introduction to personality psych Flashcards
What is personality
•Regularities in behaviour and experience (DeYoung &Gray, 2009)
•A person’s typical mode of response (Pervin, 1999)
•Our identity and our reputation (Hogan, 2008)
-An individual’s unique variation on the general evolutionary design for human nature, expressed as a developing pattern of dispositional traits, characteristic adaptations, and self-defining life narratives, complexly and differentially situated in culture and social context
Level of personality describtion
Level 1 – dispositional traits: broad descriptions of patterns of behaviour and experience. Relatively decontextualized. E.g. shy, bold, warm, aloof, disciplined, impulsive etc.
Level 2 – characteristic adaptations: concerns an individual’s particular life circumstances. Highly contextualized (e.g. specific goals (e.g. to become a doctor), social roles (e.g. as a medical student), ‘stages of life’ tasks).
Level 3 – life narratives: the story we have constructed about who we are. Highly/completely individualized.
What are Dispositional traits
-Personality traits are probabilistic descriptions of regularities in behaviour and experience ex: hot temper
-It arised as a response to very broad classes of stimuli and situation ex: fustration
® The earliest known attempt to offer some descriptions of personality was. The Characters of Theophrastus (c. 371 – c.287 BC),containing the 30 archetypes of ancient Greece
early catalogous of dispositional traits
§ The ‘lexical hypothesis’ – important characteristics will, over human history, be coded in language.
§ Collected an exhaustive list of personality descriptors – about 18,000 terms (e.g. sociable, aggressive, lazy, dishonest, reckless, calm).
§ Perhaps useful for rating personality.
§ However, was very unwieldy, more of a ‘laundry list’ rather than a system.
The Structure of Traits
- What is the number and nature of basic trait “domains” required to describe personality trait structure?
- How is space structured?
Factor analysis:
A statistical method that reduces many correlated variables to much fewer composite variables or ‘factors’…
•Developed by Spearman and Thurstone to explore the structure of mental abilities
•Cattell (1943): reduced Allport and Odbert’s list through many and varied techniques, including factor analysis
•Eventual result was a 16-factor solution…
what is a taxonomy of personality
- describing the structure of personality
* applying an organizing framework to the universe of trait descriptors
Problems with Cattell’s 16 traits:
- Subjectivity: different people reach a different reduced set of Allport & Odbert’s descriptors.
- Poor replicability/reproducibility: using Cattel’s 171 personality descriptors, many people failed to obtain his same 16 factors.
- Redundancy: correlations amongst many of the 16 factors were very high, suggesting that they might not be distinct
Subsequent research in the 1950’s-80s about personality taxanomy
® Most replicable factors structures suggested 3-6 traits
® Particular factors seemed to reliably emerge
® Goldberg & colleagues argued for a ‘big five’ model
hierarchical structure of traits
- Meta traits (very broad)
- Domains
- Aspects
- Facets
- Nuance
Themes from The Big Five:
® Affective/emotional tendencies: extraversion – involves feelings of positive affect and energy; neuroticism – involves feelings of worry and negative mood; openness/intellect – involves feelings of interest, awe and curiosity.
® Behavioural tendencies: extraversion describes being bold & assertive, talkative and outgoing; agreeableness describes being cooperative and generous, willingness to help; conscientiousness describes being industrious, hardworking, persisting with tasks, being organized.
® Cognitive tendencies: conscientiousness describes planful, sustained attention, attention to detail, being orderly; neuroticism describes rumination, perceiving things through a more negative lens, having more rigid & compulsive thinking; openness/intellect describes being artistic, creative, intellectually curious, inquisitive, introspective, imaginative
How to ensure scientific measurement
We must ensure that there is:
- Reliability – do they perform consistently? Are they relatively free from error?
- Validity – do trait questionnaires measure what they are intended to?
Estimating reliability :1. Test-retest reliability
- Test-retest reliability
•Correlation between time 1 score and time 2 score
•Temporal stability
•Rationale: a reliable measure is a repeatable measure – you should be able to verify the score
•Caveat: Not applicable to all psychological phenomena
•e.g., states vs. traits
•Psychological states are changeable and fleeting
•Psychological traits are relatively stable (more in week 4…)
Estimating reliability 2. Inter-rater reliability
- Correlation between rater 1 score and rater 2 score
- Rationale: again, a reliable measure is a repeatable measure – you should be able to verify the score via a second rater
- Caveat: Different raters see different ‘sides’ of a person
- Some traits are less visible to observers (e.g., neuroticism)
- Conceptually and philosophically, identity ≠ reputation
Estimating reliability split half and cronbach alpha
- Split-half reliability• Correlation between score from one half of the scale and another half
•Internal consistency - Cronbach’s Alpha•Average of all possible split halves
•Most widely reported measure of reliability
•Scales with α < .60 generally not considered reliable
