Personality I Flashcards
Why do we care about personality?
Predictability - allows us to plan and commit resources
Like some variability but within predictable limit and in the right context.
We apply cognitive consistency to how we understand the individual, attribute people’s beliefs/moods/behaviours to personality or to the situation or a combination of the two.
We like them all to line up with each other, don’t like information that counters this.
What is the main definition of personality?
How we express ourselves around different people and different situations
What is meant by temperament?
Personality isn’t stable during childhood and adolescence so we call it temperament, may change from one day to another
For biological and experiential reasons e.g. puberty
Outline and explain the measurement of personality
Some are based around normal function, others around understanding problematic function, measured for different reasons
Huge trade-off between precision and utility
Some are huge and have lots of proposed dimensions e.g. MMPI has 567 items and 15 scales but others have 10 items for example to measure 5 personality dimensions
The optimum length is somewhere in between these.
What are some problems with measures?
Fatigue - results in later responses becoming blander
Socially desirable responding
Misleading answers - in a job application everyone will answer yes to “are you an honest person?”
Most adult measures don’t work with children and adolescents due to temperamental nature
Interpretation - what does it mean if someone has a particular characteristic or set of characteristics?
Outline the role of factor analysis
Measurement of psychological ‘space’ - how do we see different characteristics correlating into bigger groups e.g. if I’m punctual to work am I likely to be a strict marker, am I likely to respond to emails quickly?
Most measures are based on the results of such analyses
Depends on what we put into it and how we interpret it. Can bias our findings by asking only about features that interest us and interpreting according to our own personalities
Outline the different types of personality and what they are associated with
Type A - competitive, outgoing, hostile, ambitious, impatient - men more likely to develop cardiac problems than type B but not found among women
Type B - relaxed, calm, procrastinator
Type C - detail oriented, unassertive, suppresses wants, needs and desires, appears unemotional but suppressing anger - suggested to be linked with development of cancers
Type D - Negative outlook on life, fear of rejection, prone to depression, not clear that this has health implications
Outline the Minnesota Multi-phasic 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
A lot of questions per dimension
Used in American insurance industry
Outline Cattell 16PF
Less linked to psychological problems
Similar approach with a lot of items, subjected to FA
Ended up with 16 Personality Factors, but these factors have been been replicated
Outline Eysenck’s 3 factor model
Suggested to be linked to brain function very closely
Extraversion/Introversion reflects out natural cortical arousal
Neuroticism/Stability reflects levels of activation of the SNS
Psychoticism/Socialisation reflects our levels of testosterone, resulting in higher/lower levels of aggression.
Always claimed he scored at middle point of all 3 scales which is doubtful
Outline Myers-Briggs
4 components, presented as dichotomies that sum up to personality types Hybrid model 1. Introversion/Extroversion 2. Intuition/Sensing 3. Feeling/Thinking 4. Perception/Judging Combinations are presented as one of 16 personality types E.g. INTJ = mastermind
To what extent is out behaviour predictable from one situation to another?
Only a relatively small proportion of our behaviour is consistent from one situation to another
Would be rather maladaptive if we were always the same in every situation
Personality is an influence on our behaviours rather than a determinant of all behaviour
Findings that seemingly small alterations in an experimental situation can lead to large mean differences in behaviour; implying that cross-situation consistency and the influence of personality on behaviour is low.
