On some limitations of personality psychology

…Big Five Conscientiousness was not found to correlate with mask wearing in a sample of thousands in Spain during the coronavirus epidemic (Barceló & Sheen, 2020). This was not treated by the authors as any kind of falsification of the Big Five, or even evidence against it. The abstract noun “conscientiousness” has a rich meaning, only part of which is captured by the Big Five, and only a tinier part of which is captured by the two-question methodology used here (“does a thorough job” and “tends to be lazy”). But Conscientiousness is often correlated to health behaviors, and is often said to predict them with various strengths, even though the questions in the survey focus on job performance and tidiness.

Here is the full essay “by a literal banana,” interesting throughout.