Midterm 2 Flashcards
1
Q
Describe the trait approach to personality
A
- A more contemporary way of looking at personality than psychoanalytic approaches
- Identifies personality characteristics that can be represented along a continuum (bell curve - most people are average in these traits)
- It’s about identifying individual characteristics that define people that are consistent in different environments
- Traits that are consistent across many situations
- Traits give the power of predictability
- 2 different approaches: we can look at people’s individual traits or we can look at general traits
2
Q
Who came up with the trait approach to personality and how?
A
- Gordon Allport
- He went through the dictionary and wrote down all the words that he thought could define people
- He came up with thousands of traits
- Thought these traits were observable and conscious
- He thought there were central traits and secondary traits
- He also thought that some people have cardinal traits
3
Q
What are secondary traits?
A
- Something you think you have but it doesn’t define the core that you are
- Could be a side interest
4
Q
What’s a cardinal trait?
A
- A single dominating trait in personality that you can define a person by
- Single characteristic that directs most of a person’s activities
- Ex: a selfless woman might direct all her energy toward humanitarian activities
5
Q
What’s a trait?
A
- Consistent personality characteristics and behaviours displayed in different situations
- Categorizes people according to degree to which they manifest a particular characteristic
6
Q
What’s the assumption to the trait approach?
A
Personality characteristics are relatively stable over time and across situations
7
Q
Describe Gordon Allport
A
- Came up with the trait approach to personality
- Acknowledged the limitations of the trait concept
- Behaviour is influenced by a variety of environmental factors
- Brought personality into the mainstream -> popularized personality
- Shed light on the significance of traits through a theory of personality development
- Thought that traits were partly inherited and partly due to environmental influences
8
Q
What were the 2 research strategies/approaches Allport took with his trait theory?
A
- Nomothetic approach
- Idiographic approach
9
Q
Describe Allport’s nomothetic approach to trait theory
A
- People can be described along a single dimension according to their level of assertiveness or anxiety
- Common traits
10
Q
Describe Allport’s idiographic approach to trait theory
A
- Identifies the combination of traits that best accounts for the personality of an individual
- People can identify traits that are specific to them
- Central traits and cardinal traits
- Advantage: person determines what traits to examine
11
Q
What are common traits?
A
Traits that apply to everyone
12
Q
What are central traits?
A
- Traits that describe an individual’s personality
- The major characteristics of an individual (usually around 5-10 for an individual)
13
Q
Allport’s definition of personality
A
- Dynamic organization within individual of those psychophysical systems that determines characteristic behavior and thought
- Opposed to viewpoints of psychoanalysis and behaviorism (and idea that our personality is just our history of rewards and punishments)
- Allport was completely against behaviourism because it’s only responsible for one aspect (the environment)
- Influenced by gestalt psychology - “the whole is the sum of its parts” (wholeness, interrelatedness, conscious experience)
14
Q
Describe the “dynamic organization” component of Allport’s definition of personality
A
- Personality is constantly changing
- Never something that is
- Rather it’s always becoming
- Experience changes people
- “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” - Herarclitus
15
Q
Describe the “psychophysical systems” component of Allport’s definition of personality
A
- Nothing is exclusively mental nor biological
- Body and mind are fused together
16
Q
According to Allport, what constitutes an adequate theory of personality?
A
- Personality as contained within the person
- Internal mechanisms rather than just external mechanisms (reaction against behaviourism) - Views persons as filled with variables that contribute to actions
- Reaction against behaviorism and against the idea that humans are empty vessels
- Such a description of humans is dehumanizing - Seeks motives for behavior in the present not the past
- Reaction against psychoanalysis because it’s too involved in the past and doesn’t really take into account what’s going on in the present
- “People it seems are busy leading their lives into the future, whereas psychology, for the most part, is busy tracing them into the past”.
- Normal adults are aware of their motives and healthy adult motives are independent of earlier experiences - Employs units of measure capable of living synthesis (people have to be looked at as living synthesis -> as living beings and not just as test scores)
- People are not a collection of test scores
- Must measure the whole, dynamic personality - Adequately account for self-awareness
17
Q
What is the nature of personality comprised of?
