Lecture 5 - Personality and Individual Differences Flashcards
What did the Ancient Greeks think?
Link the body and the mind, believed that physical humours or fluids within the body were linked with personality traits.
What did personality depend on the balance of?
Fluids:
Yellow bile - quick tempered,
Blood - Enthusiastic, optimistic
Phlegm - calm, relaxed, slow-paced
Black bile - gloomy, pessimistic, sad
What is Phrenology?
Aim to predict personality types by the size and shapes of bumps on our skulls
Created by Joseph Gall, its a pseudoscience
What is Personality?
Both internal traits and external expressional style
eg
emotions, behaviours, cognitions, motivations, social tendencies
What is the definition of personality?
Characteristics of the person that account for consistent patterns of feeling, thinking, and behaving
Personality is the enduring set of traits and styles that they exhibit
The set of psychological traits and mechanisms within the individual that are organised and relatively enduring and that influence his or her interactions with, and adaptations to, the physical and social environments
What are the theories of personality?
Psychodynamic
Humanist
Behavioural/ Social Cognition
Trait
What is a trait?
A stable characteristic in ur personality causing individuals to behave in certain ways
What do traits assume characteristics are?
Relatively:
Stable over time
Stable across situations
Are traits discontinuous/continuous?
Continuous not categorical
ppl can have more or less of a trait by demonstrating behaviour
1. more frequently
2. w more intensity
3. across wider range of situations
What is the big five model of personality?
Allport reduced 18k words to 4.5k by taking out physical characteristics
Raymond Cattell then reduced it to 16 traits by using factor analysis
then reduced personality traits to 5
What is the Acronym for the Big 5 personality traits?
OCEAN
Openness
Conscientiousness
Extroversion
Agreeableness
Neuroticism
Each of these traits represent a continuum
What is openness?
A big 5 trait
Willingness to try new things as well as engage in imaginative and creative activities. Includes the ability to think outside of the box
What is Conscientiousness?
A person’s ability to regulate their impulse control to engage in goal-directed behaviours.
It measures elements such as control, inhibition, and persistency of behaviour
What is Extroversion?
The tendency and intensity with which someone seeks interaction w their environment, particularly socially. It encompasses the comfort and assertiveness levels of ppl in social situations
What is agreeableness?
How ppl tend to treat relationships with others. Unlike extraversion which consists of the pursuit of relationships, agreeableness focuses on ppls interactions w others
What is Neuroticism?
The overall emotional stability of an individual.
Takes into account how likely a person is to interpret events as threatening or difficult. It also includes ones propensity to experience negative emotions
What are some criticisms of the Big five?
It does not provide a theory of how personality develops
Each trait is too broad, need more specific traits for predicting outcomes
What is the Barnum Effect?
A cognitive bias that occurs when individuals believe that generic personality description and statements apply to themselves
But the description is general and vague enough to apply to almost everyone
aka Forer Effect
What are projective tests?
if you give ppl an ambiguous stimulus and ask them to describe it, their answer will tell you something ab their personality.
What are the 2 type of projective tests?
Rorschach Test
and
Thematic Apperception Test (TAT)A
What is the Rorschach Test?
ppls descriptions of what they see in ink blots say something ab their personality
What is the Thematic Apperception Test?
show ppl a series of picture cards depicting a variety of ambiguous characters, scenes and situations. They are then asked to tell a story for each picture presented
What do modern personality questionnaires use?
Likert-type questionnaires / statements
Informant report questionnaires
Behavioural measures (measure behaviour/traces of that ps exhibit)
What is the person vs situation debate?
Can we use a person’s personality as a guide to predicting their behaviour across diff situations
OR
is what a person does utterly dependent on the situation at the time
are ppl consistent across situations
