Intro to personality Flashcards
define personality
persistent patterns of thought, affect and behaviour
what is a personality trait
An observable characteristic - consistent pattern in the way individuals behave, feel and think
Important aspects of traits
Stable across situations and time
Distinctive - relative to other people
define - trait description
what a person is typically like
define trait prediction
predict how an individual may behave in certain situations
define trait explanation
why a person behaves in a certain way
define trait explanation
why a person behaves in a certain way
what is a trait theory
Individual differences in characteristics that are generally stable across time and situations
what do trait theories typically measure with
self-reports
what does traits as dimensional refer to
Everyone has a value for every trait, with majority often falling in the middle
not categorical
define surface trait
characteristics or attributes that can be inferred from observable behaviour (what can we see)
define source trait
most fundamental aspect of personality - broad basic traits thought to be universal and few in number
who originally performed the lexical hypothesis
Galton
what was the lexical hypothesis
used dictionary to clarify words of importance that represent important characteristics, as they are more likely to be encoded in that language - estimated approx. 1000s words
what did Gordon Allport do
Listed all the trait words in the 1925 edition of Webster’s dictionary
Found 17,953 and categorised them into 4500 words as personality traits
how do was it determined which traits are most important
Need to identify traits thar co-occur e.g. argumentative and aggressive
define correlation
Association between two numerical values
assumptions of correlations
- Normal distributions of both variables
- You expect a linear relationship between the two variables
Caveat of correlation
not an indication of causation
what is a factor analysis
Statistical method that is used to reduce a large number of variables into a smaller set of factors
Aims of a factor analysis
Simplify relations amongst variables
Identify common patterns in data
Aims of factor analysis within a trait
aims to have strong correlations
Aims of factor analysis between traits
aims to have low correlations
