Stability & Change Flashcards
Stability vs. Change: 2 important issues to consider
- consistency across situations
- consistency over time
consistency across situations
- Research indicates that behaviour is both a function of the situation and the person -> personality and situation interact to produce behaviour (interactionism)
- Person-situation interaction
- Person-environment fit
- Aggregation
Situationist perspective vs. trait psychologist perspective
- Situationists argued that behaviour varies across situations, and situational differences (not traits) determine behaviour
- Ex. Human Rights Violations in Iraq, Stanford Prison experiment -> power of the situation (rotten barrel vs. Rotten apple)
- Trait psychologists assumed cross-situation consistency
- If situations mainly control how people behave, then the existence/relevance of traits is questionable
consistency across time: 2 factors to consider
- Personal stability and change
- Personality coherence
Situational specificity
certain situations can provoke behaviour that is out of character for an individual (ex. Survival situations)
Strong situations
situations in which most people react in a similar way (ex. Public speaking)
weak situations
when situations are weak or ambiguous, personality has its strongest influence (ex. When someone smiles at you – are they being friendly or do they like me?)
situational selection
Tendency to choose or select situations in which one finds oneself, as a function of personality (ex. Extroverts more likely to choose highly social situations)
evocation
Certain personality traits may (naturally) evoke specific responses from others (ex. Neurotic behaviour evokes anxious/hostile response in others)
manipulation
Various means by which people (intentionally) influence the behaviour of others; altering existing environments; includes things like charm, coercion, and silent treatment (ex. Helping someone in hopes that they’ll help you later)
person-environment fit
- the extent to which a setting or situation complements one’s personality, traits, and characteristics (you work well in some settings, less so in others)
- personality tests used in workplaces to screen out applicants who wouldn’t have good person-environment fit
practical implications of having good person-environment fit
- Optimal functioning
- Coping well with stress
- Conserving resources
- Maintaining health
- Performance (job, etc.)
Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)
- Most popular personality test in business settings
- Based on Carl Jung’s 8 psychological types
Problems with Myers-Brigs
- Categorical versus dimensional approach to personality
- Assumes a bimodal distribution of personality traits (which are actually normally distributed)
- Self-report MTBI questionnaire has a forced-choice response format (ex. You could choose 11 extraversion and 9 introversion items, while another “E” might get 20 and 0)
- Low test-retest reliability across studies (so we can’t necessarily conclude that it’s valid)
aggregation
- Implies that traits refer to the person’s average level (ie. Level of agreeableness today might not be reflective of your typical level of agreeableness)
- Thus, personality psychologists will never be good at predicting single acts, single observations of behaviour, states
measures of personality stability/change
- rank-order stability/change
- mean-level stability/change
rank-order stability/change
- Refers to an individual’s position within a group
- Assessed by test-retest (correlation between time points) to see if that changes your position in the group -> unlikely to change
- Ex. Broad personality traits show moderate to high rank-order stability over time
mean-level stability/change
- Refers to average level of population; normative increases or decreases over time
- Measured by longitudinal studies (mean differences/t-tests)
- Ex. Broad personality factors show moderate mean-level stability over time
- Openness, extraversion, neuroticism decline with age; conscientiousness and agreeableness show gradual increases
2 key qualities for personality change
- Internal: changes are internal to a person, not occurring in the external environment or surroundings
- Enduring: changes are endearing over time, not temporary
personality coherance
- no change in traits, but changes in how those traits are manifested
- ex. male dominance may manifest in childhood by bullying others, and in adulthood by asking women out
- ex. Schwarzenegger moving from acting to politics -> is it a personality change? Not really, just a different expression of the same traits
3 levels of personality analysis
- population level
- group differences level
- individual differences level
population level analysis
- deals with personality changes that apply to almost everyone
- ex. increase in sexual motivation at puberty
group differences level analysis
- deals with personality changes that affect certain groups differently
- ex. from adolescence to adulthood, men’s self-esteem increases slightly while women’s decreases slightly; European kids become more extroverted than Asian kids
individual differences level analysis
- focuses on individual differences in personality to try to predict behaviours of an individual
- ex. can we use personality to predict when someone will go through a midlife crisis?