Personomics: Putting the many dimensions of personality into good use

Description

Researchers typically represent personality using a relatively small number of trait dimensions. But it has become clear that personality variation among people is much higher-dimensional than many of us previously thought. There are possibly hundreds of unique personality traits that are stable, detectable with different assessment methods and partly heritable, also displaying distinct developmental trends and associations with life outcomes. This poses conceptual and methodological challenges; some may even fair that embracing this would mean doing away with personality science as we know it. However, I argue that rather than shying away and/or ignoring this high-dimensionality, we can capitalize on it. I will describe a new research program, personomics, that treats personality traits as a diverse set markers of the “persome” rather than something assumed to “carve nature at its joints”. Among other things, personomics allows us to study systematic variations among traits in their various attributes and thereby tackle important questions on how personality develops and intersects with life outcomes. Besides its name, personomics draws on genetic research in many other ways.

Period	21 Nov 2021
Held at	Queens Univ Belfast, Queens University Belfast, IGFS
Degree of Recognition	National