L01 - Introduction

Question 1

What is personality psychology?

Answer 1

To predict a person’s behaviour, you need to understand what they’re like as a person
- e.g., personality traits, social identities

Question 2

What is social psychology?

Answer 2

To predict a person’s behaviour, you need to understand the situation they’re in
- social situations predict behaviour regardless of a person’s personality

classical social psychology studies demonstrated power of the situation
- e.g., Milgram’s experiment on obedience

Question 3

What is the person-situation debate?

Answer 3

Personality psychology: behaviour is determined by characteristics of the person

Social psychology: behaviour is determined by social situation

is the person or the situation more influential in determining behaviour?

Question 4

What is the situation argument?

Answer 4

Average correlation between a person characteristic and specific behaviour tested is 0.3
- means that only about 15% of behaviour can be predicted by characteristics of a person

Consistency in behaviour across situations is low

Is there such a thing as personality?

Question 5

What is the person argument?

Answer 5

Personality intuitively exists
- over 17,000 words to describe personality

Personality is pretty stable across time

Personality predicts behaviour in general pretty well, but not as accurate for behaviour at any one given time

Correlation between well-established situational variables and behaviour is 0.3-0.4

Question 6

What is the interactionist consensus?

Answer 6

Behaviour = interaction between characteristics of the person and the situation they’re in

Question 7

What does it mean to have a self?

Answer 7

To have a body
- enables distinction from others

Capacity for reflexive behaviour
- we are capable of thinking and behaving towards ourselves
- first conceptualized by William James (1890) as:
- “I”: subjective self that is aware of its own thinking and actions
- vs. “me”: self as object or self you can describe

A psychological collection of information about who you are as a person
- i.e., self-concept

Heavily shaped by the social world

Question 8

What is the “self”?

Answer 8

the self: your social identity and your inner processes that enable you to operate your body successfully in society

the self is not a thing, but a system/process
- selves are always in flux dealing with new situations, learning, and adapting
- not just the self-concept, because there’s no action in a self-concept