Chapter 4 The Trait Perspective

Question 1

Trait Approach

Answer 1

• People are consistent in their actions, thoughts, and feelings over time and situations.
• People are fundamentally different from each other.
• People differ from each other in many ways.
• A personality consists, in part, of a pattern of trait qualities.
• Pattern differs from one person to another.
• The intersection among these traits in any given person defines his or her personality.

Question 2

Hippocrates (400 BC) and Galen

Answer 2

Four types of people, each reflecting an excess of certain types of body fluids:

• Choleric (irritable)
• Melancholic (depressed)
• Sanguine (optimistic)
• Phlegmatic (calm)

Question 3

Carl Jung (1933)

Answer 3

People are introverted or extroverted

Question 4

Introverted

Answer 4

• Prefer solitary activities

- When facing stress, introverts tend to withdraw into themselves

Question 5

Extroverted

Answer 5

• Spend time with other

- When facing stress, extroverts tend to seek out other people

Question 6

Trait Theories

Answer 6

• Assume people occupy different points on continuously varying dimensions
• Dimensional approach
• Differences among people are seen as quantitative, rather than qualitative
• People are seen as differing in how much various characteristics are incorporated in their personalities
• Quantitative (vs. qualitative view) with thousands of possible permutations

Question 7

Types

Answer 7

*Distinct and discontinuous categories

Question 8

Nomothetic View

Answer 8

• The belief that traits exist in the same way in every person
• This viewpoint sees traits as having the same psychological meaning in everyone. The belief is that people differ only in the amount of each trait.
• Everyone stands somewhere on each trait that exists
• Allows comparisons among people
• “Nomothetic”= Greek word “law”
• Uniqueness arises from unique combinations of levels on many trait dimensions
• Uniqueness of the individual expressed by where they stand on different traits

Question 9

Idiographic View

Answer 9

• Emphasizes each person’s uniqueness
• Emphasizes that traits may differ in importance from person to person
• Traits are individualized
• Even if the connotations are the same, the trait may differ in importance, so the people can’t be compared meaningfully.
• Maybe from differences in how the traits are expressed

Question 10

Factor Analysis

Answer 10

• Looks at the correlation among many qualities in people to detect meaningful patterns/traits.
• Statistical technique
• If two qualities correlate when assessed across many people, they may reflect a trait that contributes to both of them
• Patterns of correlation, then, may reveal trait dimensions that lie beneath the measured qualities
• Instead of looking at one correlation between two variables, a factor analysis looks at correlations among many variables.

Question 11

Factor Extraction

Answer 11

• Distills the set of correlations to a smaller set of factors
• Reduces your matrix to a smaller number of underlying dimensions

Question 12

Factors

Answer 12

*Shared variations (underlying commonalities) among several of the measures (rather than just two at a time)

Question 13

Factor Loadings

Answer 13

• Correlations between the factor and each item (rating) that contributes to its existence
• Indicate how closely each quality is correlated with its corresponding factor (trait)
• Items that correlate strongly with the factor (0.40 or above)= “load on” that factor

Question 14

Factor “labels”

Answer 14

• Indicate what the factor represents- i.e. which trait

* Subjective

Question 15

Raymond Cattell

Answer 15

• Empirical Approach
• Lexical Criterion
• One of the first to use factor analysis
• If you start with preconceptions, you’ll lead yourself astray.
• Cattell thought that personality is captured in a set of 16 dimensions: the 16 Persoanlity Factor inventory (16PF)

Question 16

Lexical Criterion

Answer 16

*The more words for a quality of personality, the more it probably matters.

