Good personality means what?

Miss Congeniality - we all know this award. In the beauty contest one candidate is selected by all the other candidates. Essentially that means that this is the woman that is best liked by the other candidates. She has the "best personality". The same thing basically holds true in evaluations of people: when someone says, "Oh, he/she has such a great personality", what they are really saying is that person is such a likeable person. Good personality = personality that makes other people feel good. Is this really the best personality? Big Frank thinks not.

What if the criteria were set up so that best would equal most interesting, or most unusual, or most beneficial. In all cases this may not be the most likeable person. If we take the BIG FIVE personality traits: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism, and then create some kind of consituent criteria using these, that would make this choice a little more meaningful. Each item could be scored on a scale of 1 (low) to 3 (high) depending on how characteristic this trait is of the person. Here is han example of how the criteria might look:

Openness

__ active imagination

__ aesthetic sensitivity

__ attentiveness to inner feelings

__ preference for variety

__ intellectual curiostiy

Conscientiousness

__ self-disciplined

__ carefulness

__ thoroughness

__ organization
__ deliberation

__ need for achievment

Extraversion

__ gregarious

__ assertive

__ generally seeking excitement

Agreeableness

__ empathetic

__ considerate
__ friendly

__ generous

__ helpful

Neuroticism (lack of)

__ emotionally stable

__ less reactive to stress

__ calm

__ even tempered

__ less likely to feel tense or rattled

This is Big Frank's list of desirable traits. Your list might be different. For example - you might like introverts better - in that case just substitute for the above three: reserved, less outgoing, and less sociable. A similar substitution could take place for the others. In the end you have a scoring system in which 72 is the top possible score. This person would be BEST PERSONALITY. This could be used in beauty contests, and it could also be used to evaluate friends, relatives, potential dates, and in gossip. For example, if you said that so-and-so was a 13 everyone would know that he/she had a rotten personality; whereas a 60 would be someone that you could say with some assurance had a good personality. Let's hope that this system is used more often - it would certainly let people know what "good personality" meant. Try scoring yourself so that when you meet people you can shorten the time it takes to know people by exchanging personality scores, e.g., I'm a 57 what are you?