Problem 3: Personality Traits Flashcards
personality trait
differences among individuals in a typical tendency to behave, think, or feel in some conceptually related ways, across a variety of relevant situations and across some fairly long period of time
Structured personality inventories
–> self- and observer reports
the individuals being measured are given a predetermined set of options for responding to the “items” that make up the test
–> each trait is assessed by its own “scale” which contains several different “items”
–> an individual’s responses to the items of a given scale are averaged out (or added up) to produce an overall score which can then be compared with the scores of other individuals on that scale
–> most scales also contain some items for which responses indicating greater disagreement will contribute to higher scores on a trait - “negatively keyed” / “reverse-coded”
–> good reliability and content validity
Empirical Strategy
- Writing down a large number of items that describe a very wide variety of actions, thoughts, and feelings, as well as items that ask for ratings on various characteristics
- A psychologist obtains self-/observer reports on this large pool of items from a large sample of persons
- The psychologist obtains extra information that he uses to decide which items should be kept for the purpose of assessing the traits of interest
Items should be selected “empirically” –> on the basis of observed evidence of the relations of those items with some other information that is believed to give an accurate indication of the individual’s level of a given trait
Factor-Analytic Strategy
Sorting correlated items together into the same category (same factor), while putting uncorrelated items into different categories (different factor)
Each group of correlated items measures different traits
Psychologists use the results to find out:
(a) what personality trait is being measured by each of the resulting factors
(b) which items clearly belong to each factor, so that these items can be selected to make up
the scales of the personality inventory
Factor Analysis
Classifies a vast array of personality traits into a few basic groups of traits
“factor loadings” –> can range in size between -1 and +1 –> indicate how strongly each variable belongs to each group, or how much each variable “loads on” each “factor”
–> dimensions along which people differ
Lexical Approach
- the researcher searches systematically throughout the dictionary of the language to be studied, in order to obtain a list of personality-descriptive adjectives and administers those to a large sample of people
- those people are asked to provide self-ratings on these adjectives, indicating the extent to which each adjective describes their own personalities
- the researcher can then calculate the correlations among the adjectives, and conduct a factor analysis to find the major categories of personality traits
Rational Strategy
- Writing down items specifically for the purpose of assessing each trait that is to be measured
This process of writing the items to measure each trait is conducted “rationally” –> produce items that are intended to describe actions, thoughts, or feelings that reveal a high level of the trait, and represent all the various aspects of the trait - Figure out which of the items is the best one, which ought to be kept in a final version of the scale measuring the trait
- Administer the items to a large sample –> select items that show the strongest correlation with the entire set of items overall
–> perceived as the best strategy
Agreement between self- and observer reports
–> high agreement
–> agreement might occur because people who know each other might have developed a shared opinion about each other’s personality
Validity of self- and observer reports
–> personality might be assessed more accurately by observer reports
–> personality is assessed most accurately by averaging self- with observer reports provided by multiple persons
–> personality would be revealed most precisely by the observation of behaviors in a variety of natural settings over a long period of time
Big Five Personality Traits
Extraversion
Agreeableness
Conscientiousness
Emotional Stability (vs Neuroticism)
Intellect/Imagination (Openness to Experience)
NEO Personality Inventory (Revised) (NEO-PI-R)
A personality inventory that can be used in different countries
Produces five factors similar to those of the Big Five
Neuroticism, Agreeableness (weakly related to that of the Big 5), Extraversion, Conscientiousness, Openness to Experience
HEXACO Personality Inventory (Revised) (HEXACO-PI-R)
Six personality factors were found in diverse languages using lexical studies:
Honesty-Humility
Emotionality
Extraversion
Agreeableness
Conscientiousness
Openness to Experience
–> the Extraversion, Conscientiousness, and Openness to Experience factors are largely similar to the same-named factors of the NEO-PI-R
Projective instruments
= representing people with ambiguous images, words, or objects
= are applied for mental assessment
Aid in:
- diagnosing mental illness
- predicting whether convicts are likely to become
violent after being paroled
- evaluating the mental stability of parents
engaged in custody battles
- discerning whether children have been sexually
molested
Rorschach inkblot tests
= asks people to describe what they see in a series of 10 inkblots
–> provides some suggestive and rather obvious
shapes that many people would see
–> provides perceptual “hooks” that would capture
or trigger personalized and unique imagery
–> the examiner aggregates coded features
across all responses to compare what the
individual sees, says and does to what others
see, say, and do when confronted with the
same problem-solving task
typical performance measure = does not impose strong demands on the person
Support:
- provides a very unique source of information about people which can aid in assessing and understanding personality
- can be accompanied by self-reports
Criticism:
- falls short on reliability and validity
- it is poorly equipped to identify most psychiatric conditions
- not valid for the assessment of propensities toward violence, impulsiveness, and criminal behavior that it is used for
Thematic Appreciation Test (TAT)
= asks respondents to formulate a story based on ambiguous scenes in drawings on cards
–> administration is not standardized
–> weak “test-retest” reliability: tend to yield inconsistent scores from one picture-viewing session to the next
–> weak validity
