5. Personality and Individual Differences Flashcards
What did Hippocrates and Galen believe were linked with personality traits?
- physical humours, or fluids within the body
What is phrenology?
- aimed to predict peoples personality by the size, shape and bumps on their skill
- areas of the brain linked to characteristics
What is personality?
- comes from the latin persona
- involves both internal traits and external expression style
- hard to define
How does the humanistic theory explain personality?
- maslow and rogers
- importance of free will and the role of each persons conscious life experiences
- people are inherently good and motivated to do things to reach their full potential
How does the psychodynamic theory explain personality?
- influenced by our unconscious mind and childhood experience
- components: id, ego and superego
- id = needs and urges
- superego = regulates ideals and morals
- personality is developed due to the struggle to find stability between these 2 forces
How does the behavioural/social-cognition theory explain personality?
behaviourism:
- personality is influenced by associations, rewards and punishments (skinner)
social cognition:
- views personality through the lens of social interaction and learning
both consider the environment as a strong influence and that personality is learnt
How does the trait theory explain personality?
- fails to explain HOW personality is developed
- describe different factors of personality
- lexical hypothesis: personality differences can be derived from the total number of descriptors in any language system
What is a trait?
- relatively stable personality characteristic that causes individuals to behave in certain ways
- they are continuous: can have more/less of a trait
What is the big 5?
18000 traits were gradually reduced to 5: they aim to catch a wide range
How does the big 5 work?
OCEAN: openness, consciousness, extroversion, agreeableness, neuroticism
- each represents a broad category
What is neuroticism?
- overall emotional stability of an individual
What is the Barnum effect?
- cognitive bias that occurs when individuals believe that generic personality descriptions and statements apply to themselves
- the description however is so vague it could apply to most people
What is a projective test?
- if you give people an ambiguous stimulus and ask them to describe it, their answer will tell you something about their psyche
What is the most common way of assessing personality nowadays?
- self report questionnaire e.g the likert scale
What is the person vs situation debate?
- idea that behaviour is too inconsistent across situations for individual differences to be characterised by traits
- situation is important in determining behaviour
What is interactionism?
behaviour = person x situation
Can personality change over time?
yes although the degree of change may depend on environmental and developmental influences and the willingness of the individual to change
