Chapter 4 The Trait Perspective Flashcards
1
Q
Trait Approach
A
- 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.
2
Q
Hippocrates (400 BC) and Galen
A
Four types of people, each reflecting an excess of certain types of body fluids:
- Choleric (irritable)
- Melancholic (depressed)
- Sanguine (optimistic)
- Phlegmatic (calm)
3
Q
Carl Jung (1933)
A
People are introverted or extroverted
4
Q
Introverted
A
- Prefer solitary activities
- When facing stress, introverts tend to withdraw into themselves
5
Q
Extroverted
A
- Spend time with other
- When facing stress, extroverts tend to seek out other people
6
Q
Trait Theories
A
- 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
7
Q
Types
A
*Distinct and discontinuous categories
8
Q
Nomothetic View
A
- 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
9
Q
Idiographic View
A
- 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
10
Q
Factor Analysis
A
- 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.
11
Q
Factor Extraction
A
- Distills the set of correlations to a smaller set of factors
- Reduces your matrix to a smaller number of underlying dimensions
12
Q
Factors
A
*Shared variations (underlying commonalities) among several of the measures (rather than just two at a time)
13
Q
Factor Loadings
A
- 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
14
Q
Factor “labels”
A
- Indicate what the factor represents- i.e. which trait
* Subjective
15
Q
Raymond Cattell
A
- 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)
16
Q
Lexical Criterion
A
*The more words for a quality of personality, the more it probably matters.
17
Q
Hans Eysenck
A
- 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
18
Q
Second-order factors
A
- 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
19
Q
Jerry Wiggins
A
- The core human traits concern interpersonal life
* Interpersonal Circle
20
Q
Interpersonal Circle
A
- 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
21
Q
Five Factor Model
A
- Extraversion: Assertiveness, spontaneity, energy, dominance, confidence, propensity toward happiness
- Neuroticism: Emotional stability
- Tendency to experience anxiety, general distress
- High level of agreement among researchers - Agreeableness
- A concern with maintaining relationships
- Emotional supportiveness
- Nurturance
- Inhibition of negative affect - 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 - Intellect
- Openness to Experience
- Very large amount of disagreement about what this entails.
- Intellect/Intelligence
- Imaginative/Creative
22
Q
Extraversion
A
- 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
23
Q
Agreeableness
A
- 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
24
Q
Conscientiousness
A
- 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
25
Q
Openness to Experience (Intellect)
A
- 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
26
Q
Neuroticism
A
- 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
27
Q
Walter Mischel
A
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!!
28
Q
NEO Personality Inventory
A
- 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.
29
Q
Tellegen
A
- 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
30
Q
Zuckerman
A
- 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
31
Q
Ashton
A
- 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
32
Q
The five-factor model can be condensed into two dimensions
A
- 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
33
Q
Situationism
A
- 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
34
Q
Interactionism
A
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.
35
Q
Weak Situations
A
Some situations permit easy expression of personality
36
Q
Strong Situations
A
Force behavior into channels, thus preventing expression of personality
37
Q
Analysis-of-variance model
A
- 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
38
Q
Hedge
A
- 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”
39
Q
Mischel, Shoda & Mendoza-Denton
A
- 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.
40
Q
Behavioral Signatures
A
- 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.
41
Q
Personality Disorders
A
- 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
42
Q
Trait Approach to Problem Behavior
A
- Behavioral change
- Traits are stable. Any change that therapy produces will likely be in how the traits are displayed, not in the traits themselves.
43
Q
Interactionism to Problem Behavior
A
- 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.
44
Q
Trait Psychology: Problems and Prospects
A
- 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
