Personality Flashcards
Personality
- aspects of an individual’s unique characteristics
- enduring behavioral and cognitive characteristics, traits, or predispositions
Trait
A characteristic or quality distinguishing a person
Approaches to studying personality
- psychological anthropology
- etic - focused on measurement equivalenceof imported instruments
- Emic - indigenous, culture-specific approach
- combined etic-emic approach
Psychological anthropology
Mainly a descriptive approach. The early psychological anthropological studies were about describing groups of people, field oberservations and so forth
Trait approach (Etic)
- is there universality? –> assumption of biological disposition for dimensions
- are there score differences?
Dimensions are found around the world, also in non-western contexts
Not just for self-reports, but also structure found in large scale other-report
Etic - focused on measurements equivalence of imported instruments
The comparative approach that is focused on measurement equivalence of important instruments. That means that we’re looking at an instrument or a specific theory and the associated instrument and we’re interested in making the instrument work across different cultural settings. From an outsider’s perspective, focused on cross-cultural comparison
Emic - indigenous, culture-specific approach
The emic appraoch in contrast is the culture specific approach. It is the approach that also goes togheter with a relativist cross-cultural perspective in which you cannot compare cultures that easily. You should not engage in that because cultures need to be understood in and of themselves. You can only understand a culture from within the culture. It’s an insider approach
OCEAN –> Big Five
- openness to experience
- coscientiousness
- extraversion
- agreeableness
- neuroticism
Do perceptions of national character correspond to aggregate personality traits
- perception of national charater - stereotypes about personalities of people of different cultures
- not correlated with actual, aggregate personality levels of individuals of those cultures
Where do traits come from
FFM is atheoretical (psycolexical approach, bottom-up)
FFT (five factor theory) develop to explain variation
Core components of traits
- basic tendencies (biological)
- characteristic adaption (cultural)
- self-concept
Imposed etic approach
Transportation to other cultural settings
- mean differences between cultures are small - interindividual differences within cultures are much bigger
–> 4-17% of variance in interindividual differences is explained by culture
Emic approach
Reaction to imposed etics, warns about assuming meaning equivalence/ construct validity
- across the world, particularly China
Limitations to Emic
- overemphasis on cultural uniqueness
- initially lacked of methodological rigor
- need for incremental validity beyond etc measures
Emic: Ashanti personality
Child is given the name of the day, as it refers to the soul of the day
- ‘correpsondence appears too striking to dismiss’
–> reflection of stereotypes, prejudice, and bias? internalized expectations?
Emic: Ubuntu
African personality
- a person is only a person through others
- individual layers
- three reference axes: family, community, ancestors
–> seek the good of the community, and your own good; seek your own good, and seek your own destruction
Emic: Amae
Amae - Japan
- form of passive love or dependency (in adults)
- originating in the relationship with the mother
–> building block of Japanese relationships
Familiar to self-distancing and self-assertive dimensions, and could thus be translated into other personality dimensions
Combined Etic / Emic approach
- next step: intergration of early indigenous approaches
- cross-cultural and indigenous studies of personality are complementary
- combined use of emic and etic measures
Chinese personality assessment inventory (CPAI)
Bottom-up, methodologically rigerous, indigenous approach, with a psycholexical starting point: everyday life descriptions, proverb, interviews
SAPI
- South African Personality Inventory
–> combined EMIC/ETIC approach
1: cultural specific phase
2: instrument development phase
3: cross-cultural phase
South Africa and psychological testing
Weak structure equivalence of adopted/adapted tests
Employment Equity Act: Psychological testing should only be allowed when “the test (…) being used (a) has been scientifically shown to be valid and reliable, (b) can be applied fairly to all employees; and (c) is not biased against any employee or group.” (Employment Equity Act 55, 1998)
SAPI aims to develop:
- an indigenous theoretical model of personality; and
- a personality measure that can be fairly used across all language/ethnic groups in South Africa, and comlies with SA labor legislation
SAPI 1: culture specific
Psycholexical approach:
- 1216 participants from all 11 language groups of SA
- interviews, whole phrases in context
- main difference to classic psycholexical approach: not exhaustive but ecologically valid
- 49818 responses/statements, later labelled as 900 specific descriptors
–> traitedness
–> Structure: facilitating
Tratedness SAPI 1
Concrete behaviors
- qualified by situation
- qualified by relation
- expressed as relation or role
- expressed as joint description
Structure: facilitating SAPI 1
Clusters:
- Big 5
- facilitating
- integrity
- intellect
- relationship harmony
- soft-heartedness
SAPI 2: item development
- will the item translate well
- item too long in english
- idiomatic items
SAPI 3: cross-cultural phase
- aim: establish validity
- relations between subclusters were rated by 204 students from different language groups in SA, and 95 students in NL
- hierarchical cluster analysis
- south africa: positive/negative and person-centered/relational
- nederland: similar clustering as in SA yet; no facilitating cluster
- general support for the adequacy of the selected items/scales
SAPI 3: can all trait dimensions be valid?
- if trait dimensions have a biological basis
- if they are different peices of the same cake
- but: personality traits are not good predictors of behavior
- is personality just a label to organize descriptions more efficiently?
Final thought on SAPI
Universality/specificity
- across cultures, traits provide the primary information
- in interdependent settings higher relevance of specific behaviors, preferences, and contextualized information
Emic and Etic approaches are different, yet complementary (not incompatible)
Ethnocentrism and assessment
