1. Introduction to Personality Flashcards
Define personality
‘the distinctive and relatively enduring ways of thinking, feeling and acting that characterise a person’s responses to life situations’
Give a brief historical outline of personality research:
1900: psychoanalytic approach –> emphasis on the self, ‘ego’
1930s: Trait approach –> emerged because of the developments in statistics
1960s: Person situation debate –> if we want to understand what someone does, do we look at their personality or the social situation
1980s: resurgence of the personality trait approach
1990s: evolutionary accounts emerge
What did Funder say the mission of personality was?
- integration of the fragments of people (developmental, social, cognitive, biological understandings) into a whole
- personality psychology aims to bring it all together
- a theory of personality must account for the integrated, coherent functioning of the individual
McAdams suggests an integrative approach to personality - outline this:
Need to address
- continuity, change and adaptation (to situations) of personality
- similarities and differences
- nomothetic and idiographic approaches
5 principles
1) evolution and human nature
2) dispositional signature (traits)
3) characteristic adaptations
4) life narratives and identity
5) the role of culture
Outline McAdam’s model
Human nature, culture (meaning systems and practices), dispositional traits, characteristic adaptations, and integrative life narratives, all impact upon each other, along side the social ecology of everyday life (demands and challenges)
What is McAdam’s personality triad?
- Dispositional Traits
- Characteristic Adaptations
- Narrative identity as a life story
Outline the ‘dispositional traits’ aspect of McAdam’s personality triad
- ‘lexical hypothesis’: if you want to know about personality, you must examine the words used to describe yourself
- universal, biologically based dispositions
- stable components of personality
- nomothetic approach
- typically assessed via self-report
Examples of major trait accounts:
- Allport (Cardinal, central and secondary)
- Cattell: 16 personality factors
- Eysenck: Extraversion, Neuroticism, Psychoticism
- Big 5 Factor Model: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism
What are some limitations about ‘dispositional traits’
- Useful starting point BUT
- only provide general information about how someone is likely to behave
- do not show a sense of the unique person
Outline the ‘characteristic adaptation’ facet of McAdam’s triad:
How you learn to adapt in your own way to situations around you:
- Personal goals and motives
- values and beliefs
- attachment and relationship styles
- domain-specific skills and interests
- defence mechanisms and coping strategies
Limitation: does not address the actual uniqueness of the person
Outline the ‘life story and personal identity’ aspect of McAdam’s triad:
How we make sense of ourselves through life narratives - a story providing unity and purpose
- Sense of continuity (coherent sense of self)
- finally an idiographic approach
- takes into account personality change
- explains ‘how the self of today will become the anticipated self of tomorrow’
Where does our research come from?
More than 70% of psych research comes from the US, despite the US only representing 5% of the world’s population (2008)
More than 60% of our research from the US - but an increase from other English-speaking and Western European countries (2021)
- i.e. 11% of the world’s population is represented
What are some criticisms of personality research?
- Sample bias as theories are mostly developed from WEIRD countries - could they be rooted in Western assumptions
- emphasis on the individual (very Western perspective)
- Person/situation dichotomy (the idea that the self is separate from the social environment - this dominant thought in research is only reflective of middle class American models)
- individual as separate from the group
- the replication crisis
