PERSONALITY Flashcards
Personality
**–> ‘BENEATH THE MASK’
–> the authentic ‘TRUE SELF’, separate from social roles, linked to INDIVIDUALISM.
–> Enduring, broad differences btwn ppl that are PSYCHOLOGICAL but not cognitive abilities.
Individual differences
- These ‘dispositions are fundamental;
- personal identity,
- social communications/gossips
- persona perception,
- stereotypes
Personality and self-concept study - “Describe yourself” (Prentice, 1990)
- Likes, beliefs, values (33%)
- Personality traits (25%)
- Behaviours (9%)
- Interpersonal attributes (9%)
- Demographic attributes (9%)
- Physical characteristics (8%)
- Abilities (6%)
Personality and social communication
- Much of our communication aims to learn what others are like
(eg: thru personalities) - Robin Dunbar argues that human intelligence evolved to HANDLE COMPLEXITIES of group life
Person Perception (Personality)
- Person perception is largely devoted to judging other people’s personalities
- Rapid personality judgements
- ‘DISPOSITIONAL INFERENCE’(integrated info to predict a person’s motives/intentions) and ‘correspondence bias’
Stereotypes
largely made up of personality
traits BELIEVED (rightly / wrongly) to be associated with social groups
- competence
- warmth
Personality Pscyhology
Dedicated to understanding the ‘WHOLE PERSON’
- Focus on study of differences btwn people
- Closely related to clinical psych
- Emphasis on INTRINSIC (essential) factors
* contrast with social psychology,
person vs the situation
* The PERSON vs the SITUATION
Every person is in certain
respects; (Murray & Kluckhohn, 1953)
- like all other people (human nature)
- like some other people (systematic variation)
- like no other person (personal uniqueness)
Personality traits
A trait is a CONSISTENT PATTERN of behaviour, thinking or feeling.
- Relatively stable over time
- Relatively consistent across situations
- Varying between people
- Dispositional (integrating context into potential actions)
–> Trait vary in generality or ‘bandwidth’ : some are broad, others narrow
Hierarchy of traits
High-level trait: Extraversion
Mid-level trait: sociability, sensation-seeking
Low-level trait: physical sensation-seeking, sexual sensation-seeking
Illustrative behaviour: sky-diving, raunchy Tinder ad
Trait organisation
- Basic dimensions or types of personality
- One theory: poeple come in 4 types:
- (pomegranate) = hard on outside, hard on inside
- (walnut): hard-soft
- (prune) = soft-hard
- (grape) = soft-soft
Structure of personality traits
–> Survey the traits encoded in language - ‘lexical approach’
- It assumes that important distinctions for describing ppl are incorporated in everyday SPEECH
study of personality trait structure -
Allport and Odbert 1963
- 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
*Remove cognitive abilities and talents
*Remove transient states
*Remove highly evaluative terms - 4500 terms remained
Raymond Cattell study (further of Allport and Odbert’s)
- 4500 trait words still too many
- Mostly synonymous / related
- Cattell progressively reduced the set
- Sorted words into 171 groups of
synonyms/antonyms - Reduced these to 16 ‘factors’ using
a technique called ‘factor analysis’ - These factors represented the basic
dimensions of personality
Cattel’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
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
Which of the following statements accurately reflects the idea that personality is “beneath the mask”?
Personality is part of our true self, behind the social roles we enact
Extraversion
HIGH- sociable, energetic, enthusiastic, assertive
LOW- shy, reserved, quiet, retiring
Agreeableness
HIGH- highly warm, modest, kind, helpful, trusting
LOW- cold, unfriendly, quarrelsome
conscientiousness
HIGH- highly efficient, organised, thorough, self-controlled
LOW- careless, irresponsible, frivolous
Neuroticism
HIGH- highly tense, irritable, moody, nervous, high-strung
LOW- stable, calm, unemotional, content
Openness to experience
HIGH- higly imaginative, intelligent, original, sophisticated
LOW- simple, shallow, conventional, narrow
Value of the Big Five
–> suggest that there are 5 fundamental ways in which ppl differ in personality.
considering all 5 values helps …
- Assessment of personality
- Investigation of personality correlates
- Explanation of the underpinnings of personality
- Provides a way to map specific personality traits
- EG: shyness is a combination of (low) Extraversion and (high) Neuroticism
BEHAVIOUR correlates of the Big Five
Extraversion:
- Preference for stimulant drugs
- Quicker reaction time
- positive emotionally
Agreeableness:
- Trustingness
- cooperation in experimental games
- Altruistic behaviour
Conscientiousness: (organized, dependable)
- longevity
- work performance
- low rates of substance use
Neuroticism: (emotionally unstable)
- low self-esteem
- vulnerable to depression
- negative emotionality
Openness to experience:
- artistic interests
- more education
- less prejudice
Big Five Prediction of Outcomes
Mortality
–> significant high mortality in poeple w
- high SES (socio-economic status), extraversion, agreebleness,
- low conscientiousness, IQ
Divorce
–> higher divorce rate in
- high SES, neuroticism
- low conscientiousness, agreeableness
- bedroom: organised environment
- photos: no human (less extraverted)
Other evidence for the “Big
Five”
- Big 5-like factors have been found in studies of many languages
- OTHER SPECIES
◦ Piglet extraversion = frequency of snout-touching
Flaws of Big 5
- “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 TWO-factor model
- Extraversion
- Neuroticism
- Subsequently proposes 3RD factor
- Psychoticism: aggressiveness, coldness, antisocial tendencies, egocentricity, vulnerability to psychotic disorders
(eg: schizophrenia) - Proposed BIOLOGICAL bases for these factors
- Others have developed similar 3-factor models
Eysenck re-discovers
Hippocrates
“The human body contains
blood, phlegm, yellow bile
and black bile. These are
the things that make up its
constitution and cause tis
pains and health. Health is
primarily that state in which
these constituent
substances are in the
correct proportion to each
other, both in strength and
quantity, and are well
mixed.”
