Lecture 6 - Personality (Persons & Situations)

Question 1

What is Kurt Lewin’s field theory?

Answer 1

behaviour is a function of the PERSON (their needs, beliefs, values, abilities) & their ENVIRONMENT (esp the social env / psychological ‘field’)

Question 2

Asch’s (1951) conformity studies:

Answer 2

People will conform with a majority view even at the expense of a response they
know to be correct.

Question 3

Milgram’s obedience studies

Answer 3

People are willing to deviate from what they’d normally do (in this case, giving electric shocks) when put in a situation with a strong authority figure.

Question 4

Stanford prison experiment:

Answer 4

Prisoners revolted; guards grew sadistic

Demonstrated ‘the power of a bad situation to overwhelm the personalities and
good upbringings of even the best and brightest among us’

Question 5

What is situationism?

Answer 5

the theory that human behaviour is determined by surrounding circumstances rather than by personal qualities.

Question 6

What did Walter Mischel claim about personality & situationism?

Answer 6

® Claimed that personality is a weak predictor of behaviour (r ~.30), and that
behaviour varies considerably over situations.

The concept of a personality traits is ‘untenable’. Behaviour is largely driven by
situations

Mischel later revised his position from situationism to INTERACTIONISM (traits and
situations combine to influence behaviour).

Question 7

Describe the fundamental attribution error (aka correspondence bias)

Answer 7

People mistakenly explain behaviour in terms of dispositional factors rather than to situational factors (e.g. impressions of the Milgram obedience study – believing that people made their decisions based on their personality traits rather than situational factors).

® However, Malle (2006) disconfirmed this theory.

Question 8

Schweder in 1975 put forward an argument against the structural validity of personality tests. What was his argument?

Answer 8

The “Conceptual Similarity Critique”. You make a judgement on how similar items on the personality test are to each other rather than how similar they are to the target person’s personality. The problem of how to classify becomes mistaken for how people classify.

However, Romer & Revelle (1984) failed to confirm this theory.

Question 9

Common criticisms of situationism.

Answer 9

® Personality is a weak predictor of behaviour (r~.30). However, situations are no better predictors of behaviour than traits.

Richard et al. (2003) found the average correlation in both personality & social
psychology to be r = .20

A ‘straw man argument’ – cross-situational flexibility of behaviour is not
incompatible with the effects of traits on behaviour.

Question 10

How did Mischel underestimate the cross-situational consistency of behaviour?

Answer 10

By focusing on single instances of behaviour in different situations, Mischel’s estimates were
rendered unreliable (Epstein, 1979)

AGGREGATION n across multiple measurement
occasions increases reliability, which is a requisite for assessing consistency/stability.
This is also why we use multiple items on a personality questionnaire.

Question 11

What was Mischel’s situational strength hypothesis?

Answer 11

both traits and situations influence behaviour, but STRONG situations cancel out the effects of traits

Question 12

What is a strong situation?

Answer 12

must have:
1) clear behavioural expectations
2) incentives for compliance (or threats for non-compliance)
3) the individual must have the ability to meet the demands of the situation

Question 13

In the Milgram study, did the situation cancel out the effects of personality?

Answer 13

NO

People who respect and value authority (authoritarianism) were more
obedient, as well as those with an external locus of control.

Question 14

Begue et al. (2014) conceptually replicated the Milgram study, and found . . .

Answer 14

that larger shocks were predicted by agreeableness
(r = .26) and conscientiousness (r = .34).

Question 15

Cooper & Withey (2009) found that . . .

Answer 15

virtually no studies directly assess the effects of
situations as a function of the three situational strength dimensions specified by
Mischael

Question 16

What is trait activation theory?

Answer 16

Strong situations might also activate other relevant personality effects.

Question 17

Tett and Burnett found about latent traits that. . .

Answer 17

® Latent traits are activated by trait-relevant situations.

® A trait may not manifest until a person is in a relevant situation.

® Thus, trait-relevant situations strengthen trait-behaviour associations.

Question 18

How did De Young define personality traits?

Answer 18

Personality traits are probabilistic descriptions of regularities in behaviour and
experience arising in response to broad classes of stimuli and situations.

Question 19

What did Judge & Zapata find in their meta-analysis of personality & job performance?

Answer 19

® Found some support for ‘situational strength’ – all of the Big 5 traits predicted job
performance more strongly in ‘weak’ job situations (e.g. when work was
unstructured, when employees had decision-making autonomy etc.).

® Also found some support for ‘trait activation’ – in strong situations that were trait
relevant, specific trait-performance effects increased (e.g. extraversion when social
skills demands were high, openness when creativity/innovation demands were high,
conscientiousness when attention to detail was required.

Question 20

What are person-situation transactions?

Answer 20

-person-situation transactions concern how and why people with certain trait levels or genotypes maintain, construe, evoke, select, modify, and create certain situations or environments.

• contextualized aspects of personality (characteristic adaptations)
• Methods that accommodate both within-person variation and between-person
  differences (e.g. experience sampling methods).
• Questions of generality – for whom is the effect of a situation most strong? (e.g. for obedience & authoritarianism). When or where are the effects of personality
  strongest? (e.g. conscientiousness and effort-related job performance).

Question 21

How do traits impact on the effect of situations?

Answer 21

1) situation selection

2) situation evocation / transformation

3) situation perception

Question 22

What is situation selection?

Answer 22

where traits predict entering a strong or consequential situation (openness & studying abroad)

Question 23

What is situation evocation / transformation?

Answer 23

where traits impact on the dynamics of a particular situation (e.g. effects of traits on relationship dynamics)

Question 24

What is situation perception?

Answer 24

Where traits shape appraisals of situation, and thus a person’s experience of that situation

e.g. individuals higher in agreeableness perceive more opportunities to cooperate in a social situation, individuals higher in openness / intellect perceive more opportunities for intellectual engagement in a same situation

Question 25

What did Carnahan & McFarland find about the prison life study?

Answer 25

participants in the ‘prison life group’ (participants who were recruited using an advertisement with the words ‘study of prison life’) different on multiple personality traits vs the control group

They were higher on aggression,
authoritarianism, machiavellianism, narcissism, and social dominance, and were lower on empathy & altruism.

Question 26

What did Matz & Harari find about personality traits?

Answer 26

they predict the places people visit, AND the places people visit predict their behaviour

e.g. extraverts wee more likely to report being at a party/bar

however, after controlling for traits, the places people visited RARELY predicted personality traits. This provides evidence for a causal chain where the
traits get you into the situation, and the situation impacts on your current behaviour.

Question 27

What is a situation?

Answer 27

There is little agreement on how to define it

Question 28

What was Rauthman’s comprehensive taxonomy for describing the STRUCTURE of situations? (the Big 8 DIAMONDS model)

Answer 28

• Duty - a job needs to be done
• Intellect - situation includes intellectual or cognitive stimuli
• Adversity - someone is being criticized
• Mating - situation includes stimuli that could be construed sexually
• Positivity - situation is potentially enjoyable
• Negativity - situation is potentially anxiety inducing
• Deception - it is possible to deceive someone
• Sociality - close interpersonal relationships are present

Question 29

What did Sherman et al find when he compared the Big 5 TRAITS and the Big 8 SITUATIONS as predictors of behaviour and affects?

Answer 29

He found that state expressions (behaviour/experience) vary widely between and within participants

the effects of traits and situations on behaviour & experience were very similar

Question 30

What are experience sampling methods (ESM) used to assess?

Answer 30

they are techniques used to assess behaviours/experiences multiple times per day for several days or weeks