A
- Heredity
- 2 personalities
18
Q
Describe heredity in the nature of personality
A
- Provides raw materials
- Shaped, expanded, or limited by environmental conditions
- Emphasis on uniqueness through genetic combinations
- People are different because although they may encounter the same situations, everybody differs in their genetics -> 2 people can be raised in the same kinds of environments but their genetics can be very different
19
Q
Describe 2 personalities in the nature of personality
A
- No continuum of personality between childhood and adulthood
- Discrete or discontinuous nature of personality
- Allport believed that there were different stages in personality development (going up steps)
- Believed we go through different steps/stages where we develop our personality
- Adult personality is not constrained by early experiences
20
Q
What’s an example of a continuous theory of personality?
A
Behaviourism
21
Q
Describe the trait/situation interaction
A
- Allport talks about personality traits as organizing a person’s experience
- On one side you have environmental situations
- One the other side you have the response to the environmental situation
- In the middle you have the trait
- There are ranges of possible behaviour and traits are activated at varying points within a range according to the demands of a situation
22
Q
What’s the Proprium?
A
- All aspects of personality (including our goals) are integrated by an organizing agent that connects together what we call the soul, the self, the mind, the ego, etc.
- All of this should be integrated and shape who we are
- For Allport this organizing agent is “The Proprium”
- The proprium includes your conscience
- 2 parts to our conscience: “must conscience” and “ought conscience”
- Close to the idea of the self and ought self or the present self and ideal self (what you really want to be)
- Getting these 2 types of conscience in sync is the proprium
23
Q
Describe the “must conscience”
A
- Fear of punishment and obedience
- Things that we learn that we must do
24
Q
Describe the “ought conscience”
A
- Closely tied to proprium
- Certain goals that we think ought to be attained
- Certain things ought to be obtained, others avoided
25
Describe the development of the Proprium and each stage
- These are stages to personality development according to Allport
- Stages 1-3 emerge during the first 3 years
- Stages 4 and 5 emerge during the 4th year through the 6th year
1. Bodily self: infants become aware of their existence and distinguish their bodies from objects in the environment
2. Self-identity: children realize that their identity remains intact despite the many changes that are taking place (you may act differently across different situations and you know you’re still you but there was a point in time where this was unclear)
3. Self-esteem: children learn to take pride in their accomplishments
4. Extension of self: children come to recognize the objects and people that are part of their world
5. Self-image: children develop actual and idealized images of themselves and their behaviour and become aware of satisfying (or failing to satisfy) parental expectations
6. Self as a rational copper: develops during ages 6-12, children begin to apply reason and logic to the solution of everyday problems
7. Propriate striving: develops during adolescence, young people begin to formulate long-range goals and plans
8. Adulthood: normal, mature adults are functionally autonomous, independent of childhood motives. They function rationally in the present and consciously create their own lifestyles
26
Describe Allport's definition of a trait
- “A neuropsychic structure having the capacity to render many stimuli functionally equivalent and to initiate and guide equivalent forms of adaptive and expressive behavior”
- Responding to similar situations in similar ways
- Thought these were subject to social, environmental, and cultural influences
27
Allport's view on trait development
- Here we go to the past but it’s still about conscious experience
- Ex: if the child develops a healthy attachment style (early affective attachment -> conditioning), social contacts will be gratifying to that child, child seeking people rather than avoiding people, child will develop trait of gregariousness, child is eager for social situations (sociability trait), when isolated child misses people and becomes restless
28
How do traits organize experience?
- People confront the world in terms of their traits -> traits organize experience
- People can only respond to the world in terms of their traits
- Traits account for the consistence of human behavior
- The same situation will be a different experience for people with different traits (ex: optimist vs pessimist)
29
What's trait theory?
- Model of personality that seeks to identify the basic traits necessary to describe personality
- Trait theorists do not assume that some people have a trait and others do not
- Rather, they propose that all people possess certain traits, but that the degree to which a given trait applies to a specific person varies and can be quantified
30
What are the 3 basic categories of traits that Allport identified?
- Cardinal
- Central
- Secondary
31
What's a factor analysis?
