Volume 6, Issue 2 
December 2011

Noted Sociologist, William Sims Bainbridge, Ph.D., submitted the following article for publication within the Journal of Personal Cybercomsciousness

Dr. Bainbridge proficiently utilizes open-source, scientific methodologies, coupled with his own, in analyzing and identifying the human abilities most worthy of enhancement.

As more and more innovative people seek to enhance human abilities, it makes sense to ask how future-oriented members of the general public conceptualize the ideal human being. There are, of course, many dimensions to a human individual, and many cultural vantage points from which to view a person. Thus, we eventually need many studies, using different methodologies and population groups, from which we can cull the most interesting results. The study reported here measured key values of fully 3,267 respondents, which they use to judge human personalities, finding two major sets of values that were rather distinct from each other.

The study was designed to build on a very well established tradition of research in the psychology of personality, the so-called Big Five model of personality variation [1]. This is a social-psychological model, which emphasizes five different ways in which people differ in how they interact with other people, in fairly tame settings. For example, it does not measure how physically strong a person is, what a person looks like, or any propensity toward physical violence. It was intended to fit all people, around the world, and to be gender-neutral, features that limit its ability to measure some interpersonal variations. While different versions of the model exist, a common feature is that they are structured along five orthogonal dimensions that logically and empirically are independent of each other.

While the Big Five model has deep roots in human history, it was derived very directly from the work of Raymond B. Cattell [2] who believed that human personality might require as many as sixteen dimensions for a full description. Later psychologists failed to find some of Cattell's less important dimensions, and by the 1990s, a consensus had focused on five that seem most important across many studies. The version I used here was refined by Lewis R. Goldberg [3] who calls these dimensions: Extraversion; Agreeableness; Conscientiousness; Emotional Stability and Imagination. Goldberg was not only a leading researcher in this field, but a visionary who was concerned that too many psychological measurement scales are restricted by copyright, and who went to great effort to develop public-domain versions of many scales that anyone may freely use. His version of the Big Five is a set of 100 phrases describing a person, twenty for each of the five dimensions, and they were used in the present study.

The logic in this study is that we can learn a significant amount about different people's images of the ideal human personality, by asking them to compare how good each of the 100 attributes is, then conducting a statistical analysis across a large number of research subjects to learn how those attributes tend to cluster in people's minds. As part of a much broader research effort [4], I had written a computer program to administer these hundred items, plus 1,900 others, to a single individual on a desktop computer. With the generous support of Martine Rothblatt [5], leader of the Terasem Movement, Michael Clancy[6] adapted the program into an Android application, and it was distributed widely over the web. In the very first few days, 3,267 residents of the fifty US states rated each of the 100 attributes on a simple scale from 1=Bad to 8=Good.

Table 1 lists the twenty-five items that earned the most positive average scores. The mean of the 100 items is 5.1169, and the standard deviation is 0.7324. Thus, any item with a score at or above 5.8493 is more than one standard deviation above the mean. Twenty-three items meet this criterion, but two are very close to it, so selecting 1/4 of the items or twenty-five essentially meets the standard deviation criterion. It is perhaps not surprising that the highest-rated item is "am quick to understand things." Downloading Android apps onto a mobile device is a very new thing to do, and the people who responded to the questionnaire had mastered this skill very early in the history of mobile computing, thus proving that they themselves were quick to understand things. They are not a random sample of humanity, but for present purposes that may be a good thing. They are future-oriented people; early adopters of a new technology, and thus their conception of a good human personality will be more visionary than the average.

Table 1: The 25 Most Highly Rated Characteristics
(On a 1-8 scale)

All twenty-five of the items in Table 1 - the top quartile of the 100 items - are highly rated, and there is very great variety among them. Having a soft heart and sympathizing with the feelings of other people is not the same thing as being full of ideas, for example. To find the internal structure of this list, I used the standard statistical method that Cattell used and that developed the Big Five in the first place, factor analysis. To define the method in more precise technical terms: I used the principal components method, selecting all factors with eigenvalues greater than 1, and employing varimax rotation. What this means is that the statistical analysis program on my computer examined the matrix of correlations connecting all pairs of items, and searched systematically for a simpler way of representing the data, coming up with two major factors and two minor ones that appear to be offshoots of the second major factor. Each factor is an independent dimension, but they also can be conceptualized as clusters of items expressing the same value. Table 2 lists the eleven items most strongly associated with Factor 1, what I call The Genius Factor.

Table 2: The Genius Factor