Retrospective Analysis of Personality
Name
Institution

Retrospective Analysis of Personality
Personality is defined in terms of the ways how people think, feel, and behave. Some aspects of personality may change over time, and some may form a relatively stable component of personality. This essay will describe the changed and unchanged traits of my personality and explore the impact of nature and nurture on such transformations. It will also assess not only my personality within a retrospective paradigm but also the retrospective analysis itself, by identifying possible biases and by comparing retrospection with the scientific method.
In retrospect, three traits, openness, extraversion, and agreeableness of my personality, have seen an elevated rank in the trait assessment model, while the other two of the “big 5” traits, conscientiousness and neuroticism, have remained moderate (Burger, 2010). In other words, I have become more open to new experiences as I engaged in more activities, such as working part-time. I became more extraverted after I was blessed with plenty of positive human interaction experiences. I have also cultivated a high level of agreeableness when it comes to offering help. My other two traits, conscientiousness and neuroticism, have kept moderate because I have always striven to guard my morality and preserve my inner peace.
In brief, 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 may have felt anxious about the outside world, wondering how other people would influence my life. Moreover, I may have not been able to develop a strong sense of agreeableness due to insufficient human contact. In this sense, nurture seemed to largely affect my personality. However, with regard to conscientiousness and neuroticism, the impact of nature seemed to outweigh nurture. I never attempted to make impossible promises and always kept promises once I did. Furthermore, I was calm; even as a child, I rarely caused a scene when faced with unmet needs. It seemed that I was born with a strong sense of conscientiousness and calmness.
While analyzing my personality as I did above, I must allow that biases may invalidate my judgment. One possible 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. As such, if I had employed this psychological defense frequently, my analysis would have been inaccurate, possibly influencing my “big 5” scores (Reisberg & Hertel, 2004). Likewise, implicit memories, which are unconsciously stored memories, can affect my analysis as well; I may tend to use it to document one of my traits, even if such trait has already been transformed to a great extent. Additionally, distorted memory may cause a misinformation effect and confirmation bias (Reisberg & Hertel, 2004). A misinformation effect may make me distortedly remember a friendly smile as an intimate connection. The confirmation bias here can be understood as the way people filter and select memories that make them feel better about themselves. If such bias is operative, I may, in self-evaluation, overstate my assertions regarding conscientiousness.
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. 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.
As discussed above, retrospective analysis of personality through reflection on past experiences may be contaminated by bias and inaccuracy. In order to observe objectively and obtain realistic results, psychologists rely more on systematic scientific studies than on retrospection. 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 (Argyle, 2013). 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 (Argyle, 2013). 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.
To sum up, 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. In this sense, it is more reliable to adopt the scientific method than retrospection to analyze one’s personality.

References
Argyle, M. (2013). The scientific study of social behavior (psychology revivals). London, UK: Routledge.
Burger, J. (2010). Personality. Belmont, CA: Cengage Learning.
Reisberg, D., & Hertel, P. (2004). Memory and emotion. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.