Question 17

Hans Eysenck

Answer 17

• We should begin instead with well-developed ideas about what we want to measure
• Began with the typology of Hippocrates and Galen and observations made by Jung and Wundt
• Study whether the types identified by Hippocrates and Galen could be created by combining high and low levels of two super traits
• Extroversion (vs. introversion)
• Concerns tendencies toward sociability, liveliness, activeness, and dominance
• Neuroticism (emotional stability)
• Concerns the ease and frequency with which the person becomes upset and distressed.
• Self-report
• Used factor analysis to refine his scales, by selecting items that loaded well, and to confirm that the scales measure two factors as he intended.
• Supertrait: extraversion
• Trait level: Sociability, dominance, assertiveness, activity, liveliness
• Habitual response level: derive from specific responses
• He believed that extraversion and neuroticism link to aspects of nervous system functioning
• There’s a third dimension in Eysenck’s view, called psychoticism- a tendency toward psychological detachment from, and lack of concern with, other people
• People high in this trait- hostile, manipulative, and impulsive

Question 18

Second-order factors

Answer 18

• Tells whether the factors themselves form factors (correlate in clusters)
• One second-order factor from the 16PF is virtually identical to extroversion; another is similar to neuroticism

Question 19

Jerry Wiggins

Answer 19

• The core human traits concern interpersonal life

* Interpersonal Circle

Question 20

Interpersonal Circle

Answer 20

• A set of eight patterns, arrayed around two dimensions underlying human relations
• Core dimensions: dominance (or status) and love
• Diverse personalities arise from combinations of values on the two core dimensions
• Dominant vs. Submissive
• Cold-Hearted vs. Warm-Agreeable
• Introversion and extroversion= resulting from the interaction of two other qualities
• Compared to Big Five
• Dominance and Love
• Love may be equivalent to agreeableness
• Dominance = extraversion

Question 21

Five Factor Model

Answer 21

1. Extraversion: Assertiveness, spontaneity, energy, dominance, confidence, propensity toward happiness
2. Neuroticism: Emotional stability
   - Tendency to experience anxiety, general distress
   - High level of agreement among researchers
3. Agreeableness
   - A concern with maintaining relationships
   - Emotional supportiveness
   - Nurturance
   - Inhibition of negative affect
4. Conscientiousness
   - Will to achieve or simply will
   - Constraint and responsibility
   - Planning, Persistence, Purposeful striving
   - Lack of agreement among theorists about what this trait realy means- most agree name is misleading
5. Intellect
   - Openness to Experience
   - Very large amount of disagreement about what this entails.
   - Intellect/Intelligence
   - Imaginative/Creative

Question 22

Extraversion

Answer 22

• Having social impact
• Unlike agreeableness, predicts tendency to assume leadership roles
• Firm handshake that conveys confidence
• Construct the stories along with their friends
• Less cooperative than introverts when facing social resource dilemmas
• Valuing achievement and stimulation
• Desires for a high-status career, political influence, and exciting lifestyle, and children
• Peer Acceptance

Question 23

Agreeableness

Answer 23

• Maintaining positive relations with others.
• Protect against being victimized by peers unlike extraversion
• With greater social support from family members
• Short-circuits aggressive responses
• Valuing benevolence and tradition
• Desires for group welfare and harmonious family relations and actually relates inversely to desires for wealth, political influence, and an exciting lifestyle
• Less likely to respond to bad outcomes
• *Predicts less poaching of romantic partners, less responsiveness to poaching attempts by others, and greater cooperation in resolving social dilemmas over resources
• Predicts endorsement of conflict resolution tactics among children
• Greater responsiveness in parenting
• Less negativity in marital interactions
• Less seeking of revenge after being harmed
• Less substance abuse
• Less antisocial behavior

Question 24

Conscientiousness

Answer 24

• Various kinds of health-linked behaviors
• Have health implications
• More restritive household bans on smoking
• Live longer -> take better care of themselves
• Less substance abuse
• Less antisocial behavior more generally
• Less Likely to poach partners or be poached
• Desire for a career but not necessarily a high standard of living
• Predicts less unsafe sex and other risky behaviors
• More responsive parenting of young children and to use of negotiation as a conflict-resolution strategy (Better parents)
• Predicts higher academic achievement and relates to high religiousness in adulthood (Better students)
• Less likely to try to steal someone else’s romantic partner and are less responsive to being lured away
• Development of relationships in adolescence
• Predicts peer ratings of social influence in organizational settings

