Brian Little in this month's TIME magazine cover story.
“Take Brian Little. He’s a research psychologist and superstar academic lecturer, his class on personality at Harvard was perennially one of the most popular at the university. He’s also a serious introvert…”
TIME subscribers can read the full article online.
By Brian R. Little | From the April-May 2010 Issue of Academic Matters
Sometimes, the academic life demands that faculty deny their fundamental personality traits. But if collegial respect includes allowing colleagues the latitude to nurture their true characters, academics can survive and thrive amidst the challenges of academic life.
It often comes down to personality. Despite the candidate’s obvious brilliance, tenure is denied. The comment “insufferably arrogant,” uttered almost sotto voce just before the vote, helps tip the scales. Across campus a dedicated but painfully shy associate professor is reading the term’s teaching evaluations and, once again, is simply devastated. And over at the faculty club, a newly minted Professor Emeritus bounces into the retirement party to find only three attendees at the event, trying in vain to create the illusion of a throng. Later, at the bar, the reluctant pseudo-celebrants agree on one thing — this wouldn’t have happened to any of their other colleagues. Personality matters.
Continue readingA 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.”
Read the rest:
Introversion Unbound | Harvard Magazine Jul-Aug 2003.