2015
Todd Marbury
Dr. Lauren Goldstein
Intro to Psychology
June 7, 2015
2015
Todd Marbury
Dr. Lauren Goldstein
Intro to Psychology
June 7, 2015
Retrospective Analysis of Personality
Retrospective Analysis of Personality

Through the years I wondered what made me change my personality towards the way I look at things but now I see why I drastically made these changes due to the different people and environments I have been. I have changed in too many ways to recount all of them, but a few I will list. In this essay I will discuss the aspect of my life that has and has not changed, analyze the role of nature and nurture within my personality and discuss why most memories are bias, which makes systemic scientific more valued than individual accounts.
Psychologists strive to understand how personality develops as well as how it influences the way we think and behave. This area of psychology seeks to understand personality and how it varies among individuals as well as how people are similar in terms of personality. While there is no single agreed upon definition of personality, it is often thought of as something that arises from within the individual and remains fairly consistent throughout life. It encompasses all of the thoughts, behavior patterns, and social attitudes that impact how we view ourselves and what we believe about others and the world around us. Understanding personality allows psychologists to predict how people will respond in certain situations and the sorts of things they prefer and value.
In retrospect, three traits, openness, extraversion, and agreeableness of my personality, have increased, while the other two of the “big 5” traits, conscientiousness and neuroticism, have remained common (Myers, 2014). In other words, I have become more open to new experiences as I engaged in more activities, such as working part-time. In 2015, I am a father and I am engaged, so I am in a different world and I’m more of an out spoken and social person than I have ever been. I have become more extraverted. I have also cultivated a high level of agreeableness when it comes to offering help. My other two traits, conscientiousness and neuroticism, have stayed the same because I have always striven to guard my morality and preserve my inner peace. In 2005, I was jumped by many guys after school, which caused me to stay guarded and much more watchful. It also caused me to be less trusting of people I interacted with because one of the men were a person I thought I knew. I was not really as goofy and cheerful as I used to be.
Nature and nurture have together shaped my personality. When I was growing up, I did not make many friends and was shy, which made me less open to strangers and new experiences. As a result, I felt anxious about the outside world, wondering how others influenced my life. In the sense, nurture seemed to largely affect my personality. I never attempted to make impossible promises and always kept promises once I did. I was calm as a child, I rarely caused a scene when faced with unmet needs. It seemed that I was born with a sense of strong will and calmness.
I must admit that biases may invalidate my judgment. One source of bias is memory-related, for example, in the form of selective, implicit, or distorted memories of past experiences. It is suggested that people tend to repress unpleasant memories, and if this lasts long enough, the memories will be erased. In the case in which I was jumped, there are many memories from that night that I have suppressed, so much so, I forget about it ever happening. Likewise, implicit memories, which are unconsciously stored memories, can affect my account of that night. I recall when my fiancé was giving birth to my son earlier last year, and it was so long. She was induced and drugged up, as though was I as well with marijuana. I remember the nurse stopping her from pushing after ten centimeters. I was petrified as the nurse explained to me that the cord was wrapped around the baby's arm. So they rushed her for an emergency C-section. Although it was a great moment in time, I was so exhausted and my fiancé held my baby long before I did. While long story short, a year later I was reciting my fiancé’s long labor and found out from my Aunt Valerie that the cord was actually wrapped around my son's neck twice and that's why she had a C-section. This event is very biased because there were nurses who would explain the event happened in a different way. One event has the story through several different insights on those thirteen hours of labor. Additionally, distorted memory may cause a misinformation effect and confirmation bias. The confirmation bias here can be understood as the way people filter and select memories that make them feel better about themselves.
Another possible distortion of retrospection is the impact of intelligence-related factors, involving both IQ and EQ, such as one’s ability to reason, think, effectively solve problems, and respond with reality-based emotions. (Myers, 2014) Low level reasoning can, for instance, cause people to attribute the wrong cause to a given effect and to assign disproportionate emotional weights to them. Similarly, people with specific problem-solving skills are more likely to offer help when it is needed. This may not correlate highly with their actual tendency toward agreeableness or extraversion, to the extent that the display of those skills may reveal more about cognitive style and capacity than about personality traits.
Retrospective analysis of personality through reflection on past experiences may be contaminated by bias and inaccuracy. Systematic scientific studies involve a series of rigorous procedures that begin with a theory-based assumption, followed by an experiment, which involves two variables (independent variable and dependent variable) and two testing groups (experimental group and control group) and is conducted to test the assumption (Myers, 2014). The scientific studies can remove or, at least, drastically reduce bias and inaccuracy, especially in clinical research. They adopt placebos, blind studies, and double-blind studies as controls. Placebos can be given to subjects in the control group to detect a placebo effect. If this effect cannot be removed, psychologists can still use single or double-blind studies to avoid subject bias or experimenter bias. In short, unlike retrospection, scientific studies control various biases and examine the cause-effect relationship based on repeatable experiments with sizeable samples, instead of on casual and unreliable past experiences, and thus, are more valuable to psychologists. (Myers, 2014)
Reflecting on the experience has helped me to balance, cope and develop a better understanding of my own strengths and weakness. The most important skill that needs to be developed is communication. Therefore my fiancé and I are developing our foundation and communication skills so that the relationship may achieve maximum success. Although the transformed and consistent aspects of my personality have been identified through retrospective analysis, the result may be invalid due to bias and inaccuracy. It is more reliable to adopt the scientific method than retrospection to analyze one’s personality.