It’s been awhile since I was doing psychology, but following is a list of the top of my head (note that I’m likely to misremember or misrepresent some of these):
* One good study demonstrated that a common drug used to treat Parkinson deices has an unfortunate side-effect of limiting dopamine levels in your frontal cortex. People who used that drug are way more likely to engage in anti-social behavior after they start treatment then before. It seems like dopamine levels in your pre-frontal cortex can severely affect your personality.
* Social scientists often create amazing studies where they are easily able to manipulate the environment in such a way that they get participants to e.g. lie, cheat, etc. Off course there is variability within these studies and you can argue that personality trades explains this variability, however I don’t know if that has been done, and if it has, I wouldn’t be surprised if you would find that other factors such as religiousness, socio-economic status, gender, age etc. explains a bigger part of the variability in those social science studies.
* If you are looking for a better general theory of behavior then cognitive science has a number of constructs which don’t have this problem of operational definition. For example research has shown that you can prime people with a stimuli to increase the chances the participants will respond to similar stimuli in a short timespan afterwards.
* Behavioralism is more like a philosophy then science and posits that you can explain behavior by looking at the reinforcement history of an individual. That theory has been somewhat debunked by cognitive science, however behavioralists are still doing some impressive research which shows how you can modify behavior by offering some reinforcement contingencies. The same variability applies though as with social the social science studies.
I tried to sway away from specific studies because it has been a minute since I was studying psychology. But I hope this list is still relevant and accurate, and that it inspires you to go look for the individual studies which backs these claims.
Do note that what I’m doing here is a bit unfair. I’m making grand claims backed by evidence I think exists, but pushing the responsibility of looking for these evidence onto the reader. This is not how science communication is supposed to work, and my only excuse is that I’m lazy.
* One good study demonstrated that a common drug used to treat Parkinson deices has an unfortunate side-effect of limiting dopamine levels in your frontal cortex. People who used that drug are way more likely to engage in anti-social behavior after they start treatment then before. It seems like dopamine levels in your pre-frontal cortex can severely affect your personality.
* Social scientists often create amazing studies where they are easily able to manipulate the environment in such a way that they get participants to e.g. lie, cheat, etc. Off course there is variability within these studies and you can argue that personality trades explains this variability, however I don’t know if that has been done, and if it has, I wouldn’t be surprised if you would find that other factors such as religiousness, socio-economic status, gender, age etc. explains a bigger part of the variability in those social science studies.
* If you are looking for a better general theory of behavior then cognitive science has a number of constructs which don’t have this problem of operational definition. For example research has shown that you can prime people with a stimuli to increase the chances the participants will respond to similar stimuli in a short timespan afterwards.
* Behavioralism is more like a philosophy then science and posits that you can explain behavior by looking at the reinforcement history of an individual. That theory has been somewhat debunked by cognitive science, however behavioralists are still doing some impressive research which shows how you can modify behavior by offering some reinforcement contingencies. The same variability applies though as with social the social science studies.
I tried to sway away from specific studies because it has been a minute since I was studying psychology. But I hope this list is still relevant and accurate, and that it inspires you to go look for the individual studies which backs these claims.
Do note that what I’m doing here is a bit unfair. I’m making grand claims backed by evidence I think exists, but pushing the responsibility of looking for these evidence onto the reader. This is not how science communication is supposed to work, and my only excuse is that I’m lazy.