Personality Flashcards
L7:
What are the learning objectives for personality lecture 1: Introduction to personality
- Understand the meanings of the term ‘personality’
- Be able to explain why our drive for cognitive consistency means that we strive to identify personality in other people
- Distinguish different methods of measuring personality
- Understand the conceptual issues behind those measurement methods
- Be prepared to analyse a specific model of personality (‘the Big Five’) in more depth in the following lecture
L7:
What are the definitions personality?
The definitions are not always consistent
Oxford English Dictionary
- “The combination of characteristics or qualities that form an individual’s distinctive character”
American Psychological Association
- “Individual differences in characteristic patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving”
Note: the focus of each is different (sum vs parts), and we need to be able to hold both in mind
L7:
Explain why our drive for cognitive consistency means that we strive to identify personality in other people
Human beings like predictability, allows us to plan and commit resources. But we also like some variability, within predictable limits and in the right context.
So we apply cognitive consistency to how we understand the individual.
We attribute people’s beliefs/moods/behaviours to personality or to the situation or a combination
e.g., if I cannot quite get my head around the Brexit result, I think about people having the ‘wrong’ attitudes, having the ‘wrong’ information, or both (all of which tells you something about my personality)
L7:
Why do we study personality?
Two broad perspectives:
- Understanding individual differences in particular personality characteristics.
- Understanding how the various parts of a person come together as a whole.
L7:
What is missing from the definitions of personality presented?
Consistency, regardless of situation
- are you more or less shy in different situations?
- or do you act differently in different situations?
How do we cope with inconsistency?
- the ‘worlds collide’ phenomenon
- how do you feel when one group of friends meet another group?
L7:
Temperament vs personality
- Personality is not stable during childhood and adolescence
- Biological and experiential reasons
- Suggested that we should refer to ‘temperament’ in younger people, and ‘personality’ in adulthood
L7:
Outline some differences in different methods of measuring personality
It is safe to say that there is a lot of literature on measurement of personality… bigger focus on what to measure rather than how
But the measures are not based on functions and models that are identical (or even similar)
• some are based around normal function
• others are around understanding problematic function
Some are driven more by history than by evidence
Trade off between precision (accuracy) and utility (worth, how useful it is)
Some are huge and have lots of proposed dimensions of personality
• e.g., the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory
• version 2 has 567 items, will probably take you two hours to complete (has 15 scales)
Others are much shorter
• e.g., 10 items used to measure 5 personality dimensions
The optimum length is probably somewhere in between…
L7:
Problems with the measurement of personality
- Fatigue
- results in later responses becoming blander - Socially desirable responding
- Misleading answers
- in context (e.g., job application) - Temporally valid
- Most adult measures do not work well with children and adolescents (when personality is a lot more prone to change)
- See temperament vs personality in teens - Interpretation – what does it mean if someone has a particular characteristic or set of characteristics?
L7:
Role of factor analysis
Factor analysis: Method that combs through data to find which factors “account for the most variance” in the data.
> Factor analysis is a measurement of psychological ‘space’
- how do we see different characteristics correlating into bigger groups
- e.g., if I am punctual at work, am I likely to be a strict marker, am I likely to respond to emails quickly, and am I less likely to smoke?
> Most measures of personality are based on the results of such analyses
> But factor analysis depends on what we put into it, and how we interpret what comes out
- so, we can bias the findings by asking only about features that interest us, and by interpreting according to our own personalities
L7:
Name some different measures of personality
Personality Types (assumed to be changeable) - ‘Type A/B’
Personality Traits (assumed to be immutable)
- MMPI - Cattell - Eysenck (‘Great 3’) - Myers-Briggs - Big Five (next week)
How do we assess which is best?
- Utility and predictive power
L7:
Personality types (A and B)
Usually derived from experience, and with clinical or practical implications in a limited field
> Type A personality (vs Type B)
• Type A - competitive, outgoing, ambitious, impatient, aggressive
• Type B – relaxed, calm, unflapping
Why does this difference matter?
