class discussion about the test and it's inclusion as a personnel selection tool. If you have 15 minutes to kill you can take the short by visiting this website here. If you have about 40 minutes to kill, you can also find the longer at the same site. They're both reliable, with the added benefit of the longer one being even more reliable than the shorter one. Just take the shorter one. It's kind of fun.

Extraversion	59
Friendliness	65
Gregariousness	55
Assertiveness	63
ACtivity Level	27
Excitement Seeking	26
Cheerfulness	90
Agreeableness	86
Trust	99
Morality	81
Altruism	89
Cooperation	80
Modesty	5
Sympathy	82
Conscientiousness	90
Self-Efficacy	90
Orderliness	98
Dutifulness	88
Achievement-Striving	26
Self-Discipline	47
Cautiousness	96
Neuroticism	13
Anxiety	2
Anger	8
Depression	9
Self-Consciousness	58
Vulnerability	19
Openness to Experience	48
Imagination	28
Artistic Interests	92
Emotionality	84
Adventurousness	28
Intellect	79
Liberalism	0

So the bolded categories constitute the "Big 5" personality traits. The assumption is that all traits can be collapsed into those five categories. It's on a 0-100 point scale, with near 50 being average, obviously. There are several outcomes that I think are kind of funny - I'm totally immodest. I'm about as far from liberal as can be. I actually kind of think that most of the stuff is pretty on about me. A couple of notes about the scale. The traits are supposed to be stable, meaning that they don't change over time, but people who take these things say that the results do change for them. A lot of it depends on your mood, or your current situation in life. And, this might be more a reflection of how you perceive yourself than what your actual personality is like.

Something interesting you might want to try is take it yourself, and then have someone else that knows you well take it also. That could cause some fights, but it'll be interesting.

In class yesterday my professor asked if we thought that there was a perfect personality. For whatever reason, the discussion kind of went elsewhere, but I thought it was an interesting question. I'm going to have to say no, and this response is informed by my perspective on the gospel...

If salvation were an individual thing, then maybe there would be some kind of perfect personality, but it's not. Salvation comes with husbands and wives, in families, and learning to live peaceably and happily in communities with other people. I think the main benefit to salvation coming that way is that it allows for variety among us as people, to become saved with all of our quirks and idiosyncrasies. When I imagine Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ, I actually imagine them with different personalities. Am I alone on that? Where that comes from for me is when I think about people who are super righteous (prophets and apostles, for example), and they all have their distinct personalities, but I would think it safe to assume that they are all going to be exalted. Joseph Smith had his personality that was entirely different than Brigham Young's. Gordon Hinckley was known for his humor and cheer. Anyway, there are a lot of great people in the kingdom of heaven and I'm pretty sure they're not all going to be carbon copies of each other.