INDIVIDUAL DIFF - PERSONALITY Flashcards
What is personality?
“the more or less stable, internal factors that make one person’s behaviour consistent from one time to another, and different from the behaviour that other people would manifest in comparable situations” Child (1968)
a particular pattern of thinking and behaviour that prevails across time and situations and differentiates one person from another” Carlson et al (2010)
What are the key ideas of personality?
- stability over time
- consistency between situations
- universality of types/ traits
Where are the origins of the term personlity?
- theatrical mask used first in Greek Drama (500-600 BC)
- stylised/ exaggerated masks worn to indicate different roles
- masks allowed same actor to play multiple roles
Whats the difference between types and traits in personality?
Types- large, all consuming categories e.g oral, introvert or melancholic
Traits- elements or dimensions that people can have more or less of e.g openness, warmth, dominance etc..
What was the earliest personality work?
- Ancient Greece
Hippocrates - 400BC - they suggested 4 different personality types related to bodily humours (liquids)
- phlegmatic (calm)
- melancholic (gloomy) - black bile
- Choleric (angry)- yellow bile
- sanguine (cheerful) - blood
Galen 200BC
- he developed the work of Hippocrates 4 different bodily humours - into 4 temperament types
What are personality traits?
- Elements or dimensions that all people have
- people vary in terms of how much they have - more or less of e.g warmth, dominance, extrversion
- traits can become dimensions
As a trait model- low, medium, high
Do universal traits exist?
yes
- height, weight and age
Where did trait theory begin and what is it?
Allport & Obert - 1936
- identified 18,000 adjectives in English language that describe some aspect of personality
- approx 4500 words refer only to people
- eliminated evaluations such as admirable
- eliminated synonyms such as shy/ bashful
- reduced to 160 ‘trait’ names - that describe human personality
How many traits are there and have have psychologists arrived at these figures?
3, 16 or 5
- factor analysis
What is factor analysis?
A mathmatical procedure applied to a set of numerical observations
- relationship between 2 variables can be summarised in terms of a correlation coefficient
- it is a way of summarising a set of correlation coefficients
- provides set of results which gives an indication of the underlying relatuonships between the observations
- underlying relationships = factors
Who is Eysenck?
- born in germany, but moved to the UK in 1930s
- interested in how personality traits clustered
- used factor analysis
- developed personality questionnaires
- proposed a model of the structure of personality
His theory explored two factors: Extroversion & Neurotricism
Later devised a 3 factor model
1. Introversion - extraversion
2. emotionally stable - neuroticism
3. self-control - psychoticism
OK RELIABILITY BUT POOR PREDICITON
Who is Cattle?
- his aim was to be able to describe entire personality with reference to a few dimensions.- data reduction/ factor analysis
- He created a questionnaire with 100 items
looked into 16 trait dimentions
POOR RELIABILITY BUT WANTED TO PREDICT MORE
What is Costa & McCrae’s 5 factors (OCEAN)
- Open to experience
- conscientiousness
- extroversion
- agreeableness
- Neuroticism
Who proposed the dark triad theory?
Paulhus and Williams (2002)
- another 3 universal traits
1. Subclinical psychopathy
2. subclinical narcissism
3. machiavellianism
Are personalities stable across time/ can u test this?
-Test - retest reliability
1. generally good but variable
2. Eysenck > big 5 > Cattell
3. retests often conducted 2 weeks later
4. identicle situation
