Lecture 3 - History of Personality

Question 1

What is everyday personality?

Answer 1

• In evaluating other people, in context of social attractiveness, we make value judgements about them
• To make sense of the world, we construct theories to help us understand them to help interaction
• Implicit personality theories are not built from systematic science = unreliable

Question 2

What is Allport’s definition of personality?

Answer 2

• A dynamic organisation inside the person of psychophysical systems that create the person’s characteristic patterns of behaviour, thoughts and feelings.

Question 3

What things are key about personality?

Answer 3

• Active, responsive and changes over time
• Organised in internal structure
• Characteristic patterns show stability which is key for personality measures
• Central component for driving behaviour

Question 4

Why would you study personality?

Answer 4

• Explain the motivational bias of behaviour
• Provide descriptions/categorisations of how individuals behave
• Investigate what causes the development of certain personality characteristics
  What contributes more? Genes or environment

Question 5

What is Physiognomy?

Answer 5

• Physical appearance is representative of inner character
• Racism is a modern variant of this
  e.g upper body represents morals

Question 6

What is Craniometry?

Answer 6

• Idea that brain size = psych traits
• Ethnicity and rights were being discussed and rich people wanted to keep their slaves, so said the brains of white people > black people
• Abandoned as miscalculations made
• Brain size has little to do with intelligence or other human functions

Question 7

What is Phrenology?

Answer 7

• Shape of brain was important
• Would physically examine bumps on head
• Abandoned as skull shape has no relation to brain shape
• Studies say no psychological attributes have no relationship to bumps the human scalp

Question 8

What was the Psychoanalytic approach?

Answer 8

• Made of conscious, pre-conscious, and unconscious
• Made of id, ego, superego, and if they have conflict = anxiety
• Develops through psychosexual stages: oral, anal, phallic, latent, genital

Question 9

What did Adler claim?

Answer 9

• As humans are helpless, we strive for power
• When we fail/succeed we have a superiority/inferiority complex

Question 10

What did Jung do?

Answer 10

• Developed Psyche
• Extraversion/Intraversion
• Myer-Briggs test, measuring Jung’s ideas

Question 11

What did Horney do?

Answer 11

• Looked at the role of culture and parenting
• Came up with 3 categories
• Compliant, aggressive, detached

Question 12

What does Learning Theory say?

Answer 12

• Differences in personality are due to differences in learning experiences
• Env is main contributor to who we become
• Key players: Pavlov, Watson & Skinner

Question 13

What is the Trait Approach?

Answer 13

• Trying to find the structure of personality
• Looking at somatypes: relationship between physicality and temperament
• Endomorph = relaxed, sociable = plump
• Mesomorph = Active, asserive = muscular
• Ectomorph = quiet, fragile = lean, delicate

Question 14

What are the two underlying assumptions of trait theory?

Answer 14

• Personality traits should be stable across time AND context.