ABSTRACT
What do we know when we know a person? There are many ways to answer this question. Personality psychologists’ answer to this question is that to know a person means that you understand the stable dimensions of their social behavior (i.e., personality traits), the adaptative aspects of their needs, wants, motives, and goals (i.e., personality characteristic adaptations), and the person’s inner narrative (i.e., narrative identity). These dimensions of knowing a person constitute a person’s personality. The purpose of this chapter is to briefly describe the dimensions of human personality and methods personality psychologists use to assess each. We adopt this focus because at the heart of our foundational development of the field of behavioral cybersecurity has been to integrate cybersecurity with a personality psychological approach to behavioral science. From this perspective, we have begun to develop a field of behavioral cybersecurity that centers on understanding the attacker’s personality in terms of how it can inform questions about behavior involved in the identification, analysis, and management of cybersecurity events faced by individuals, as well as within organizations.