Controversies in trait
psychology
- Are individual differences consistent?
- Is the structure of traits universal?
- Traits or types?
- Are traits sufficient for describing personality?
Situationism (Mischel 1968)
- Behaviour expressing a trait in diff
SITUATIONS often correlates WEAKLY - The SITUATION is the main determinant of behaviour (i.e., social psychological factors)
- Traits are weak predictors of behaviour
- Therefore personality tests lack validity
–> Evidence Examples: Hartshorn and 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 just as weak as dispositional influences
- We need an interactionist view that
recognizes traits, situations & their
combined effects
How to think about inconsistency
- We can think about a person as having a distribution of behaviours along a trait dimension, from low to high
- People high on a trait just engage in trait-related behaviour more
Evidence for moderate universality of personality structure
–> approach 1: translating English language personality tests can be a way to assess consistency of personality structure across cultures
- UNIVERSAL:
Multiple tests across many translations of the NEO-PI-R test (revised Big Five) suggest STRONG CONSISTENCY - NOT UNIVERSAL:
factors sometimes have minor differences of content
*Extraversion and agreeableness BETTER DESCRIBED as Dominance and Love in Filipino, Korean and Japanese samples
–> approach 2: Indigenous’ personality systems
- Another approach is to start from OTHER cultures’ personality lexicon (vocab)
UNIVERSAL: Among several European languages (i.e., English, French, German, Polish, Hungarian, Dutch, Italian, Czech) strong congruence for most Big Five factors, EXCEPT OPENNESS
NOT UNIVERSAL: Occasionally apparent culture-specific factors emerge
* ‘CHINESE tradition’ factor (Harmony, Ren Qing
[relationship orientation], Thrift, Face, low Adventurousness)
Other evidences: Filipino
- 6900 person-descriptive terms extracted from a Filipino dictionary, reduced to 1297 by expert judge
- Factor analyses of ratings yield 7 dimensions
- Family resemblance between some of these factors and the Big Five, even if they don’t perfectly correspond
Cross cultural variabilities
- 6900 person-descriptive terms extracted from a Filipino dictionary, reduced to 1297 by expert judge
- Factor analyses of ratings yield 7 dimensions
- Family resemblance between some of these factors and the Big Five, even if they don’t perfectly correspond
Personality traits vs types
–> Traits vary by degress: they are dimensions
–> ‘Type’ concept proposed by Jung
* Extraversion - introversion
* Sensation - intuition
* Perception - judgement
* Thinking - feeling
- Common in popular psychology (eg: MBTI)
- 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
Values
- beliefs about desirable end states / behaviours that transcend specific situations and guide selection / evaluation of behaviour and events
- Cognitive, linked to motives and desires, intrinsically desirable and learned
- Schwartz developed a model of 10 value types, replicated in about 60 countries
–> Value examples:
* UNIVERSALISM - broad-minded, environmentalism, social justice, wisdom
* BENEVOLENCE (kind) - forgiving, helpful, honest, loyal, friendship
* CONFORMITY - obedient, honouring parents, self-discipline
* TRADITION - devout, humble, respect for tradition
* SECURITY - safety, harmony, national security
* POWER - authority, social power, wealth
* ACHIEVEMENT - ambitious, capable, influential, successful
* HEDONISM - enjoying life, pleasure
* STIMULATION - an exciting life, a varied life, daring
* SELF-DRIVEN - independence, creativity, curiosity, freedom
Vocational (career related) interests
realistic, investigative, artistic, social, enterprising, conventional
Character strengths
- ‘positive psychology’ aims to study and promote human character strengths
- Created in opposition to traditional focus on ABNORMALITY and CONFLICT
- The VIA (values in action) 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
Personality description
- traits are important but other alternatives are also essential in describing personality
- Motives, needs, goals
- Schemas, personal constructs
- Life narratives
VIA classification
- Wisdom
- Courage
- Humanity
- Justice
- Temperance
- Transcendence
Levels of personality
McAdams’ personality levels
1. Dispositional traits - Traits - General nature - Low depth - Short time to perceive
2. Characteristic adaptations - goals, values, vocational interests - contextual nature - medium depth - medium time to perceive
3. Life stories - identities, self-narratives - temporal and unique nature - high depth - long time to perceive
Genetics of personality
- DNA as source of our similarities and differences
- About 20,000 protein-coding genes
- About 3,000,000,000 DNA base pairs
- Most DNA is shared between people
- Genetic variation accounts for
*99.6% is identical between any two people - Most influenced trait by genetics = conscientiousness > neuroticism > extraversion
