Chapter 12: Personality Through Perception Flashcards
What are cognitive approaches?
ways of studying personality that recognize the influence of how people think/process information
Research by Larsen and Cropanzano was interested in what participants…
thought about (info that went through their minds) when exposed to such emotional scenes
What did responses in the study show?
a) “My brother once had a bad gash just like that” → example of personalizing cognition = scene prompted them to recall a similar life event
b) “Head wounds bleed quite a bit because, in the head, there is a high concentration of blood vessels” → example of objectifying cognition = scene prompte her to recall objecctive facts about the distribution of blood vessels in human head
For both examples, there is a difference in…
cognition
- awareness and thinking and to specific mental acts such as perceiving, interpreting, remembering, believing, and anticipating
Levels of cognition that are of interest to personality psychologists
- Perception
- Process of imposing order on information received by one’s sense organs - Interpretation
- Process of making sense of, or explaining, events in the world - Conscious goals
- Standards that people develop for evaluating themselves and others
Personality revealed through perception
Most people assume there is reality out there and that the representation we have ot it in our minds is a precise representation → not true
What is field dependence?
perception and judgment depend and are based on the “field”
Pros: strong social skills, gravitate toward others, and are more attentive to the social context
Cons: Either is adaptive so no one is greater than the other
What is field independence?
a cognitive style in which the individual consistently relies more on internal referents (bodily sensation cues) than on external referents (environmental cues)
Pros: skillful at analyzing complex situations and extracting important details/disregarding irrelevant details
Cons: low on social skills and prefer to keep their distance from others
Field dependence/independence and life choices
-Education:
Field independent people favor natural sciences, math, engineering, whereas field dependent people favor social sciences and education
-Interpersonal relations:
Field independent people are more interpersonally detached, whereas field dependent people are attentive to social cues, oriented toward other people
What are three ways personality is revealed through interpretation?
- Kelly’s Personal Construct Theory
- Locus of Control
- Learned Helplessness
Kelly’s Personal Construct Theory
primary goal in life is to make sense of the world, and find personal meaning in it
- Finding primary meaning in life circumstances can be used to predict future and to anticipate what will happen next
Personal constructs
set of observations and explanations for those observations
- Kelly’s idea was that people have a few key constructs that they habitually apply in interpreting their world, particularly their social world
- Personality = differences in the way people construe the world
Role Construct Repertory Test (REP)
to assess individuals’ personal construct systems
- Research has found that construct similarity is related to likelihood one becomes friends with another
- May not be just about personality types grouping together, but the way in which one perceives the world
Locus of Control
concept that describes a person’s perception of responsibility for the events in his or her life; refers to whether people tend to locate that responsibility internally, within themselves, or externally, in fate, luck, or chance
Rotter
learning depends on the degree to which the person expected reinforcement - obtaining a reward was under their control, they are in control of their life outcomes