• Type A men are more likely to develop cardiac problems than type B, but that difference is not found among women
L7:
Trait Models and Related Measures
Multi-dimensional models
Multi-dimensional models
- Measure a relatively large number of traits (do not need to learn them all)
e.g.
Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI)
• Originally designed to allow us to label people with psychological problems
- leans towards difficulties rather than strengths
• 15 different dimensions (e.g., Anxiety; Social discomfort; Anger)
• A lot of questions per dimension (567 in all)
• Widely used, without always being clear why
- e.g., insurance companies in some US states demand an MMPI is done before treatment can be approved for payment
Some of these measures have true/false responses - appropriate? Out of date terms? Results compared against a ‘normal’ range of responses
L7:
Personality types (C and D)
Types with less evidence of utility
The following two are hypothesised to be important, but with less evidence that they have practical consequences/correlates
> Type C personality
• Detail oriented; unassertive; suppresses wants, needs and desires
• Appears unemotional, but suppressing anger
• Suggested link to development of cancers?
- evidence is rather equivocal, but getting more convincing
> Type D?
• Negative outlook on life, fear of rejection, prone to depression
• Not clear that this has health implications
L7:
Trait Models and Related Measures
Cattell 16PF
Less linked to psychological problems
Similar approach – a lot of items, subjected to factor analysis
Ended up with 16 personality factors
- e.g., warmth, reasoning, conscientiousness, sensitivity
However, the 16 traits have never been replicated
- e.g., Howarth and Brown (1971)
Further analysis has shown that there is a better 5-factor model
- see next week
L7:
Trait Models and Related Measures
Eysenck’s three-factor model
Eysenck Three Factor Model
Suggested that there are only three factors
- suggested to be linked to brain function very closely (temperament)
- > Extraversion/Introversion
• reflects our natural cortical arousal, and efforts to find an optimum point - > Neuroticism/Stability
• reflects levels of activation of the sympathetic nervous system - > Psychoticism/Socialisation (more about aggression than psychotic states)
• reflects our level of testosterone, resulting in higher/lower levels of aggression
Case study:
Hans Eysenck always used to claim that he scored at the middle point of all three of his scales. Anyone who met him might have had their doubts…
L7:
Trait Models and Related Measures
Myers-Briggs
Myers-Briggs
Four components, presented as dichotomies that sum up to personality types
- not always clear that yes/no is the best way to split these scales
- Intuition/Sensing
- Introversion/Extraversion
- Feeling/Thinking
- Perception/Judging
The combinations are presented as one of 16 personality types
- e.g., INTJ = mastermind; ESFP = performer; ISTP = crafter
L7:
What is the most current view of personality measurement?
The Big Five
L8:
What are the Learning Objectives for Lecture 8: The Big Five?
(Five factor model)
- Understand how the FFM has developed from earlier approaches, and understand the history of the study of personality
- Be able to detail the five factors
- Be able critically to analyse the reality of the two levels that are proposed within in the FFM (Factors and Facets)
- Be able to determine the utility of measures that are used to assess the five factors
- Be prepared to use the FFM as a basis for investigating the origins of personality and its stability and variation (following lecture)
L7:
Summary of Lecture 7
Key Points
• Defined personality in terms of stable, situation-independent patterns of attitudes, behaviours, emotions, etc.
- trait rather than state
- Temperament in childhood and adolescent
- Personality in adulthood
- Outlined how most of the research to date was taken to suggest one of the following:
- Types
- usually taken from clinical observation - Relatively large numbers of personality factors
- emerging from big data sets (MMPI; Cattell)
- not replicated, probably due to the very large number of factors - Relatively small numbers of personality factors
- emerging from theory (Eysenck)
- less useful, because the theory is not always right
L8:
History of the FFM
- First proposed in 1961 (Tupes & Christal, 1961)
- Established as robustly superior to other models by the beginning of the 1990s (Digman, 1989; O’Connor, 2002)
- Various attempts thereafter to:
- come up with the best measure
- decide the level at which to understand the big five