- Technique employed by Raymond Cattell to determine the structure of human personality
- Statistical method of identifying associations among a large number of variables to reveal more general patterns
- Limitation: procedure is confined by the type of data chosen for analysis
- Cattell looked at Allport's list of thousands of traits and noticed a lot of traits on the list meant the same thing
- He did a factor analysis that grouped terms that mean the same thing under one factor which you can then make statistic analyses under that trait
- He came up with source traits (nomothetic approach -> these are basic traits that can be measured in everyone)
32
What are source traits?
Basic traits that make up the human personality
33
What's Raymond Cattell's definition of personality
"That which permits a prediction of, what a person will do in a given situation"
34
Describe Raymond Cattell's contribution to personality psychology
- Using factor analysis, personality psychologist Raymond Cattell suggested that 16 pairs of source traits represented the basic dimensions of personality
- Using these source traits, he developed the Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire (16 PF) a measure that provides scores for each of the source traits
- One of the first organized personality inventory that was used to predict people’s propensity to be good at a particular job/career
35
Describe Hans Eysenck
- Trait theorist & psychologist
- Used factor analysis to identify patterns of traits
- Found that personality could best be described in terms of 3 major dimensions: extraversion, neuroticism, and psychoticism
- By evaluating people along these 3 dimensions, he has been able to predict behaviour accurately in various situations
36
What are the 3 major dimensions that Eysenck thought personality could best be described by?
- Extraversion: degree of sociability
- Neurotic: encompasses emotional stability
- Psychoticism: degree to which reality is distorted
37
Describe The Big Five Personality Traits
- For the last two decades, the most influential trait approach contends that five traits or factors called the “Big Five” lie at the core of personality
- Using modern factor analytic statistical techniques, several researchers have identified a similar set of five factors that underlie personality
- The five factors are: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism (emotional stability) -> OCEAN
38
Describe Murray’s principles
1. Personality is rooted in the brain
- The individual’s cerebral physiology guides and governs every aspect of the personality
- Certain drugs can alter the functioning of the brain, and so the personality
- Everything on which personality depends exists in the brain, including feeling states, conscious and unconscious memories, beliefs, attitudes, fears, and values
2. Tension reduction: People act to reduce physiological and psychological tension, but this does not mean we strive for a tension-free state
- It is the process of acting to reduce tension that is satisfying not the attainment of a condition free of all tension
- Murray believed that a tension-free existence is itself a source of distress
- We need excitement, activity, and movement
- We generate tension to have the satisfaction of reducing it
- We must have a certain level of tension to reduce
- He says we’re unconsciously creating tension to satisfy our needs
3. Individual’s personality continues to develop over time
- It's constructed of all the events that occur during that person’s life
- The study of a person’s past is of great importance
- Personality changes and progresses, it's not fixed or static
4. Each person is unique
- BUT there are similarities among all people
- An individual is like no other person, like some other people, and like every other person
39
Describe Henry Murray
- Founder of personology
- He identified different sets of needs along 2 categories: viscerogenic needs and psychogenic needs
- Believed that people can be described in terms of a personal hierarchy of needs
- Identified the press
- Principal contributions to personality: Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) and stimulated extensive research on psychogenic needs
40
What are viscerogenic needs?
- What you need to live
- Most basic needs
- Food, water, etc…
41
What are psychogenic needs?
- Need to find purpose, need for social contact, need for belonging
- Sort of the higher needs on Maslow’s pyramid
- Murray focused on psychogenic needs
- Readiness to respond in a certain way under certain given conditions
- Can be activated by cues in the environment
- He thought psychogenic needs were important to get you to react in certain environments
42
What's the press?
- A situation that influences the activation of a need
- Ex: exam coming up is a press -> triggers need to excel
43
Describe the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT)
- Murray asked people to describe the situation and what they think is going on (describe the people, what they’re telling each other, what they’re thinking, etc.)
- Also asked them what they think led to this situation and how it was resolved
- He was trying to get to a person’s subconscious needs because this is psychodynamic
- This uses Freud’s idea of projection
- Despite showing different pictures, the person’s stories will always revolve around the same need and Murray argues these reflect a latent need that’s being projected in this test
44
