2: Trait approach: History and intro Flashcards
Are traits/dispositions stable over time?
Yes - they are reasonable stable over time/ consistent across situations
What are the 3 fundamental questions that should guide those why study personality psychology?
- How should weconceptualizetraits?’
- How can we identify which traits are themost importanttraits from among the thousands of ways in which individuals differ?
- How can we formulate acomprehensive taxonomyof traits – a system that includes within itallof the major traits of personality?’
What are internal traits?
something inside each person that causes him/her to act a certain way and he/she carries these desires from one situation to the next (EX: he has a DESIRE for xxxx. She NEEDS xxx)
How do psychologists who view traits as internal link those traits to behavior?
A psychologist who view traits as internal dispositions doesn’t think that behavior and traits are always in synch - you might have a desire to do something but you don’t do it because it is inappropriate
Psychologists who don’t see traits as internal see them as………?
Descriptive summaries
Traits as descriptive summaries are?
Traits are defined simply as descriptive summaries of a person’s attributes
Personality coherence means that……?
Changes in personality vary over time even though the underlying characteristic remain the same. The trait is the same over time but how it is expressed changes over time
What is the difference between traits and stages?
Traits represent the typical behavior of a person over time (somewhat the same over time).
Stages change and vary across time and situations
What does Funder (2009) say personality psychologists should do?
He argues that personality psychologists should not only try to understand between-person differences but also changes and differences within a person. And what situations can cause a person to act in a different way
What was the first publication on the topic: To what extent situational circumstances influence our behavior?
Personality and assessment by Walter Mischel (1968)
He argues that situational demands partly determine our behavior
The act frequency approach starts with what notion?
Traits are categories of acts.
A trait is just a trait category that has hundreds of other acts as members
The act frequency approach say a trait is what?
A trait is a summary of general trends in a person’s behavior
What are the 3 key elements of the act frequency approach (research program)?
Act nomination (which actions belongs to which traits) Prototypically judgment (which acts are the most prototypical for each trait) Recording of act performance
Act nomination (act frequency approach)
Asking a large number of people to name (‘nominate’) all kinds of behaviours (‘acts’) they feel pertain to a certain category and then determine the most frequently named behaviours of that category. These will then most likely make it to the shortlist of acts that may belong to that trait category.
Prototypically judgment (act frequency approach)
Panels of raters judge how prototypical each act is as an example of a particular concept. You try to identify the prototypical acts of a certain trait
Recording of act performance (act frequency approach)
Securing information on the actual performance of individuals in their daily lives.
This is often done by self-reports or reports from close friends or spouses
Criticism of the act frequency approach
- Most of the criticisms have been aimed at the technical implementation of the approach.For example, the act frequency approach does not specify how much context should be included in the description of a trait-relevant act - the act frequency formulation doesn’t specify how much context is needed to identify an act as an expression of a trait
- Another criticism of the approach is that it seems applicable to overt actions, but what aboutfailuresto act and covert acts that are not directly observable
What are the 3 fundamental approaches to identifying important traits?
- The lexical approach
- Statistical approach
- Theoretical approach
What is the lexical approach to identifying important traits?
The approach to determining the fundamental personality traits by analyzing language.
2 clear criteria for identifying traits:
SYNONYM FREQUENCY: if an attribute has not merely one or two trait adjectives to describe it but, rather, six, eight or nine words, then it is a more important dimension of individual difference
CROSS-CULTURAL UNIVERSITY:
the more important is an individual difference in human transactions, the more languages will have a term for it
what is the lexical hypothesis?
All important individual differences have become encoded within the natural language
How often is the lexical approach used?
Not very often - One problem with the lexical strategy concerns the fact that personality is conveyed through different parts of speech, including adjectives, nouns and adverbs
The statistical approach to identifying important traits
The goal is to identify the major dimensions of the personality map - this is done by having a large number of people rate themselves on certain items and then using a statistic procedure to identify groups or clusters.
What method is most commonly used within the statistical approach?
Factor analysis = identify groups or items that go together (covary)
What is the advantage of the statistical approach?
A major advantage of identifying clusters of personality items that covary, is that it provides a means for determining which personality variables have some common property
Factor loading indicates what? (statistical approach)
Factor loadings indicate the degree to which the item correlates with the underlying factor.
Factor loading are indexes of how much of the variation in an item is ‘explained’ by the factor.
