Intro to Individual Differences Flashcards
What is personality inferred from?
1) behaviour that is mostly consistent and stable (situational and temporal)
2) preferences, values & interests
When does personality exist?
- social settings
- outside of social interaction
- when were alone
Implicit Personality theories
- “common sense”- non scientific understanding
- inadequate and biased
- silly generalisations
- we NEED science to make predictions
History of personality research
- experimental data
- psychoanalysis
- psychiatric perspectives
- results from factor analysis
Issues with psychiatric perspectives
- unreliability of diagnoses between psychiatrists
- “disease” perspective- results in categorising people
- based on psycho dynamic perspectives
Idiographic / psychodynamic perspectives
- focus on individual uniqueness
- in depth analysis and understanding of person
- intra individual- how someone changes according to the situation or how the situation is defined
Issues with psychodynamic perspectives
- no proof
- not scientific (Freud a fraud)
Behaviourism
- personality is only the aggregation of a stimulus response element
- personality has no structure
- does indicate there is a measurable behavioural output
The role of statistics in personality research: Galton’s Lexical Hypothesis (1884)
- assumption that important individual differences between individuals would be encoded in single linguistic terms that occur cross culturally
- interested in measuring differences (intelligence)
- created the standard deviation as measure of individual variation
- regression and correlation coefficients to quantify degree of association between measures of individual differences
Factor analysis: Spearman (1904)
- study of cognitive performance in school children
- realised scores on range of tests correlated together
- underlying some sort of “factor”- called “g” for general cognitive ability
Factor analysis: Galton
- used adjectives as way of coming to some understanding of what personality is
- we ‘naturally’ used descriptive words to describe personality
Factor analysis: Allport and Odbert (1936)
- categorised all words in dictionary that describe personality
- started off with 18000 and reduced to 4500
Factor analysis: Cattell (1949)
- applied factor analysis to Allport and Odbert 4500 words
- ended up with 16 personality factors which all vary
Some of Cartell’s personality traits
- warmth
- reasoning
- emotional stability
- sensitivity
- privateness
- perfectionism
Nomothetic (trait based)
- similarities between large number of individuals
- core structure of personality- predefined criteria/attributes that are universal
- dispositional
- dimensional- continum and not categorical
Issues with factors/ traits
- can’t be regarded as parts of a substance
- not separate “organs” or “isolated properties”
- not “primary abilities”
- they are principles of classification described by person doing the analysis
The need for both nomothetic and idiographic approaches (Eysenck, 1951)
- no scientific way of investigating the inner subjective organisation of a persons fundamental needs and drives except by studying
- no way of accounting for observed consistencies and characteristics tendencies except assuming some inner organisation
Eysenck (1952)
- sought to structure personality into meaningful and testable entity
Components of personality: Temperament
- individuals emotional nature
- suspectability to emotional stimulation
- customary strength and speed of response
- quality of his prevailing mood
- fluctuation and intensity in mood
Components of personality: Character
- psychological disposition to inhibit instinctive impulses in accordance with a regulative principle
- ground of consistency, firmness, self control
Components of Personality
- cognitive (intelligence)
- somatic (constitution)
- motivation (what drives us)
- values (whats important to us and others)
- attitudes (positive and negative feelings)
- beliefs (cognitive component of attitudes)
Eysenck’s (1947) theory of personality structure
1) specific responses which are observed once and may be characteristic of an individual
2) habitual responses that tend to recur under similar circumstances
3) traits organised from habitual responses
4) general “types” organised from traits
Where does it leave us now?
- Eysneck high influential in reserch having specified structure
- allowed for development and testing hypotheses about personality and individual differences
- he brought substance to traits defined by FA
- personality research rooted in this approach
How to measure individual differences
- quantitative
- tested via various analyses like factor analysis, multiple regression, mediation and moderation and sometimes ANOVAs
Psychometrics
- scientific measurement of individual differences
- factor analysis relies on data acquired from this
- accurate, effective, standardised and statistically tested for validity and reliability
achieve accurate operational definitions of psychological constructs - produce score for individual taking test
What is a psychological construct?
- particular phenomena that is evidenced in research and NOT what is referred in everyday conversation
- label given to set of observations of beh that appear to belong together
- not something that exists in a person but manifested
- OPERATIONALISED definition of a personality trait
