نظریه پنج عامل بزرگ سایبرنتیکی

Cybernetics, the study of goal-directed, adaptive systems, is the best framework for an integrative theory of personality. Cybernetic Big Five Theory attempts to provide a comprehensive, synthetic, and mechanistic explanatory model. Constructs that describe psychological individual differences are divided into personality traits, reflecting variation in the parameters of evolved cybernetic mechanisms, and characteristic adaptations, representing goals, interpretations, and strategies defined in relation to an individual’s particular life circumstances. The theory identifies mechanisms in which variation is responsible for traits in the top three levels of a hierarchical trait taxonomy based on the Big Five and describes the causal dynamics between traits and characteristic adaptations. Lastly, the theory links function and dysfunction in traits and characteristic adaptations to psychopathology and well-being.

The mission of personality psychology is “to provide an integrative framework for understanding the whole person” (McAdams & Pals, 2006, p. 204), but such grand theoretical frameworks are in short supply in modern research. An adequate theory of personality must explain not only how individuals differ from each other in their persisting patterns of emotion, motivation, cognition, and behavior, but also why. In other words, it must be an explanatory, causal theory. Further, to have any claim to being a “grand” theory, it must be comprehensive, synthetic, and mechanistic. To be comprehensive, it should encompass everything that psychologists mean by “personality.” To be synthetic it should integrate what is known about the various components of personality within a single coherent framework. And to be mechanistic, it should explain what causes the components of personality to be what they are and to function as they do. Cybernetic Big Five Theory (CB5T) is designed to provide a framework capable of meeting these criteria. A complete mechanistic theory of personality should encompass the biological basis of the mechanisms responsible for personality, and CB5T is designed to be fully compatible with the current state of personality neuroscience (DeYoung, 2010b, DeYoung, 2013 and DeYoung and Gray, 2009). Biological constructs are not necessary for use of CB5T, however, because the theory is designed to offer a reasonably complete description of personality in psychological terms. The present article will not focus on the biological component of CB5T, referring to biological research only when it provides particularly useful evidence for a given psychological argument. This is not to say that psychological processes are in any way independent from biological processes; rather, psychological processes supervene on biological processes, meaning that any change in psychological function must involve a change in biological function, but not vice versa because biological constructs are at a higher (more fine-grained) level of resolution than psychological constructs (Kim, 2009). Nonetheless, an adequate theory of psychological mechanisms does not depend on complete or immediate translation into biological mechanisms for its utility. The fundamental premise of CB5T is that any adequate theory of personality must be based in cybernetics, the study of goal-directed, self-regulating systems (Austin and Vancouver, 1996, Carver and Scheier, 1998, DeYoung, 2010c, Peterson and Flanders, 2002, Van Egeren, 2009 and Wiener, 1961). Cybernetic systems are characterized by their inclusion of one or more goals or reference values, which guide the work carried out by the system. (In psychology, the term “goal” is sometimes reserved for conscious representations of goals, but the term is more general in cybernetics, and many goals are not conscious.) Further, all cybernetic systems receive feedback, through some kind of sensory mechanism, indicating the degree to which they are moving toward their goals. Finally, they are adaptive and adjust their behavior, based on feedback, to pursue their goals. Cybernetics is a useful, and perhaps even necessary, approach to understanding living things (Gray, 2004, chap. 3). In psychology, “personality” is often used to describe the array of constructs that identify variables in which individuals differ, but “personality” also refers to the specific mental organization and processes that produce an individual’s characteristic patterns of behavior and experience. These are the between-person, or interpersonal, and within-person, or intrapersonal, senses of “personality,” respectively. Most intrapersonal personality constructs are causally interacting psychological elements that generate the ongoing flux of behavior and experience. These elements constitute a cybernetic system that, when functioning well, allows the organism to fulfill its needs ( Block, 2002 and DeYoung, 2010c). CB5T is an attempt to create a theory bridging the two senses of “personality,” explaining interpersonal personality differences in terms of variation in the intrapersonal elements of personality. The cybernetic component of CB5T renders it mechanistic, but a central aim is also to provide an explanatory framework capable of synthesizing the full range of phenomena that psychologists signify by the term “personality.” McAdams and Pals (2006) provided an elegant delineation of the scope of personality, and the words “Big Five” in “Cybernetic Big Five Theory” serve as a reference not only to the well-known Big Five personality traits but also to their “New Big Five”—a set of five “principles for an integrative science of personality.” These principles serve as a guide for the development of any personality theory and are themselves integrated within a definition of personality that is a useful starting point for CB5T: “Personality is conceived as (a) an individual’s unique variation on the general evolutionary design for human nature, expressed as a developing pattern of (b) dispositional traits, (c) characteristic adaptations, and (d) self-defining life narratives, complexly and differentially situated (e) in culture and social context” (McAdams & Pals, 2006, p. 204). Each principle will be discussed at the appropriate point in what follows.

CB5T is currently the only theory of personality that provides a mechanistic explanation of traits in all of the top three levels of the personality hierarchy (Fig. 1). Further, it is the only theory that provides explanations of many specific traits in a way that is integrated with a mechanistic account of characteristic adaptations. CB5T provides more precise definitions of personality traits and characteristic adaptations than those that were previously available, allowing the two types of construct to be more clearly differentiated. CB5T provides only a broad outline of the organization and dynamics of characteristic adaptations. This is obviously a limitation, but it is also a strength because to delineate all of the processes that structure and carry out characteristic adaptations would be to summarize nearly the entire field of psychology. CB5T boils the nature of characteristic adaptations down to its cybernetic essentials. Characteristic adaptations are more complicated to measure than traits, but personality psychology will benefit from increasing its focus on these constructs and better integrating them with research on traits. Finally, the inclusion of characteristic adaptations as a separate category of elements within the cybernetic system allows CB5T to describe more clearly the referents of the metatraits, Stability and Plasticity. It is precisely one’s goals, interpretations, and strategies that are stable or unstable, plastic or rigid. CB5T affords a wealth of testable hypotheses, both psychological and biological, largely because it specifies the mechanistic functions that underlie different traits (summarized in Table 1). Hypotheses based on CB5T can be tested in a variety of ways, including incorporating them into connectionist models like that of Read et al. (2010). Their model is the most sophisticated attempt to date to create an artificial information-processing system in which personality traits are represented as parameters of specific cybernetic mechanisms. It encompasses three traits, Extraversion, Neuroticism, and Constraint, the last of which corresponds either to Conscientiousness or Stability. In future, CB5T can provide guidance for including additional traits in such models. If CB5T is at all successful in providing “an integrative framework for understanding the whole person” (McAdams & Pals, 2006, p. 204), it should be useful for nearly every branch of psychology, though the most obvious applications outside of personality psychology may be in clinical research. CB5T interprets personality in a manner compatible with the study of development across the lifespan. A discussion of the ontogeny of the cybernetic mechanisms described by CB5T is beyond the scope of this article, but note that its mechanistic description of personality traits allows CB5T to circumvent some of the difficulties of studying the Big Five in children (DeYoung, 2010c and Shiner and DeYoung, 2013). Although the specific behaviors associated with a given trait will change during development, even very young children will show meaningful variation in most of the cybernetic mechanisms underlying the Big Five, manifested in individual differences in sensitivities to reward and punishment, curiosity and imagination, altruism and cooperation, etc. CB5T allows consideration of the developmental trajectories of the mechanisms underlying personality, which mature at different rates during early life and break down at different rates in old age. Thus, CB5T is a theory of personality for the whole person and the whole of human life.