Chapter 1 What Is Personality Psychology?

Question 1

Heider

Answer 1

Internal vs. External attributions

Question 2

Correspondence Inference Theory

Answer 2

Jones and Davis

*We try to figure out what people are trying to achieve and make an inference about their personality from it

Question 3

Kelly’s Co-variation Model

Answer 3

We have try to decipher, over time, the possible causes of behavior and then either decide if its due to the person or situation. (Consensus, Distinctiveness, and Consistency)

Question 4

Deciphering Personality

Answer 4

Portraying the essence of who someone is:

• Reducing a lot of information about a person into a small set of qualities
• Easier to do/different kind of experience depending on the relationship
• We do this quite efficiently and automatically

Question 5

Personality

Answer 5

• Convey a sense of consistency or continuity about a person
• Consistency across time
• Consistency across similar situations
• Sometimes consistency across situations that are quite different from each other
• Internal causality
• Predict and understand people’s behavior (even your own)
• Distinct
• Conveys the sense that a few qualities can summarize what a person is like, because they’re so prominent in that person’s behavior.

Question 6

Personality…

Answer 6

• A dynamic organization, inside the person, of psychophysical systems that create the person’s characteristic patterns of behavior, thoughts, and feelings. (Gordon Allport, 1961)
• Organization
• Processes
• Psychological concept, but it’s inextricably tied to the physical body
• Causal force that helps determine how the person relates to the world
• Individualized patterns- recurrences and consistencies
• Is displayed not just one way but many ways- in behaviors, thoughts, and feelings

Question 7

Individual Differences (traits)

Answer 7

• Each person who ever lived is different from everyone else.
• No two personaliies are quite alike-not even those of identical twins.
• Key to everyday use of the term personality- capture central features of a person
• Address where the differences come from
• Consider why the differences matter

Question 8

Intrapersonal Processes

Answer 8

Cognitive processes that cause consistently cause you to act the way you do, even if yields inconsistent behaviors across situations

• The processes within the person that Allport (1961) called a “dynamic organization” of systems
• Processes that go on inside you, leading you to act the way you do
• Processes create a sense of continuity within the person, even if the person acts differently in different circumstances
• The same processes are engaged, even if the results differ across situations.
• The processes by which motives vary in strength are some of the processes of intrapersonal functioning, in this view.

Question 9

Social Psychology

Answer 9

Focus on the power of the social situation

Question 10

Personality Psychology

Answer 10

Focus on the enduring and characteristic patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving that originate within an individual.
*The situation matters, yet people often behave differently given the same set of situational circumstances

Question 11

Theory

Answer 11

Summary statement, a general principle or set of principles about a class of events.

• Explain the phenomena it addresses; provides a way to explain some things that are known to be true- Explanation
• Predict new information- things nobody has thought to look for yet
• More subtle and difficult- because most theories have a little ambiguity, makes it unclear exactly what the prediction should be
• The broader the theory, the more likely it will be ambiguous

Question 12

Good Theory

Answer 12

*Breadth of the information behind the theory
-To base a theory on just one source of information weakens the theory
*Parsimony: it should include as few assumptions (or concepts) as possible
SImple as possible
-A theory that looks parsimonious today may not be able to account for something that will be discovered tomorrow. A theory that looks too complex today may be the only one that can handle tomorrow’s discovery.
*Subjective- some theories just “feel” better than others.
-Which theories feel best to you, depends partly on how you see the world.
-Fit with your worldview

Question 13

Trait Perspective

Answer 13

• People have fairly stable qualities (traits) that are displayed across many settings but are deeply embedded in the person.
• People differ in how they embody stable traits
• What (and how many) traits are the important ones in personality and how trait differences are expressed in behavior

Question 14

Motive Perspective

Answer 14

• The key element in human experience is the motive forces that underlie behavior
• Posited many different motives and have examined how some of them wax and wane under different circumstances.
• People also differ in their patterns of underlying strengths of different motives

Question 15

Inheritance and Evolution Perspective

Answer 15

• Humans are creatures that evolved across millennia and that human nature is deeply rooted in our genes.
• Personality is genetically based.
• Dispositions are inherited.
• Many qualities of human behavior (and thus personality) exist precisely because long ago they had evolutionary benefits.

Question 16

Biological Process Perspective

Answer 16

• Personality reflects the workings of the body we inhabit and the brain that runs the body.
• How the nervous system and hormones influence people’s behavior and how differences in those functions influence the kind of person you are.

Question 17

Psychoanalytic Perspective

Answer 17

• Personality is a set of internal forces that compete and conflict with one another.
• Dynamics of these forces (and the way they influence behavior)
• Set of pressures inside the person that sometimes work with each other and sometimes are at war with each other
• Sigmund Freud

Question 18

Psychosocial Perspective

Answer 18

• Our formation of relationships with other people and the ways in which these relationships play out
• Historical links to psychoanalytic theory

Question 19

Social Learning Perspective

Answer 19

• A view of human nature in which change, rather than constancy, is paramount.
• Behavior changes systematically as a result of experiences
• Person’s personality is the integrated sum of what the person has learned up till now

Question 20

Self Actualization/Self Determination Perspective

Answer 20

• Every person has the potential to grow and develop into a valuable human being if permitted to do so
• People naturally tend toward self-perfection
• Self-determination
• Peronality is partly a matter of the uniqueness hidden within and partly a matter of what the person chooses to make of that uniqueness

Question 21

Cognitive Perspective

Answer 21

• Human nature involves deriving meaning from experiences
• Imposes organization and form on experience
• Mental organizations
• Thinking about those processes of construing the world and how they are used to

Question 22

Self Regulation Perspective

Answer 22

• Personality is a reflection of how people form and move toward their goals.
• People are complex psychological systems
• Homeostatic processes reflect complex physiological systems and weather reflects complex atmospheric systems
• Recurrent processes form organized actions that attain specific endpoints
• Assumption of organizations, coherence, and patterning
• Synthesizing goals and moving toward those goals