Question 25

Openness to Experience (Intellect)

Answer 25

• Predict greater engagement with the existential challenges of life
• More favorable inter-racial attitudes
• Greater sexual satisfaction in marriage
• Desire artisitc expression and devalue the possibility of an easy, lazy life
• React less intensely to stress
• Predict more prior arrests among prisoners
• Less likelihood of stigmatizing others

Question 26

Neuroticism

Answer 26

• Distress in a wide variety of difficult circumstances
• Relates to more difficult interactions among married partners and less satisfaction in the relationship
• More likely to distance themselves from their partners after a negative event
• Impairs academic performance
• Predicts earlier death, partly (but not exclusively) because people higher in neuroticism smoke more
• Predicts a negative emotional tone when writing stories about oneself

Question 27

Walter Mischel

Answer 27

Conducts series of studies showing that self reported traits and behaviors don’t correlate well, average correlation of only 0.3!!! This meant 91% of the variation in behavior was unaccounted for!!

Question 28

NEO Personality Inventory

Answer 28

• Neuroticism, extraversion, openness, agreeableness, conscientiousness
• Measures of six narrow traits for each domain of the five-factor model
• Combine into a score for that supertrait
• Share with Eysenck the idea that the core traits are supertraits, which are, in turn, composed of more specific facet traits.

Question 29

Tellegen

Answer 29

• Greatly resembles Eysenck’s in having three supertraits
• Because neuroticism slightly as a tendency to experience negative emotions
• Because extraversion as a tendency to experience positive emotions
• Positive emotionality -> social success
• Negative emotionality -> poor adjustment
• Constraint, resembles psychoticism in Eysenck’s model but viewed from the opposite direction
• Predicts similar outcomes: low constraint-> criminal and antisocial behavior and to drug use

Question 30

Zuckerman

Answer 30

• Adopt five factors in another direction
• “Alternative 5”
• What comes out of a factor analysis depends partly on what goes into it
• Put slightly different things in
• Sociability factor resembles extraversion
• Neuroticism- anxiety is most of neuroticism but without the hostility that others include there
• Hostility is an aggression-hostility, which otherwise looks like agreeableness (reversed)
• Impulsive sensation seeking looks like conscientiousness (reversed)
• Activity- located hostility outside neuroticism

Question 31

Ashton

Answer 31

• The five-factor model is incomplete
• Tests involving seven languages
• Sixth supertrait- honesty-humility
• This trait tends to be absorbed by agreeableness in some measures but is a distinct quality that stands out on its own, if it’s allowed to do so.
• HEXACO framework
• Honesty-humility adds predictive validity above and beyond the five-factor framework

Question 32

The five-factor model can be condensed into two dimensions

Answer 32

• Putting the five traits into a higher-order analysis yields two factors
• Low neuroticism, agreeableness, and conscientiousness- Digman called it socialization
• Because these qualities all influence whether people get along in social units
• Extraversion and openness
• Digman: reflecting personal growth
• Because these qualities influence whether people expose themselves to new things, thereby fostering growth

Question 33

Situationism

Answer 33

• Situational forces determine behavior, not personality
• Correlations between traits and behavior were low because situational variables overwhelm the effect of personality
• Funder and Ozer (1983): Studies impact of situation on behavior and converted the original statistics to correlations
• About the same size as the personality coefficients that had been criticized so sharply
• Consistent with social psychological perspective

Question 34

Interactionism

Answer 34

traits and situations interact to influence behavior. Neither *The setting alone nor the person alone provides a complete account.

• Part to an analysis-of-variance understanding of how two variables (or in this case, two classes of variables) influence an outcome
• Sometimes, variations in a situation have an effect on all persons
• Stressful situations may cause everyone to seek out other people for social support
• Sometimes, variations on a trait have an effect in all situations
• Extroverts may always spend more time with other people than introverts
• Interaction here means that variations in the situation affect some people in one way and others in a different way.
• This interaction might occur in addition to one or both of the overall effects, or it may occur instead of them.
• Situations and dispositions can interact in several ways to determine behavior
• A situation may influence one kind of person but not other kinds.
• Sometimes a situational change causes one kind of behavior change in one person and a different behavior change in another person.

