personal psychology Flashcards
What is personality?
Personality as what is ‘beneath the mask’
◦ Personality as the authentic true self
◦ Separate from social roles
◦ Linked to growth of individualism
◦ Personality as ‘psychological individuality
Individual differences
So … personality refers to enduring, relatively broad differences between people that are
psychological but not cognitive abilities These ‘dispositions’ are fundamental
◦ Personal identity & self-concept
◦ Social communication & gossip
◦ Person perception
◦ Stereotypes
Personality & social communication
Much of our communication aims to learn what others are like (i.e., their personalities)
Dunbar argued that human intelligence evolved to handle the complexities of group life
Person perception
Person perception is largely devoted to judging other people’s personalities
◦ Rapid personality judgments
◦ ‘Dispositional inference’ (predictions about a person’s future behavior) and the ‘correspondence bias (the tendency to draw inferences about a person’s unique and enduring dispositions from behaviors)
Stereotypes
Stereotypes are largely made up of personality traits believed (rightly or wrongly) to be associated with social groups
Personality within psychology
• Dedicated to understanding the ‘whole person’
• Focus on the study of differences between people
• Closely related to clinical psychology
• Emphasis on factors intrinsic to the person
◦ Contrast with social psychology
◦ The person vs the situation
Personality traits
-The simplest descriptive unit for personality is the ‘trait’
-A trait is a consistent pattern of behaviour, thinking or feeling
◦ Relatively stable over time
◦ Relatively consistent across situations
◦ Varying between people
◦ Dispositional
Trait vary in generality or ‘bandwidth’: some are broad, others narrow
The structure of personality traits
- Survey the traits that are encoded in language
- This is the “lexical approach”
- It assumes that important distinctions for describing people are incorporated in everyday speech
Allport & Odbert
• 1936 attempt to survey the ‘trait universe’
• Searched large dictionary for words that
could describe differences between people
• 18,000 out of 550,000
• These were then filtered
• Remove physical attributes (e.g., “tall”)
• Remove cognitive abilities & talents (e.g., “smart”)
• Remove transient states (e.g., “sad”)
• Remove highly evaluative terms (e.g., “moron”)
• 4,500 terms remained
Raymond Cattell
• 4,500 trait words is still too many
• Many of them were synonyms or closely related
• Cattell progressively reduced the set
• Sorted words into 171 groups of synonyms/antonyms
• Reduced these in several steps to 16 “factors” using a
technique called ‘factor analysis’
• These factors represented basic dimensions of personality
Cattell’s 16 factors
Reserved↔ Outgoing Stable↔ Neurotic Expedient↔ Conscientious Shy↔ Venturesome Tough-minded↔ Tender-minded Trusting↔ Suspicious Practical↔ Imaginative Forthright↔ Shrewd Less intelligent↔ More intelligent Humble↔ Assertive Sober↔ Happy-go-lucky Placid↔ Apprehensive Conservative↔ Experimenting Conforming↔ Independent Undisciplined↔ Controlled Relaxed↔ Tense
Five basic factors
- Cattell’s 16 factors were still correlated
- Different factors might both reflect a single underlying “super-factor”
- Ideally, the dimensions of personality should be independent of one another
- Donald Fiske showed that the 16 factors could be further reduced by factor analysis to 5
The “Big Five”
Openness to Experience Conscientiousness Extraversion Agreeableness Neuroticism
Facets of the “Big Five”
Each factor has low-level ‘facets’; e.g
Value of the “Big Five”
Suggests that there are 5 fundamental ways in which people differ in personality
◦ Assessment of personality
◦ Investigation of personality correlates
◦ Explanation of the underpinnings of personality
Provides a way to map specific personality traits ◦ E.g., shyness is a combination of (low) Extraversion and (high) Neuroticism
evidence for the “Big Five”
Big Five-like factors have been found in studies of many languages Similar personality factors (except Openness & Conscientiousness) can be observed in numerous other species ◦ Piglet extraversion = frequency of snout-touching
Alternatives to the “Big Five”
The Big Five derives from the lexical approach
• But what if this approach is flawed?
• “Questionnaire approach” does not assume that all important personality variation is captured by everyday language
• Uses personality test items to derive basic factors
Hans Eysenck
Major proponent of the questionnaire method
• Developed a two-factor model
o Extraversion
o Neuroticism
• Subsequently proposed a third factor
o Psychoticism: aggressiveness, coldness, antisocial
tendencies, egocentricity, vulnerability to psychotic
disorders (e.g., schizophrenia)
• Proposed biological bases for these factors
• Others have developed similar 3-factor
models
Controversies in trait psychology
Despite its success, trait psychology has been challenged un several ways:
- Are individual differences consistent?
- Is the structure of traits universal?
- Traits or types?
- Are traits sufficient for describing personality?
- Are individual differences consistent?
• Traits are ways in which behaviour is consistent across situations
• But is behaviour consistent in this way?
• Mischel (1968) & ‘situationism’
◦ Behaviour expressing a trait in different situations often correlates weakly (< .3)
◦ The situation is the main determinant of behaviour (i.e., social psychological factors)
◦ Traits are weak predictors of behaviour
◦ Therefore personality tests lack validity
Hartshorne & May (1928), Studies in deceit
• Gave thousands of 10- to 13-year children multiple behavioural tests of dishonesty
◦ Lying
◦ Cheating
◦ Stealing
• Dishonesty varied widely across situations, with little consistency
• Average correlation among tests = 0.26
Responses to Mischel’s critique
- ‘Weak’ correlations are still important
- Consistency is greater for aggregate behaviour vs single behaviours
- Situational influences are about as weak as dispositional influences
- We need an interactionist view that recognizes traits, situations & their combined effects
- Is the structure of personality universal?
