Mid Tri Exam Flashcards
BASIC APPROACHES TO PERSONALITY
Trait approach - Conceptualization of individual differences
Biological approach - genetics
Psychoanalytic approach - unconscious mind
Phenomenological approach - Conscious awareness and experience
Learning and cognitive Approaches - social learning theory
Funder Psychological triad
The three essential topics of psychology: how people think, how they feel, and how they behave
Trait approach
The theoretical view of personality that focuses on individual differences in personality and behaviour, and the psychological processes behind them.
Conceptualization of individual differences
Measurement of individual differences
Consequences of individual differences
Personality development
Personality change
Biological approach
The view of personality that focuses on the way behaviour and personality are influenced by neuroanatomy, biochemistry, genetics, and evolution.
- Anatomy
- Physiology
- Genetics
- Evolution
Psychoanalytic approach
The theoretical view of personality, based on the writings of Sigmund Freud, that emphasises the unconscious processes of the mind.
Unconscious mind
Internal mental conflict
Phenomenological approach
The theoretical view of personality that emphasises experience, free will, and the meaning of life. Closely related to humanistic psychology and existentialism.
- Conscious awareness and experience
- Free will
- Humanistic psychology
- Cross-cultural psychology
Learning and cognitive Approaches
The theoretical view that focuses on how behaviour changes as a function of rewards and punishments; also called behaviourism.
- Behaviorism
- Social learning theory
- Cognitive personality psychology
basic approach (to personality)
A theoretical view of personality that focuses on some phenomena and ignores others. The basic approaches are trait, biological, psychoanalytic, phenomenological, learning, and cognitive (the last two being closely related).
Learning
In behaviourism, a change in behaviour as a result of experience.
Funder’s First Law
Great strengths are usually great weaknesses, and surprisingly often the opposite is true as well.
Funder’s Second Law
There are no perfect indicators of personality; there are only clues and clues are always ambiguous
Funder’s Third Law
Something beats nothing, two times out of three
The Goals of Personality Psychology
Personality psychology’s unique mission is to address the psychological triad of thought, feeling, and behaviour, and to try to explain the functioning of whole individuals. This is an impossible mission, however, so different approaches to personality must limit themselves by emphasising different psychological topics.
Personality psychology can be organised into five basic approaches: trait, biological, psychoanalytic, phenomenological, and learning and cognitive processes. Each addresses certain aspects of human psychology quite well and ignores others. The advantages and disadvantages of each approach are probably inseparable.
Pigeonholing Versus Appreciation of Individual Differences
Sometimes regarded as a field that seeks to pigeonhole people, personality psychology’s real mission is to appreciate the ways in which each individual is unique.
Humanistic psychology
the approach to personality that emphasises aspects of psychology that are distinctly human. Closely related to the phenomenological approach and existentialism
B.L.I.S
4 types of personality clues
B-data (Behavioural observations)
L-data (Life outcomes)
I-data (Informant’s reports)
S-data (Self-reports)
B-data - Behavioural observations (Natural B data)
The most visible indication of an individual’s personality is what they do
Real life, diary, experience-sampling, observations, lab
EAR: electronically activated recorder wearable cameras; ambulatory assessment
Social media
Highly realistic
Difficulty, time consuming, context dependent
L-data - Life outcomes
verifiable , concrete, real-life facts that may hold psychological significance
Obtained from archives & self report
The results of residue or personality: how a person has affected the world
Objective and verifiable; intrinsically important; psychologically relevant
Highly multi-determined
I data - informant reports
Judgements by knowledgeable informants about general attributes of the individuals personality
No training or expertise needed
Tied into reputation & behaviour
Large amounts of information; real-world basil takes context into account
Can be based on limited information; biassed by rater
S data - self report or judgement
A personas evaluation of their own personality
Usually questionnaires or rating scales
Self rating often match descriptions from others
High face validity
Easy to get; based on lots of information;. Definitional truth; casual force
Self presentation bias; error; too simple and too easy
Personality judgements
First impressions
Visible signs of personality
What influences our accuracy of personality judgements
Moderators
- Good judge
- Good target
- Goodtrait
- Good information
Reality accuracy model
Research Design
The plan one uses for gathering psychological data is the research design.
methods:
- Case
- Experimental
- Correlational
Case studies
examine particular phenomena or individuals in detail, and can be an important source of new ideas.
correlational and experimental studies
to test ideas gathered by case studies
Each method has advantages and disadvantages, but the experimental method is the only one that can be used to determine causality.