Question 35

Weak Situations

Answer 35

Some situations permit easy expression of personality

Question 36

Strong Situations

Answer 36

Force behavior into channels, thus preventing expression of personality

Question 37

Analysis-of-variance model

Answer 37

• Lab research
• Put people into identical situations
• Assume that people outside the lab also enter identical situations- wrong
• In life outside the lab (and rarely, but occasionally, even in the lab), people exercise considerable choice over which environments they enter.
• By exercising choice over the settings they enter, people thereby influence the behaviors they engage in- depends partly on their personalities
• People choose their marriage partners partly by whether the partner lets them be who they are.
• People differ in the kinds of responses they elicit from others
• Introverts tend to steer conversations in one direction, extroverts in another
• People actively manipulate each other
• Change the situation
• Situation is actually different for one person than it is for another
• Reciprocal influence

Question 38

Hedge

Answer 38

• A word or phrase that limits a trait’s applicability
• Implies that you think the trait-based behavior occurs only in some kinds of situations
• Ex: “shy with strangers” or “aggressive when teased”

Question 39

Mischel, Shoda & Mendoza-Denton

Answer 39

• Traits as patterns of linkages between situations and behaviors
• Consistencies do exist between traits and situations, just not for traits across all situations
• These patterns of linkages vary from person to person
• How traits affect behavior
• Given situation x, action y is likely
• A given action shouldn’t be expected to occur all the time, because the situation that elicits it isn’t always present
• A behavior may appear inconsistent across situations- especially situations that differ a lot
• Situation that seem similar to the person, the behavior is consistent
• There’s a lot of consistency, despite the variability.

Question 40

Behavioral Signatures

Answer 40

• Individuality, uniqueness: pattern of situation-behavior links the person has established over time and experience
• Even if two people tend toward the same kind of behavior, the situations that elicit that behavior may differ from one person to the other.
• Each person’s unique pattern of links from situation to action creates a trait that’s just a little different from that of any other person.
• The pattern of linkage between situation and behavior differs from one person to another.
• A person can display qualities from one end of a trait dimension in one situaiton and qualities from the opposite end of the dimension in another.

Question 41

Personality Disorders

Answer 41

• Stable, enduring patterns of behavior that deviate from normal cultural expectations and interfere with the person’s life or the lives of others.
• Many theorists suspect that personality disorders are essentially extreme manifestations of several of the “big five” traits.
• O’Connor and Dyce (2001): all personality disorders are represented within the five-factor model
• Reynolds and Clark (2001): the “big five” did a good job of representing personality disorder, and that the facet scales (the narrow scales within the five domains) did an even better job.
• One recent study even found that clinicians find the “big five” more useful clinically than the categories of the diagnostic system.
• Raised more generally about abnormalities of all types

Question 42

Trait Approach to Problem Behavior

Answer 42

• Behavioral change
• Traits are stable. Any change that therapy produces will likely be in how the traits are displayed, not in the traits themselves.

Question 43

Interactionism to Problem Behavior

Answer 43

• Interaction between susceptibilities and difficult situations
• The susceptible person to avoid entering situations in which the relevant stresses are likely to occur.
• Avoiding such situations should help prevent the problems from arising
• People exercise some control over what situations they choose to enter.

Question 44

Trait Psychology: Problems and Prospects

Answer 44

• McAdams: Trait psychology the “psychology of the stranger”- provides information that would be important if you knew nothing about a person but doesn’t portray the dynamic aspects of personality
• Doesn’t tell you much about how or why the person acts that way
• Trait psychology doesn’t claim to present a complete picture of the person but rather on angle of view
• Trait theories sometimes resort to circular explanations
• Circular reasoning: the information about the behavior is being used to infer the existence of a trait, which is being used, in turn, to explain the behavior