Ramblings

Bravery denotes a person's willingness to accept risk.
It is primarily determined by an individual's perception of risk. Due to ignorance (or sometimes because of their protected status), children can tend to feel a bit too safe sometimes, whereas adults may tend to overestimate the stakes (especially of social situations) and become more defensive. Minor differences in braveness between people exist, major differences typically indicate a (perceived or actual) difference in wealth, safety, ability or another commodity that changes the stakes. Beware the crossover toward stupidity.

Being craven could be considered a social liability, but does tend to lead an individual towards very safe options, improving their longevity. Being very craven can become a major weakness, though being exceedingly brave does the same. People on opposite ends of this spectrum may tend to get into conflict.

The spectrum of calmness is tied to safety, maturity, bravery and intelligence, amongst others. Knowing more and understanding one's reality better leads to less frustration or worry. Wrath serves as a solution for those who cannot sufficiently rely on these resources.

Primarily an indication of sex drive. Not relevant and will rarely be used (it is also not upon me to judge such intimate details, with some very rare exceptions). Only part of this list as it is part of the traits from Crusader Kings 3, from which this list is heavily inspired.
Sex drive is largely environmental and depends on personal history. Age, career and illnesses play a major role as well.

Content people tend to have a steady source of self-worth, whereas ambitious people seek out at least part of their self-worth through continuous (self-)improvement. This can be pathologic, but is probably because the person just find great fulfilment in climbing ever higher.

Value seen in a particular piece of work. Since there are all different kinds of work we each value differently, it is very difficult to make a generalized statement about a person. Someone may be very lazy at school but extremely diligent in their basketball training, purely because of how much value a person sees in school as opposed to the basketball training.

Socially, performance at the workplace is generally seen as the primary indication for diligence/laziness. Personally, I try to strike a balance and consider all kinds of effort invested (or not) by the person.

Indication of how willing and how good a person is at letting go. Very important trait, as it defines the probable longevity of people getting along. While being too forgiving is harmful to oneself, it is very important to be able to forgive people for the things they do because of their (totally humane) weaknesses. Everyone has them, so a person without forgiveness would never be able to hold onto a person for very long.

Greed and generosity are probably learned survival strategies from early childhood to childhood. Greedy characters probably lived in an environment that forced them to be proactive, perhaps aggressive to fulfil their needs, whereas charitable characters were able to rely more on their environment to keep their needs decked and learned that being generous is socially advantageous.

Typically, greed ends up becoming less relevant as one ages, and there can be other factors at play that lead a character to “greedy” behavior, even if their environment doesn't force them to be greedy (anymore).

The scale of gregariousness describes the overall amount of social inhibition afflicting a character. Social inhibition varies naturally and everyone is inhibited to some degree. The resulting plot is one of the easiest bell curves imaginable.

Social inhibition can be learned or come about as part of other factors and/or individual temperament. Often largely environmental. Strong outliers tend to have psychological reasons for why that behavior is advantageous (ie. it is not natural).

Honesty and Deceit are learned survival strategies and depend strongly on the environment in which a character was raised. Deceitful characters can have learned it as a necessity to prevent them from showing vulnerability or manipulating the social environment to fulfil their needs. Honest characters probably grew up in an environment that rewarded such honesty.

Typically a measure of knowledge and experience, but extremely subjective trait strongly influenced by one's own knowledge and experience. Generally we are probably wrong, which arrogant people like to think they're not.

Hard to call someone arrogant without making yourself vulnerable. See Arrogance.

Justness is a measure of a person's integrity and accuracy in terms of interpreting people's needs and actions (utility).
Moral preconceptions differ widely between individual, which is why a largely utilitarian model must be used to make that the assessment as to whether a person is just or not.

Patience is a useful ability needed for interaction with other humans and perseverance through tasks. Keyword would be delayed gratification. A group of people should be a healthy mix of patient and impatient people, as impatient people can help patient ones to force a conclusion where patient people might otherwise never reach one.

Trust is primarily environmental and depends almost exclusively on upbringing. Childhood environment determines whether trusting or paranoid strategies are more advantageous, which are then brought into adulthood.

Loyalty is an extension of trust which helps individuals in cases of breaches of trust. Depending on environment, loyalty or disloyalty may be more advantageous. Also serves as a protection against short term gains by abandoning individuals, groups or causes.

Temperament-based personality trait. Believing or disbelieving in a cause can both be reasonable under the right circumstances, zealousness and cynicality describe the overall trend and tendencies for a person. However, this is always compared to some objective measure of how likely something is to happen.
In other words, always and constantly disbelieving in winning the lottery is not cynical, as they are just right and probably themselves underestimate just how unlikely the odds really are.

Compassionate characters are rare individuals which truly, truly care about the people around them and are able to value them as humans.
Callousness is the opposite of this, whereas sadism is callousness but with the difference that sadism is motivated by getting one's needs met. Everyone knows the feeling of “revenge” or gratification when someone “gets what they deserve”, and sadists engage in that more than others, for all kinds of reasons.

Overall measure of confidence in choices or, if a choice was not made based on confidence, temperament. Can be learned in an environment, but often the overall trend of a person to be stubborn or fickle is best explained by temperament.

This person is not like everyone else. Obviously no two people are identical, but this person is more unidentical from others than most. This trait describes people who view life from a very unorthodox angle.

See Transsexuality.

A Sleeping Dog character is a character who is will bite if disturbed. Generally, this character is very defensive of their territory and is best left asleep. Approach only if you really have to or if you are given an invitation. Failure to do this (bothering them) can result in broken hearts (they will be mean and you won't understand what you did wrong). Unless you have a good reason to hit them up, try not to say hello, try not to say goodbye, don't just waltz in for some cuddles.