Consequences of everyday personality judgments
opportunities
expectancies:
- Intellectual expectancy effects
- Social expectancy effects
- Expectancy effects in real life
The accuracy of personality judgement
Moderators of accuracy
- The good judge
- The good target
- The good trait
- Good information
- Amount of information
Realistic accuracy model (RAM)
- Relevance - person does something relevant to that trait being judged
- Availability - the information must be available to a judge
- Detection - the judge must detect this information
- Utilisation - the judge must utilise this information accordingly
Implications:
- Personality judgement is difficult
- Moderators of accuracy must be a result of something that happens at one of more of the stages
Improving self-knowledge of judging personality
- introspection
- Seek feedback from others
- Observe your own behaviour
personality measures are developed
Psychologists have 2 assessment measures
- Projective tests
- Objective tests
Projective tests
assume self report is generally invalid
- Rorschach (ink blot)
- Thematic apperception tests (TAT)
Objective tests
assume self report is generally valid
- Questionnaires & rating scales
Lists of items answered either true-false or by ratings on scales
Objective tests rely on principle of aggregation - averages increase:
- stability
- reliability
Constructing objective tests
- Rational method
- Factor analytic method
- Empirical method
Rational method
- Based on theory or proposed construct
- Items provide S data
- Validity depends on
- Items mean same thing to creator and respondent
- Respondent can & is willing to accurately assess
- Items genuinely relate to construct
Factor analytic method
- Use statistical technique of factor analysis to find groups of similar items
- Requires long list of potential items, administered to many respondents
- Factor analysis identifies groups of items based on correlations
- Groups of similar items are interpreted & named - Validity depends on
- Number and quality of initial items
- Interpretation of factors (which don’t always make sense) - Used to reduce item lists to essential few to refine tests
Empirical method
- Choose items based on responses of pre identified groups
- Gather and administer lots of items to different groups
- Compare answers from different groups
- Cross-validation by prediction of category, behaviour, etc
validity
- Difficult to fake but items can seem odd or nonsensical
- Can be problematic for discrimination & other reasons
Personality tests
Validity - coverage of correct underlying construct
Reliability - consistency in measurement
Rorschach test
Projective test
California Psychological Inventory (CPI)
Objective test, similar to the MMPI but used for “normal people”
Thematic apperception test (TAT)
Projective test
Draw a person test
Projective test
Minnesota multiphasic personality inventory (MMPI)
Objective test used in the clinical assessment of individuals with psychological difficulties, also been used for employment screening
16PF or the strong vocational interest blank (SVIB)
used to help people choose careers
Traits
personality traits are something that produces consistent behaviour
Personality trait
- elatively enduring characteristics
- A pattern of behaviour, thinking or feeling that is
- Consistent across a range of situations
- Varies between people
Understanding traits is important to us a knowing someone’s trait can be used to
- Predict behaviour
- Understand behaviour
The single trait approach
- Examines the link between personality and behaviour by asking what do people like to do
- This research approach investigates the behavioural implications of traits of particular interest.
- The original scale (Snyder, 1974) had 25 items, but it was refined later to this 18-item scale designed to more precisely capture the core construct (Gangestad & Snyder, 1985).
The many trait approach
- Works from the opposite direction, beginning with the (implicit) research question - who does that?
- Research the behaviour of interest with long lists of traits intended to cover a wide range
- Determine which traits correlate with the specific behaviour
The typological approach
- Research strategy that focuses on identifying types of individuals
- Each type is characterised by a particular pattern of traits
The essential trait approach
The lexical hypothesis - lead to the dev of the Big Five Model of personality
The idea that, if people find something is important, they will develop a
word for it, and therefore the major personality traits will have
synonymous terms in many different languages.
Lexical hypothesis - the most important features of personality will become encoded within natural languages
THE BIG FIVE (OCEAN)
Extraversion
Agreeableness
Conscientiousness
Emotional stability (neuroticism)
Openness to experience
HEXACO
honesty-humility (H), emotionality (E), extraversion (X), agreeableness (A), conscientiousness (C), and openness (O)
The maladjusted over controlling
person is too uptight for his own good, denying himself
pleasure needlessly, and being difficult to deal with on an interpersonal level.
