Intro to Personality Psych Flashcards
what are the 3 levels of personality?
- dispositional traits
- characteristic adaptions
- life narratives
what is the defining feature of level 1 (dispositional traits) to describe personality? what does this mean?
it is relatively decontextualised… this means that when we say someone is X, it is not necessarily in a specific context
what are some examples of dispositional traits?
shy, bold, warm, aloof, impulsive etc
T or F? Dispositional traits are narrow descriptions of patterns of behaviour
F
what does the term characteristic adaptions refer to? what “level” is it?
how we might adapt in a characteristic way to a specific context, particular stage of life, situation, or role we may have.
Characteristic adaptions are highly contextualised, give an example of this
while someone may not be an anxious person, they may have a fear of heights
what are characteristic adaptions concerned with?
an individual’s particular life circumstances
what examples demonstrate characteristic adaptions?
specific goals, social roles, educational aspirations
what is level 3 of personality?
life narratives
what do some think life narratives provide?
the most detailed understanding of what an individual is like
what is the definition of personality traits?
probabilistic descriptions of regularities in behaviour and experience, arising in response to broad classes of stimuli and situations
what did theophrastus do?
write a book in ancient Greece about the different types of people he saw
what is the lexical hypothesis? who introduced it? when?
that if something is important to us, we will have developed a lexical way to describe it… allport and odbert (1936)
what did allport and odbert do? what is the flaw of it?
collected a list of 18,000 terms that were personality descriptors
it’s a list not a system
what was used to determine domains out of Allports 18,000 terms?
Factor analysis
what is factor analysis?
a statistical method that reduces many correlated variables to much fewer composite variables or factors
who developed Factor analysis to study mental abilities?
spearman and thurstone
what did Cattell do? When?
in 1943, reduced allport’s list down to a 16 factor solution using factor analysis
what were the steps of Cattell’s method?
- take 18,000 descriptors into 160 clusters of synonyms and antonyms
- discard near identical descriptors
- reduced to final list of 171 descriptors
- then asked some people to rate their friends on these 171 descriptors
- used factor analysis to settle on 16 factors
what are problems with Cattell’s 16 traits
- subjectivity before getting to factor analysis
- had poor replicability - people found different factors even when starting from his 171 traits
- redundancy - many factors correlated too highly to be different traits
from broad to narrow, what is the hierarchical structure of traits?
- meta traits (stability/plasticity)
- domains (Big 5)
- aspects (eg assertiveness, enthusiasm)
- facets (eg energy levels, talkativeness)
- nuances (discrete behaviours eg, liking parties)
how can one distinguish between an extraverted person and an agreeable person?
E person will be bold, assertive and sociable, but not necessarily nice or kind, while an A person will be kind, caring, cooperative and trusting but not necessarily a people person
what are the characteristics of a conscientious person?
- concerned with finishing things
- doing them properly
- being thorough, precise and careful