Individual Differences Flashcards
General rules of human behaviour
- Psychology generates general rules of human behaviour
- Try and understand how most people will behave
- Interested in explanations that apply to more than one person
Limitations on general rules of human behaviour
- Need to know how people differ as well how they are alike
- Average behaviour
- Variability of behaviours
Limitations - Average behaviours
- Any single individual may not behave like this
- Rules alone will not tell us much about specific people
Limitations - Variability
- Meaning we might lose the richness of human behaviour
Individual Differences: Aims
- To study how people differ from each other
- Looks at variance or range of responses
- Explains how and why people respond differently to each other
Explaining peoples behaviour
- Sometimes situations are better at explaining people’s behaviour than personality
Munstedt & Muhkhans (2013)
- Fear of wasps, bees and spiders may be partly related to personality
- People who are more afraid of these have higher scores of Neuroticism and lower scores for openness
Differential psychologists
- Seek to identify general factors underlying individuality (apply to everyone)
- Develop theories for explain/predicting differences and similarities in thought, emotion and behaviour
- Aim to explain HOW and WHY people are difference from one another
How are we different?
- Personality
- Intelligence
- Sense of Humour
- Appearance
- Abilities
- Interests
- Language
Everyday understanding of personality
- Fairly fixed or immutable: unlike mood or situational responses which can change
- Enduring or stable: consistent across the lifespan
- Differing among individual in population: each of us differs from the next person in our personality
Personality definition main points
- Internal and causal
- Long-lasting
- Explains why we behave the way we do in most situations
- Does not vary a lot within a person, but can vary a lot from onw person to another (explains difference)
Defining personality
- Hypothetical construct: cannot be directly observed and we infer its existence from observations of behaviour that we assume is related to personality
Evidence for defining personality
- Is something we construct, think about cultural differences
- Cultures: happy, serious, responsible attribute to different values
- Theories make different claims about the nature of personality
Personality consider
- Nomothetic
- Idiographic
Nomothetic
- TRAITS
- Personalities can be described in term of pre-defined criteria
- Which are present in every individual
- What differs between people is the strength of those traits
Idiographic
- TYPES
- Personalities are uniquely constructed across individuals
- No common character traits to compare people on
- There are different groups which people either belong to or don’t
Difference between trait and type
- TRAIT: shared categories but differ in strength
- TYPE: either belong or you don’t
Personality research
- Interested in figuring out what things are dispositional and what things are situational
Dispositional
- Behaviour is driven by internal, consistent dispositions
- Attempts to explain people’s behaviour by their personality traits
Situational
- Behaviour is driven by external. variable factors (i,e. situations in the environment)
- Attempts to explain people’s behaviour by their environment
Trait V State
- Trait: Dispositional, long-term (introverts)
- State: Situational, short-term (hungry)
Traits - lifespan
- Fairly stable
- although may be expressed in different ways
States
- Variable and determined by the environment
Personality traits - psychologist
- Argue that personality is based on traits rather than types
- Nomothetic view instead of an idiographic approach
Differential psychology
- Concerned with individual differences (i.e. the variation rather than the average)
Psychologists usually define personality
- Stable dimensions which affect behaviour throughout the lifespan
Personality research interested in
- Sorting influence of traits (dispositional) from states (situational)
The Four Humors
- Hippocrates and Galen
- Believed liquids in the body determined one’s mood and personality (i.e. biological basis for behaviour)
- Excesses of Humors cause mood shifts
State the 4 humors
- Phlegmatic
- Choleric
- Sanguine
- Melancholic
Phlegmatic
- Phlegm
- Calm, relaxed, slow
Choleric
- Yellow bile
- Aggressive, tense, impulsive
Sanguine
- Blood
- Enthusiastic, optimistic
Melancholic
- Black bile
- Sad, reflective
- More of an idiographic approach
The 4 humors attempt
- To describe people’s dispositions and create different categories of individuals
Physiognomy
- Lavater (1775)
- Art of reading people’s faces to determine their personality
- Darwin: outline of peoples features
Phrenology
- Gall, 1758-1828
- Modulation of children’s skulls
Common findings until 1800s
- Humorism
- Physiognomy
- Phrenology
Psychodynamic approach
- Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)
- ‘Conversion hysteria’: physical symptoms with no obvious cause. worked on it in Paris
- Theorised that symptoms were result of suppressed, pionful, memories (usually sexual or aggressive) based on hypnosis, free association and dream analysis
Freud’s theory of personality
- Believed personality is a system of energy that presses for release:
- ID
- EGO
- SUPEREGO
Freud’s theory: ID
- Instincts and drives, source of all psychic energy, unconscious, core of personality, pleasure principle (present from birth)
Freud’s theory: EGO
- Executive part of personality, conscious level, mediates the urges of the ID against the rules of the SUPEREGO (planning, thinking), emerges in the first few years of life
Freud’s theory: SUPEREGO
- Internalised morals of society, developed by around 4 or 5 years
ID + EGO + SUPEREGO interact and create conflict
- Results in anxiety
Defence mechanisms of personality examples
- Denial
- Isolation
- Repression
- Regression
Evaluation of Freudian Theory
- Data on which theory was based not rigorous
- Theory was based a lot on metaphors
- Unconscious influences on behaviour
- Defence mechanisms
- ‘Psychic energy’: vague making it hard to test (bad for science)
- His background on neurological seemed to try and give simplistic account of the mind that matched physical structure
- Overall: theories claimed too much on too little dtat
Evaluation of Freudian Theory: Data on which theory was based not rigorous
- Sketchy case notes
- Small number of individual case studies
- Not representative of general population
Evaluation of Freudian Theory: Theory was based a lot on metaphors
- Much of interpretation of data is retrospective
- Quite difficult to be wrong
Evaluation of Freudian Theory: Unconscious influences on behaviour
- Unconscious processing of information (e.g. subliminal perception)
Evaluation of Freudian Theory: Defence mechanisms
- Cognitive mechanism exclude or defer unwanted information from consciousness (cognitive avoidance/dissonance reduction)
- Similar to repression
Evaluation of Freudian Theory: Contribution that isn’t contentious
- Talking helps!
- As a theory, psychoanalysis had a lot of issues but as a method, it was revolutionary
Jungian Theory
- Carl Jung (1875-1961)
- Developed ideas such as the collective unconscious, archetypes, and extraversion/intraversion
Jungian archetypes
- Devil
- Hero
- Trickster
- Mother
- Wise old man
- Tower
Jungian Personality
- Developed a theory of personality which has become more wide-spread
Jungian Personality: ‘types’
- 16 different ‘types’ based on assumptions that we are either:
> Extraverted or introverted
> Sensing or intuitive
> Thinking or feeling
> Judging or perceiving (adding by Briggs and Meyers)
Jungian Personality: 16 types
- Attempted to classify the majority of individuals using these dimensions
- Mix of nomothetic and idiographic approaches: everyone is somewhere on the 4 different spectrums, but you class people as one of 16 types
- Vast majority of people should be classifiable under the 16 types
Myers-Briggs Test
- WW2 developed
- Wanted to assign women to jobs best suited to their personality
- Not scientifically validated however used in organisations and settings
- Usually relies on binary choices (extravert or not)