A good reason would be something like a good, serious conversation - but don't do that if all you want is just to interact with the person. Exception of course is if you were given an invitation and the sleeping dog is actually interested in what you have to say (you'll know if that's the case).

This character's bonding behavior is like a cat. This character does not like appointments or commitments, and they will not bond with you purely out of politeness or necessity. A cat will observe you and decide over time whether they like you or not. If they do, they might just one day show up and make demands (pets). Or maybe they won't. What will not work is trying to force them to spend time with you, or trying to force a cuddling session. Leave them be.

The general cat assumption is that you are living an independent life with no major committments on either side. And, the cat wants it to stay that way. Y'all can spend time if both sides want it, but the cat doesn't want to be bothered into spending time (The cat still loves you. Maybe.).

Painless is a special stupidity condition in which an individual is so devoid of agency and basic, human functioning as to make it impossible for them to engage in (self-)analysis. The most fundamental human guidance system is our pain, which alerts us to something being wrong. If one is painless, they do not ever get this feedback, fail to see that something is wrong and have no impetus to make lasting changes to their behavior. Actual, physical pain might be the only last thing still reaching their brain.

Until then, this character is unbothered by the negative consequences of their actions, both for others as well as themselves. They will continue to engage in behaviors that would lead to pain; not because it's useful to do, but because it was the first thing some unreflected part of their brain came up with and - without pain - there was never any incentive to change it.

This character is very Dutch. Not in terms of nationality, but in terms of personality. I associate Dutchness with directness, honesty and the absence of not strictly needed decorum. Obviously not enough for my taste, but much much better than 95% of people.

This character is very German. Being very German means not just being of German nationality, but it means being isolated from the world. Germans, especially middle-aged Germans, seem to think of Germany as the only place in the world that actually matters, and will translate and adapt every foreigness away out of anything coming in to the German culture - so much so that they run risk of ending up thinking that they are the ones who actually came up with it.

“Very Germans” stick to Germans and Germany even when abroad, speak only one language (which they expect everyone else to cater to) and are weirdly proud about it and point to the French, even though the French at least recognize that they're not the center of the world (although, admittedly, they aspire to be).

The United States of America are a develeoped nation and life in it is not fundamentally different from other developed nations on earth. However, it does differ in a few more or less minute details about which Americans can sometimes get a little stuck. Americans have a tendency to… get bogged into believing things about their life and lifestyle that don't make a lot of sense. Most Americans are average-ly intelligent so they see through it and function just fine. But, occasionally, things will slip through the cracks and Americans will then defend the truth of these things vigorously, mostly because to them it's always been that way. These are typically minute, unneeded details that don't really matter that would be common sense and common knowledge elsewhere, but simply aren't in the USA.

However, there are some individuals who go beyond this, where it's not just “things slipping through the cracks”, but people who are wholly into into it. So much so, indeed, that they think that they are very special and that life in the USA is absolutely incomparable to the rest of the world. That's what they must be thinking, because their ideas of life, work, guns, women, poverty and other things is fundamentally incompatible with what the rest of the world has already figured out. What makes these types special is that instead of admitting that these parts of the puzzle don't fit, they mash everything together wrongly and crudely and call the result the correct solution; even though it works for nobody and is a source of endless suffering for everyone involved. Throw in corporate interests and suddenly you understand why the USA is such a hellhole.

Depressed characters don't necessarily have the medical condition “Major Depression”, but show a generally somber attitude towards their life. They are fundamentally interested in experiencing a worthwhile life, but don't really seem to have gotten there.

A person who engages, always or in bursts, in uncontrolled, wholly irrational behaviors not motivated by any personal interests, often even against them.

A character who can't seem to control their child-getting. May be strategic as part of a larger motivation, lack of self-control, or an illness. Not my position to judge and will be seldomly used. Part of Crusader Kings 3's list of traits and, in there, described solely the physical fertility of a character in the game. For me, that would be impossible to judge in the real world, so it had to be adapted.

This character has difficulties with breathing comfortably, often creating noise.

A stupid person is someone who does not think about things very thoroughly, effectively outsourcing their problems and decision-making to others. By not thinking about things, stupid people create problems that will affect both themselves and the people around them. Without limited sophisticated thought, this person will not be able to experience the full richness of human existence.

At higher levels of stupidity, the ability to recognize their own failures diminishes. While they still feel pain, they are not capable of self-reflecting, identifying causes or changing behavior to fix problems. Being stupid holds up people who aren't and can force them to do extra work. A stupid person may be unreliable and force people around them to constantly double-check the stupid person's work.

At the highest levels of stupidity, the ability for goal-oriented planning in its entirety diminishes. They too still feel pain, but no independent thought is occurring anymore. What's left of this person's brain is pre-planned, pre-learned, “tincan” behaviors roughly thrown together to make the lowest amount of sense one can get away with. With no sophisticated thought at all, this person is just barely still experiencing “human-ness” (ie. they're human as an idea, not as actually living and experiencing like a human).

The sad thing about intelligence is that it's impossible to see. It means understanding things - and how could you see if someone understands something without understanding it yourself? And if you understand something yourself, how arrogant would it be of you to call someone intelligent just for knowing things you know?

So, what I do is looking at it from what I can observe. How much does the normal person understand, and how much does this person understand in comparison to that? Of course I can't know just how much a person actually understands, so I have to extrapolate a lot. More data is better, which is why I'm always very careful with calling someone intelligent.