Chapter 1 Flashcards
What are trait-descriptive adjectives?
Adjectives that can be used to describe characteristics of people
What is personality?
the set of psychological traits and mechanisms within the individual that are organized and relatively enduring and that influence his or her interactions with, and adaptations to, the intrapsychic, physical and social environments
What are psychological traits?
Characteristics that describe ways in which people are different from each other. Defining when people are similar and different.
How are personality traits different person to person?
They only really describe average tendencies, since not every is always shy or quiet. They are also influenced by different cultures and time periods.
What are the fours questions research on personality traits proposes?
- How many traits are there?
- How are the traits organized?
- What are the origins of traits?
- What are the correlations and consequences of traits?
What are psychological mechanisms?
They are like traits, except that the term mechanisms refers more to the processes of personality. Most psychological mechanisms have three essential ingredients: inputs, decision rules and outputs. A psychological mechanism may make people more sensitive to certain kinds of information from the environment (input), may make them more likely to think about specific options (decision rules) and may guide their behaviour toward certain categories of action (outputs).
How do personality traits change in day to day?
Although they are rather consistent especially in adulthood, they can be supressed or enhanced depending on the context
What are the 3 levels personality can be analysed?
- like all others (the human nature level)
- like some others (the level of individual and group differences),
- like no others (the individual uniqueness level).
What is personality in terms of human nature?
The traits and mechanisms of personality that are typical of our species and are possessed by everyone or nearly everyone.
What is personality in terms of individual and group differences?
Differences in individuals consist of ways in which each person is like some other people (e.g. extraverts, sensation seekers) while group differences consist of people in one group having certain personality features in common, and these common features make that group of people different from other groups.
What is the positions of nomothetic and idiographic research?
Nomothetic research studies individual instances of general characteristics that are distributed in the population while idiographic research studies single, unique cases.
What are the 6 domains of knowledge about human nature?
- Traits the person is born with or develops (dispositional domain)
- Conflicts within the person’s own mind (intrapsychic domain) 3. Personal and private thoughts, feelings, desires, beliefs and other subjective experiences (cognitive-experiential domain)
- Social, cultural and gendered positions in the world (social and cultural domain)
- The adjustments that the person must make to the inevitable challenges of life (adjustment domain).
- Biological events (biological domain)
What is a good theory made of?
- It provides a guide for researchers
- Organises known findings
- Makes predictions
What are the 5 scientific standards for evaluating personality theories?
- Comprehensiveness - does the theory do a good job of explaining all of the facts and observations within its domain?
- Heuristic value - does the theory provide a guide to important new discoveries about personality that were not known before?
- Testability - does the theory render precise enough predictions that personality psychologists can test them empirically?
- Parsimony - does the theory contain few premises and assumptions (parsimony) or many premises and assumptions (lack of parsimony)?
- Compatibility and integration across domains and levels - A theory of cosmology in astronomy that violated known laws of physics, for example, would be incompatible across levels and hence judged to be fundamentally flawed.
When asked “who are you?” how may a person react?
By giving a story/biography about their lives.This is because we kind of see our lives like our favourite story (Kurt Vonnegut)
