Why Your Personality is a System, Not a Spreadsheet: Insights from Professor Markus Quirin

Most of us didn't walk into our first Psychology 101 lecture because we were dying to calculate a Pearson’s correlation coefficient. We entered the field, or picked up a book on the subject, because of a raw, human ache for answers.

You can watch the interview with Markus Quirin and ISSID President Chris Jackson on YouTube here: https://youtu.be/YOkkc7b9Csc

Why did my partner leave me? Why am I paralysed by this project when I know it’s what I want? Why does my mood crash for no reason?

We come looking for the gears and levers of the human soul. Yet, for many students and enthusiasts, that curiosity is quickly met with a bucket of cold water - the p-value. Modern academic psychology is often less about the "why" of the individual and more about the "what" of the crowd. We trade the mystery of the person for the safety of the statistic.

Professor Markus Quirin, a specialist in personality and motivation psychology at PFH Göttingen and the Technical University of Munich, believes this disconnect isn't just a student's frustration but it’s a systemic crisis. He argues that for psychology to fulfill its promise, it must stop treating personality as a static spreadsheet and start seeing it for what it truly is: a dynamic, living system.

Psychology is Currently "Walking with a Limp"

In the eyes of Professor Quirin, any mature science requires two sturdy legs to move forward: empirics (the data we collect) and theory (the explanation of why that data exists). Currently, he argues, the discipline is dragging one foot.

"Science progresses on two legs: empirics and theory. And I have the impression our discipline has been limping far too long. [sic]"

The imbalance is structural. Quirin points out that roughly 90% of psychological training is focused on statistical methods which is essentially learning how to measure and predict behavior across populations. While this makes the field feel "scientific," it limits its status as a true natural science. In physics or biology, the goal is to find deterministic, causal explanations. By obsessing over data at the expense of rigorous theory, psychology remains caught in a limbo between social observation and genuine mechanical explanation.

The "Average Person" Doesn't Actually Exist

The fundamental tension in modern research lies between "stochastic" (statistical) and "deterministic" (explanatory) approaches. Statistical methods tell us how a population behaves on average, but as Quirin notes, the "average person" is a mathematical ghost, albeit a useful abstraction that doesn't actually exist in the real world.

A stochastic approach might tell you that 70% of people respond to stress with anxiety, but it cannot tell you why you specifically respond that way. Quirin argues that an "explanatory dynamic systems approach" is the only way to reach the individual. To understand a human being, we must move past how they compare to a group and look instead at the internal causal mechanisms, the specific "software" running in their mind, that produces their unique reality.

Personality is a Dynamic System, Not a Static List

Typical personality tests give you a snapshot: you are "High in Extraversion" or "Low in Conscientiousness." It’s a static list of traits. But Quirin, working alongside a team of both psychologists and engineers, proposes a radical shift toward a functional model.

The Dynamics of Personality

In this model, your personality is not a fixed point, but a result of the constant, fluctuating interaction between four core subsystems:

• Cognition: How you process and structure information.

• Emotion: The raw data of your feelings.

• Motivation: Your underlying needs and drives.

• Volition: The willpower and decision-making processes that bridge the gap between "wanting" and "doing."

The way these parts interact determines our approach and avoidance behaviors. That is, whether we move toward a new social partner and a challenging task, or retreat into safety. Research by figures like William Fleeson has shown that our behavior varies so wildly from moment to moment that static traits are insufficient explanations. Instead, Quirin looks at parameters like the "sensitivity and strength of connectivity" between these subsystems. Personality isn't just "being an introvert"; it's how strongly your "Emotion" system triggers an "Avoidance" response in a social "Cognition" context.

Your Personal Experience is a Valid Scientific Tool

In an era where "evidence-based" often means "only what is in a peer-reviewed journal," Quirin offers a radical piece of advice to the next generation: use your own life as a laboratory. He calls this the "experiential plausibility check."

He argues that simply reading empirical papers is a shallow way to learn. Instead, he urges researchers and students to use their interpersonal observations to generate hypotheses. If a finding doesn't match the reality of your own mood swings or your partner's behavior, don't ignore your experience -interrogate the data. For whom does this finding actually make sense? What are the missing factors for this specific person?

This radicalism extends to the history of the field. Quirin warns against "throwing the baby out with the bathwater" regarding old theories. While figures like Freud are often dismissed today because they are difficult to measure with questionnaires, Quirin defends them because those theories were built on deep, qualitative observations of internal dynamics. They provide the "theoretical leg" that modern statistics is missing.

Modeling the Mind with "Bots"

If questionnaires are too limited to capture the mind's complexity, how do we study it? Quirin’s team uses computational modeling, essentially building "agents" or "bots" in a digital environment.

This is the "Aha!" moment of generative science. By simulating these bots, researchers can implement a theory as if it were software and "run" it. We can give a bot a specific "personality", adjusting the connectivity between its motivation and emotion systems, and then watch it navigate a virtual world. We can observe exactly why a bot "cheats" or experiences a "mood swing" in a way a static survey could never capture. It allows us to see the internal friction of the gears in real-time.

From Limping to Sprinting

The shift Professor Quirin advocates for, moving from population averages to systemic, computational models, is not just an academic preference; it’s a necessary evolution. To truly understand why we do what we do, we must bridge the walls between social, cognitive, and motivational psychology.

However, the hurdles are systemic not just intellectual. The "publish or perish" culture and the rigid structures of research funding don't favor this work. Building complex models and "repairing bugs" in a theory takes time. Time that the current machine doesn't want to give. As long as we prioritise the volume of data over the depth of the system, the field will continue to limp.

But for the individual, the shift starts with a change in perspective. If you stop viewing your "flaws" as a fixed list on a spreadsheet and start seeing your mind as a dynamic system of interacting parts, your relationship with yourself changes. Your anxiety or your procrastination isn't an unchangeable trait, it is the output of a specific internal connection.

If your mind is a system of gears and levers rather than a static list of flaws, which connection will you choose to adjust first?