• One way to assess consistency of personality structure across cultures is to translate English language personality tests
• Multiple tests across many translations of the NEO-PI-R test of the 5 factors suggest strong consistency
• But some evidence of subtle differences: factors sometimes have minor differences of content
◦ Extraversion & Agreeableness better described as Dominance & Love in Filipino, Korean & Japanese samples
• Another approach is to start from other cultures’ personality lexicon
• Among several European languages (i.e., English, French, German, Polish, Hungarian, Dutch, Italian, Czech) strong congruence for most Big Five factors, except Openness
• Occasionally apparent culture-specific factors emerge
◦ ‘Chinese tradition’ factor (Harmony, Ren Qing [relationship orientation], Thrift, Face, low Adventurousness)
- Traits or types?
Traits vary by degrees: they are dimensions
Might some personality variation be best described by categories or types?
‘Type’ concept proposed by Jung
Extraversion↔ Introversion
Sensation↔ Intuition
Perception↔ Judgement
Thinking↔ Feeling
Common in popular psychology
• There is no persuasive evidence for any personality type
• Jungian “types” appear to be dimensional
- Are traits enough?
• Traits are behavioural dispositions • Other aspects of personality might not be reducible to such behavioural tendencies ◦ Values ◦ Interests ◦ Character strengths
Character strengths
• ‘Positive psychology’ aims to study and promote human character strengths
• Created in opposition to traditional focus on abnormality and conflict
• The VIA taxonomy aims to classify character strengths that …
◦ Are environmentally shaped
◦ Contribute to fulfilment in life
◦ Are valued in their own right
◦ Do not diminish anyone in society when exercised
McAdams’ personality levels
- Dispositional traits
- Characteristic adaptations
- Life stories
Cognitive explanations
Explain personality with reference to cognitive processes & structures
◦ Thoughts, plans, memories, beliefs, strategies
Focus on ways of thinking & the construction of meaning
◦ Having vs doing
◦ People as active sense-makers
◦ Emphasis on ‘experience-near’
phenomena
◦ Motivation to understand & predict
◦ Person-as-scientist model
Cognitive theory
There is no single cognitive theory of personality
We will examine four approaches or topics
◦ Perceiving (personal constructs)
◦ Explaining (attributional style)
◦ Thinking (emotional intelligence)
◦ Representing (the self)
Personal constructs
Theory developed by George Kelly
Proposes that humans are primarily driven to understand, predict & control their environment
We develop ‘theories’ to assist in this process
These theories are ‘personal constructs’
◦ ‘Personal’ because idiosyncratic to individuals
◦ We construct a sense of the world from these theories
◦ We use them to construe that world
To Kelly, human cognition is contrastive: bipolar & categorical
◦ E.g., warm vs cold, honest vs untrustworthy
Each person has a system of constructs in terms of which they perceive the world
This system of constructs is the personality
This is a radical approach
Construct system
Systems of constructs can be analysed in several ways
◦ Simplicity vs complexity
◦ Rigidity
◦ Internal conflict
Attribution
Constructs are about how we perceive the world
‘Attributions’ are about how we explain it
People aim to determine the causes of events and experiences
Attributions differ on several dimensions
◦ Internal vs external (i.e., dispositional vs situational)
◦ Stable vs unstable (i.e., lasting vs transient)
◦ Global vs specific (i.e., broad vs narrow)
Causes can vary along these dimensions
Attributional style
Attributional style is focused on negative events
‘Pessimism’ is the disposition to explain such events with Internal, Stable & Global causes
◦ this sense of pessimism differs from standard sense (i.e., negative expectations for the future)
Pessimists may also explain positive events as External, Unstable & Specific (e.g., due to chance)
Both pessimism & optimism may be irrational
Attributional style predicts many phenomena
Components of Emotional Intelligence (EI)
Perceiving emotion
◦ Accurate recognition of own emotions & nonverbal perception of other people’s
Using emotion
◦ Use of own emotions to guide & plan behaviour
Understanding emotion
◦ Predicting other’s emotional states & reasoning about them
Managing emotion
◦ Ability to control & regulate emotions
More on EI
EI appears to be distinct from general intelligence It is measured not by self-ratings but by performance on tests with correct & incorrect answers Correlates with Openness & Agreeableness Has many correlates ◦ Academic performance ◦ Job performance ◦ Social sensitivity ◦ Less antisocial behaviour
The self
The self is a mental representation of one’s personal attributes
Two individual difference variables relevant to it
1. Self-complexity ◦ Degree to which its structure is complex
2. Self-esteem ◦ Degree to which it is valued
Self-complexity
Defined as number of ‘self-aspects’ and degree of distinctness of them
Early evidence suggested that greater complexity buffers people against negative life events
However, it is also associated with greater depression
If ‘complexity’ implies a fragmented, incoherent or confused self, it may have negative consequences
‘Self-concept clarity’ may be more important than self-complexity
Self-esteem
Positive global evaluation of the self
