Topic 1: The taxonomy of individual differences Flashcards
Main goal of personality
- capture consistency or continuity within a person
- the term describes a causal force within –> influence actions
- few qualities can summarize what a person is like, because qualities are prominent in behavior
The term personality conveys a sense of consistency, internal causality and distinctiveness
Definition of personality by Allport
Dynamic organization within the person, of psychological systems that create characteristic patterns of behavior, thoughts and feelings
2 issues of personality
- individual differences in personality exists
- intrapersonal functioning- processes within influence behavior.
Allport: dynamic organization creates continuity, even if the person acts differently in different circumstances –> same processes involved, even if the results differ
Perspectives of personality
- trait/dispositional perspective
- stable qualities inside
- shown in different settings in different ways
- motives perspective
key element in human experience is the motive force that underlies behavior
- inheritance and evolutionary perspective
- human nature is rooted in our genes
- personality is genetically based
- dispositions are inherited
- biological process perspective
since humans are biological creature, personality is genetically based, and depends on hormones and the nervous system
- psychoanalytic perspective
- internal forces compete and conflict with each other
- main focus: dynamic of these forces
- neoanalytic perspective
- focus on ego and its development
- emphasis: social role and relationships
- psychosocial perspective
-most important aspect of human nature: formation of relationships with other people and how these play out (historical link to psychoanalytic theories)
- social learning perspective
- behavior changes systematically as a result of experiences –> change
- personality = integrated SUM of learned experiences
- self-actualization and self-determination perspective/organismic perspective
- everybody has potential to grow and develop into valuable human beings if permitted to do so
- natural tendency towards self-perfection
- self-regulating perspective
- people are complex psychological systems
- recurrent processes form organized actions to attain specific endpoints
- assumption of organization, coherence, and patterning
- synthesizing goals and moving towards them
- cognitive self-recognition
- cognitive processes form the basis of personality
- interpret, store, receive and hold information
Methods
- case study: 1 person, can go deeper into the personality
- generalized: need to test many people over many countries to generalize the findings
- parsimony- simple as possible
- correlation: strength and direction
- experimental: cause and effect. independent variable manipulated, other variables are controlled
lexical hypothesis
adjectives are used to label all human attributes
factor analysis
- to structure the adjectives
- if strong correlation = same category
- way of finding the main traits and their sub-categories
- aim is to find the supertraits with many sub-traits
- traits arranged on the basis of behavior –> are abstract descriptions of a person’s behavior
factor analysis continued
- if 2 or more characteristics co-vary when assessed across many people, they may fall under the same category of trait
1. reduces reflections of personality into smaller set of traits
2. can reflect that some traits matters more than others
3. helps in creating assessment devices
Eigenvalue: sum of loadings of each factor
steps of factor analysis
- selecting variables
- computing the intercorrelations of the variables
- factor extraction: determining the number of factors (supertraits)
- factor rotation: making it a simple structure
- computing the factor loadings: the measure between the measured variable and the computed variable
- label the factors
Humoral psychology
Allport, Hippocrates, Galen
Allport: nature is composed of 4 elements: air, earth, fire and water
Hippocrates: the 4 elements are represented in human body as 4 humors: blood, black bile, yellow bile and phlegm
-1 humor can predominate in the body –> can be linked to a similar predominant temperament –> humors are linked to personality
Galen: humors are the root of diseases