Teaching Personality to Non-Majors: Deep Ignorance, Superb Opportunity

Jonathan Adler

Olin College

Johnathan Adler

I have a very strange job.  I am the only psychologist on the faculty at the college where I work.  Olin College of Engineering is a small, top-tier, undergraduate-only college in the suburbs of Boston whose mission is to “prepare students to become exemplary engineering innovators who recognize needs, design solutions, and engage in creative enterprises for the good of the world” (Olin Mission Statement). The vast majority of my colleagues are engineers, though there is a small group of us on the faculty who comprise the arts, humanities, and social sciences.  Since Olin is part of a consortium with Wellesley College, Babson College, and Brandeis University, students can take classes at any of our partner institutions, which means that I am not here to represent a Psychology Department – indeed, there are stellar departments with all the core course offerings just down the road.  As a result, the teaching part of my job is to develop and run courses that expose these brilliant undergraduates to the most vital ideas in my discipline, those that will enhance their current passions.  Personality is the perfect vehicle for this mission.

When Olin students are asked why they want to become engineers (which many, but not all, do), they usually answer that they want to change the world.  A big part of my job is helping them understand the world they want to change.  I have colleagues who bring historical and anthropological perspectives to that challenge, but my niche is helping the students use the tools of science for understanding individuals.  Having worked at Olin for the past five years, I have learned some lessons about teaching personality to students who are not majoring in psychology, and who may never take another psychology course, that may be useful in approaching course planning for any personality professor.

First, I begin every course with a discussion of psychology as a scientific discipline.  For many students, even those very predisposed to scientific thinking like my students, they come to college believing that science is a body of content, as opposed to a method of inquiry.  I have developed a discussion that I call “Are the soft sciences harder than the hard sciences?” that I use to launch several of my courses.  During that discussion I have students unpack the underlying commonalities of all sciences, inductively leading them to label the parts of the scientific method as the core.  We then talk about the process of operationalizing variables for investigation and many students have an epiphany about just how challenging it can be to operationalize psychological variables, thus making psychology “harder” (i.e., more challenging) than other scientific disciplines.  This realization leaves them with a more accurate understanding of the scientific enterprise and often with a deeper appreciation for the scientific social sciences.

Second, I have found it both vital and relatively easy to ground every topic in the “real world.”  It’s not hard to demonstrate the impact of personality in domains that students intuitively feel to be important, from mortality to mental health to motivation.  Many of our primary studies elegantly make this connection on their own, but I also keep a running folder of news stories, works of art, and tidbits from popular culture that illustrate the power of personality, and I also ask students to find their own examples to support the course material.

Third, I ask students to get out in the real world to apply their newfound knowledge.  Since my students are mostly budding engineers, they like to get their hands dirty and actually try stuff out.  I have them replicate classic experiments, collect small amounts of data, and tailor the broad topics to specific ideas they’re passionate about for independent projects.  Students love administering and interpreting measures of the Big Five (and comparing them to the many popular “personality tests” out there); they love assessing their own motivation; and they love collecting and analyzing short measures of narrative identity.  Allowing students to practice being personality psychologists is one of the best ways to get them to retain the content.

Fourth, I find that I often need to hold my love of methods at bay.  One of the biggest challenges for me in my role as a teacher of almost exclusively non-psychology majors is remembering that my students are much more interested in the punch-line than in the process of determining it.  Without any research methods or relevant statistics to fall back on, my students just aren’t that good at evaluating the quality of psychological design and analysis, nor are they very interested in cultivating those skills.  I have wrestled with this issue as a teacher, wanting to impart enough proficiency that they can be strong consumers of psychological research, but also wanting to keep them engaged with the core take-aways that they will find practically relevant.

Finally, I have worked to frame my job as a special opportunity to share the most powerful lessons from our field with people who will use them in arenas I could normally never reach.  I have heard from a former student about the way she used the narrative identity themes of redemption and contamination to develop user profiles when designing a new product, and from another about how deciphering his own personality trait profile served as a reassuring foundation for navigating a miserable first year in an electrical engineering PhD program.  You never know where your students will end up, and where the lessons of personality psychology will prove relevant and useful to them.  I see this part of my job as a real gift, an opportunity to disseminate personality psychology far beyond the confines of our core discipline.

One of the signs on my office door reads “Deep ignorance, when properly handled, is also superb opportunity” (it comes from E.O. Wilson’s Letters to a Young Scientist).  The nature of my job is such that my classroom teaching is almost always an opportunity in handling deep ignorance of our field.  While that may be more dramatic in my case, any of us who teach personality to undergraduates have this opportunity.  I hope these few lessons I have learned thus far about how to approach teaching non-majors might prove useful – and I’d love to hear other insights from your experience!