Personality traits Flashcards
What are personality traits?
- “the coherent patterning over time and space of Affect, Behaviour, Cognition, and Desire” – Bill Revelle
- Consistent with all three factors over time, consistent way of being e.g. emotion/being
What are the problems with personality traits?
- How does one characterise and organise personality traits?
- Thousands of personality relevant terms • Allport & Odbert (1936)
- Extracted words to describe how someone behaves
What is the jingle fallacy?
assuming that two different things are the same because they bear the same name • e.g. fairness, e.g. political parties having different views on fairness
What is the jangle fallacy?
assuming that two identical things are different because they are labelled differently • Decisive = assertive = proactive = forceful? • Anxious = timid = withdrawn = shy?
What happened in the dark ages?
- 1920s-80s
- Researchers used any number of different scales and measures to study personality traits
- No common language was available
- Trying to measure something the same but with different scales, hard to test if they are measuring the same thing
What did Raymond Cattell create?
- Factor analytic approach
- Sub-set of Allport & Odbert’s “personal trait” terms
- Reported 12 factors - Later modified to form his 16PF
- Significant issues: Used only 35 terms. Issues regarding the actual findings
- Condense the personality traits into something more concise, e.g. 50 down to 12
- Made it easier for analysis
How did the ‘Big Five’ emerge?
- Tupes and Christal (1961)
- Analysed correlation matrices from 8 samples of personality measures
- Found “five relatively strong and recurrent factors and nothing more of any consequence”
- Extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, openness
Who created the ‘Big Five’?
Lewis Goldberg
- Big five
- Put a name to the structure
- NB “Big” denotes breadth, not intrinsic greatness
- Broad categories capture someone’s personality
What is the five factor model?
- Costa & McCrae (1992)
- Broke with the lexical tradition
- Argued that statements can better access the components of personality critical to study
- Also endorses explanation, not just description
- How high or low you are on a certain word/trait
- Different from the big five
What did Hans Eysenck create?
PEN model
- Key advocate for empirically-led psychotherapy
- Ongoing body of work throughout 60s and 70s
- Psychoticism; Extraversion; Neuroticism
- Said that psychoanalysis wasn’t empirical
- Enysenck theory was most popular between 1980-1994
What is HEXACO?
- (Ashton & Lee, 2001)
- Honesty-Humility
- Emotionality
- eXtraversion
- Agreeableness (breaks into two factors – honesty-humility)
- Conscientiousness
- Openness
Why was the HEXACO approach good?
- Ashton and Lee argue that 6 factors better represent the personality space
- Evidence from cross-culture work
- Also placed emphasis on an evolutionary approach
What is the big five?
-Neuroticism (emotional stability)
-Extraversion
-Openness
-Agreeableness
-Conscientiousness
What are the sub sections in the Measurement Hierarchy ?
- Metatraits
- Big five
- Aspects
- Facets
What are the two meta traits?
- Plasticity (explore new things, engage)
- Stability (stability of self-regulation)
How can you measure personality?
- Self-report
- Other-report (someone else observes)
- Behaviour observation
- Physiology: Hormones – Brain activity – Genetics
What are the advantages of self report?
- Quick and easy; cheap
- Person arguably has best insight into their mind
What are the disadvantages of self report?
- Bias in responding: desirability effects; bogus responses
- Not measuring the biological bases; capturing a layer further removed
- N at level of self-report may be masked by learned strategies etc.
What are the advantages of other-report?
- Quick and easy; cheap
- Close peer has good insight into the mind of their friend
- Can provide a convergent perspective
What are the disadvantages of other-report?
- Peer may not very well know the inner thoughts of the other (even if they think they do)
- This may not matter at the level of Big Five (perhaps more of an issue for things like depression; sexuality etc.)
What did Walter Mischel publish?
- Published in 1968
- Book which said personality traits don’t exist
- Personality and Assessment led to a vigorous debate among personality and social psychologists
- Challenged the notion of traits
- Emphasised the primacy of the situation
What did Funder (2007) summarise?
- Any measurement of a person’s personality is only a very modest predictor of what a person will do in a given situation (< .30 - .40)
- Therefore, situations are of greater importance than traits in determining behaviour.
- Therefore, personality assessment is a waste of time and intuitions we have about peoples’ traits are flawed.
What did trait theorists argue about inconsistency in traits?
- Such inconsistency is a result of measurement error
- Need to aggregate across several situations to access the “true” state of affairs.
- In essence, people are capricious, situations complicated, and thus noise is inevitable
What did trait theorists argue about correlations?
- .30 - .40 is not actually all that little…
- Not a small correlation
- Binomial effect size display (Rosenthal & Rubin, 1982)
- .40 = 70% classification accuracy (here, 50% is chance)
