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persevering, determined, responsible and consistently ordered; he is reliable,
can be trusted to pursue a task without supervision and is generally extremely
conscientious. The opposite person is fickle and frivolous, impatient and demanding,
slack and idle; he cannot be trusted with anything and may be even
obstructive. On its positive side this factor is what we know as self-esteem—the
urge and willingness to drive oneself even to the limits of fatigue and self-denial,
in order to achieve a desirable goal, to produce good work or bring a project to a
successful conclusion. Its reward is the pride of satisfaction in achievement and
the esteem of others.
We have to imagine that each of these source traits has the normal curve
type of distribution in the population. Thus, if we picked out 1,000 people at
random and considered them with respect to trait 1, it should happen that 500
would be good-natured and co-operative; of these about 300 would be just
above average, about 150 well above average, and about 50 very much above
average. On the down side of the curve there would be similarly 500 who were
hard-hearted and obstructive, about 300 would be a little below average, 150
well below average, and 50 very much below average. Now this same 1,000
people can be classified for factor 2, i.e., intelligence; when this has been done
we should find that they have been entirely reshuffled; it may thus happen
that a person high in good nature might be average in intelligence or even
mentally slow and vice versa. Each of the six grades in the good-natured/
hard-hearted scale can be spread over the six grades in the intelligence scale
so that there are 6x6=36 ways of classifying on the two factors. When we
come to three factors the number of ways is 6x6x6=216 or 63. With 16
factors each classifiable in six ways we would have 616 combinations. This works
out to be 2,821,109,907,456. There are just under 50,000,000 people in this
country so that the odds are more than 1,000 to one against finding even one
person who is very high in all the factors.
Shaping Character.
It is believed that all of us are born with a certain amount of each of the
16 factors or source traits which may thus be called the hereditary or constitutional
portions; these constitute the basic framework on which personality
is built. But as each person goes through life, he has to learn that in order to
attain whatever immediate or remote objective in life he desires, he must
adapt himself to circumstances and modify his conduct as he deems best in his
own light. As he goes through infancy, the toddler stage, school, adolescence,
manhood and onwards to old age he has constantly to adapt himself to his
environment, to the pleasures and displeasures of his parents, brothers and
sisters, companions, teachers, workmates, wife, and all his associates; he must
conform to the social code and the pattern of society. His hereditary or constitutional
source traits, whether they be high, average or low and in whatever
way they be mixed, become conditioned or modified into the more subtle
attitudes and sentiments. Just as in the case of insects, birds and animals, we
are all born with the instinctive urges to find food, to find companionship, to
flee from danger, to overpower an aggressor, to find a sex mate and so on. The
methods we use to satisfy any of these desires depend partly on the amount of
each source trait we possess, how the source traits have been modified by experience
in life, and by the way in which these modified traits are combined
in order to attain any particular goal.
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