The maladjusted under controlling
person has the reverse problem. She is too impulsive, prone to be involved in activities such as crime and unsafe sex, and tends to wreak general havoc on other people and herself.
The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)
is given to millions of people every year in workplaces, schools, counselling
centres, and management workshops. And not for free. The MBTI is a big business, with certified trainers and a network of marketers selling it as an ideal guide for career guidance and self-development.
The test is intended to measure which of two
opposing tendencies, in four pairs, better characterise you. The four
pairs are Extroversion (E) vs. Introversion (I), Sensing (S) vs. Intuition
(N), Thinking (T) vs. Feeling (F), and Judgment (J) vs. Perception (P).
There is still a use for Personality Types
Extroversion/Introversion
Social, chatty, outgoing, dominant,adventurous, exuberant
Linked with
Status
Popularity
Attractiveness
Positive emotions
Sensitive to rewards and positive emotions
Some differences across theories
Neuroticism (emotional stability)
Stressed versus calm; negative versus positive effect; volatile versus phlegmatic
Less effectiveness in social problem-solving
Linked with happiness/sadness, health, and well being
Strength of reactions to stress
Sensitivity to threats & social circumstances
Conscientiousness
integrity , trustworthiness, reliability, diligence
Tends to comply with rules, standards, norms
Closely negatively associated with procrastination
Agreeableness
Social conformity & compliance with others; friendliness; likeability; warmth
Cooperative approach to social relationships
Less likely to be bullied
Seen as well adjusted tend to enjoy dates more; healthy
Openness to experience
Least well defined FFM
Linked with
Creativity
curiosity
Inventiveness
Linked with unusual beliefs
The person-situation debate
behaviour is too inconsistent from one
situation to the next to allow individual differences to be characterised
accurately in terms of broad personality traits.
Do traits make a difference
Traits are not the only factors that control our behaviour
Situations are important
Which is more important for determining what people do
The person or the situation
Situationism:belie that behaviour is largely driven by the situation, and the personality is relatively unimportant
The situationist argument
The definitive test of the usefulness of a personality trait is whether it can be used to predict behaviour
interactionism
The principle that aspects of personality and of situations work
together to determine behaviour; neither has an effect by itself, nor
is one more important than the other.
Situationist argument 1: Predictability
Substantial limits of the strength of prediction of behaviour by personality
Personality- behaviour or personality- outcome, correlations rarely exceed .30 or .40
The study showed some cherry picking
Showed 70% accuracy
The .40 limit is actually not too bad
Substantial practical consequences for education, employment, life-expectancy
Situationist argument 2: power of the situation
SItuationalism
Mischel argued that situation have bigger effects on behaviour than do traits
The rational:
If personality (r=.40) accounts for 16% of variance in behaviour, the 84% is due to the situation
Think of:
Stanford prison experiment
Milgram’s electric shock experiments
Asch’s social conformity experiments
responses
Situations & traits are not independent
Situational effects were evaluated by statistical significance: trait effects were compared by effect size
Also, many of the famous “obedience” and conformity studies used to support situationism have been criticised
Situationist argument 3: person perceptions are erroneous
Everyday intuitions about personality are fundamentally flawed
Professional practice of personality assessment is a waste of time
Response
Effects of personality on behaviour are large enough to be perceived accurately
I-data is reliably associated with important outcomes
Traits are clearly reflected in our language
Person’s and situations
Personality is better for describing people over time
Situations are better for describing people within context
What you find depends on
The questions you ask
How you construct research
Partition variance
Effects of traits can depend on situations & vice-versa (person situation interaction)
Even in the strongest demonstrations of situational control, traits influence behaviour
Extreme situationism
Everybody is equal - all differences are due to situational influences
The situation is all powerful
nothing is the fault of the individual
All problems can be solved by changing the context
Extreme trait-thinking
Behaviour is solely determined by traits
Trias are all powerful
Nothing is the fault of society
All problems can be solved by weeding out ill-fitting, unworthy individuals
Resolving the trait situation debate
Personality is maintained while persons adapt to situations
To understand people, we need to explain how both traits and context affect behaviour, simultaneously
