Unit 5: Personality - Theory, Research, and Assessment Flashcards
Alfred Adler
Developed individual psychology
Argued that Freud had gone overboard in centering his theory on sexual conflicts
Thought that the foremost source of human motivation is a striving for superiority. Adler saw striving for superiority as a universal drive to adapt, improve oneself, and master life’s challenges. He noted that young children understandably feel weak and helpless in comparison with more competent older children and adults. These early inferiority feelings supposedly motivate them to acquire new skills and develop new talents.
Asserted that everyone has to work to overcome some feelings of inferiority. He called this process compensation. Compensation involves efforts to overcome imagined or real inferiorities by developing one’s abilities. Adler believed that compensation is entirely normal. However, in some people, inferiority feelings can become excessive, which can result in what is widely known today as an inferiority complex—exaggerated feelings of weakness and inadequacy. Adler thought that either parental pampering or parental neglect could cause an inferiority complex. Thus, he agreed with Freud on the importance of early childhood experiences. However, he focused on different aspects of parent—child relations.
Maintained that some people engage in overcompensation in order to conceal, even from themselves, their feelings of inferiority. These people work to acquire status, power, and the trappings of success (fancy clothes, impressive cars) to cover up their underlying inferiority complex.
Adler’s theory stressed the social context of personality development. For instance, it was Adler who first focused attention on the possible importance of birth order as a factor governing personality. He noted that first-borns, second children, and later-born children enter varied home environments and are treated differently by parents and that these experiences are likely to affect their personality..
Albert Bandura
Pointed out that humans obviously are conscious, thinking, feeling beings.
Argued that in neglecting cognitive processes, Skinner ignored the most distinctive and important feature of human behavior.
Bandura and like-minded theorists originally called their modified brand of behaviorism social learning theory. Today, Bandura refers to his model as social cognitive theory. Bandura’s impact has been such that he is considered by many to be the greatest living psychologist, ranking just behind luminaries such as Piaget, Freud, and Skinner in terms of his overall historical influence.
Agreed with the fundamental thrust of behaviorism in that he believes that personality is largely shaped through learning. However, he contended that conditioning is not a mechanical process in which people are passive participants. Instead, he maintained that “people are self-organizing, proactive, self-reflecting, and self-regulating, not just reactive organisms shaped and shepherded by external events”. Thus, people routinely attempt to influence their lives and their outcomes. Also emphasized the important role of forward-directed planning, noting that “people set goals for themselves, anticipate the likely consequences of prospective actions, and select and create courses of action likely to produce desired outcomes and avoid detrimental ones”
Comparing his theory to Skinner’s highly deterministic view, Bandura advocated a position called reciprocal determinism. According to this notion, the environment does determine behavior (as Skinner would argue). However, behavior also determines the environment (in other words, people can act to alter their environment). Moreover, personal factors (cognitive structures such as beliefs and expectancies) determine and are determined by both behavior and the environment. Thus, reciprocal determinism is the idea that internal mental events, external environmental events, and overt behavior all influence one another. According to Bandura, humans are neither masters of their own destiny nor hapless victims buffeted about by the environment. To some extent, people shape their environments.
Foremost theoretical contribution was his description of observational learning. Observational learning occurs when an organism’s response is influenced by the observation of others, who are called models. According to Bandura, both classical and operant conditioning can occur vicariously when one person observes another’s conditioning. For example, watching your sister get cheated by someone giving her a bad check for her old stereo could strengthen your tendency to be suspicious of others. Although your sister would be the one actually experiencing the negative consequences, they might also influence you—through observational learning.
Maintained that people’s characteristic patterns of behavior are shaped by the models that they’re exposed to. He wasn’t referring to the fashion models who dominate the mass media—although they do qualify. In observational learning, a model is a person whose behavior is observed by another. At one time or another, everyone serves as a model for others. Bandura’s key point is that many response tendencies are the product of imitation.
As research has accumulated, it has become apparent that some models are more influential than others. Both children and adults tend to imitate people they like or respect more than people they don’t. People are also especially prone to imitate the behavior of people whom they consider attractive or powerful (e.g., rock stars). In addition, imitation is more likely when people see similarity between models and themselves. Thus, children tend to imitate same-sex role models somewhat more than opposite-sex models. Finally, people are more likely to copy a model if they observe that the model’s behavior leads to positive outcomes.
Discussed how a variety of personal factors (aspects of personality) govern behavior. In recent years, the factor he has emphasized most is self-efficacy. Self-efficacy refers to one’s belief about one’s ability to perform behaviors that should lead to expected outcomes. When self-efficacy is high, individuals feel confident that they can execute the responses necessary to earn reinforcers. When self-efficacy is low, individuals worry that the necessary responses may be beyond their abilities. Perceptions of self-efficacy are subjective and specific to certain kinds of tasks. For instance, you might feel extremely confident about your ability to handle difficult social situations but doubtful about your ability to handle academic challenges.
Perceptions of self-efficacy can influence which challenges people tackle and how well they perform. Studies have found that feelings of greater self-efficacy are associated with greater success in giving up smoking, greater adherence to an exercise regimen, better outcomes in substance abuse treatment, more success in coping with medical rehabilitation, reduced disability from problems with chronic pain, greater persistence and effort in academic pursuits, higher levels of academic performance, reduced vulnerability to anxiety and depression in childhood, less jealousy in romantic relationships, enhanced performance in athletic competition, greater receptiveness to technological training, greater success in searching for a new job, higher work-related performance, reduced vulnerability to post-traumatic stress disorder in the face of severe stress, and reduced strain from occupational stress, among many other things
David Buss
According to Buss, the Big Five emerge as fundamental dimensions of personality because humans have evolved special sensitivity to variations in the ability to bond with others (extraversion), the willingness to cooperate and collaborate (agreeableness), the tendency to be reliable and ethical (conscientiousness), the capacity to be an innovative problem solver (openness to experience), and the ability to handle stress (low neuroticism). In a nutshell, Buss argues that the Big Five reflect the most salient features of others’ adaptive behavior over the course of evolutionary history.
Raymond Cattell
Used the statistical procedure of factor analysis to reduce a huge list of personality traits compiled by Gordon Allport to just 16 basic dimensions of personality. In factor analysis, correlations among many variables are analyzed to identify closely related clusters of variables. If the measurements of a number of variables (in this case, personality traits) correlate highly with one another, the assumption is that a single factor is influencing all of them. Factor analysis is used to identify these hidden factors. In factor analyses of personality traits, these hidden factors are viewed as very basic, higher-order traits that determine less basic, more specific traits. Based on his factor analytic work, Cattell concluded that an individual’s personality can be described completely by measuring just 16 traits.
Norman Endler
Was a well-known advocate of an interactional approach to personality. Endler argued that personality traits interact with situational factors to produce behavior. So, in order to accurately predict how someone will behave, you not only need to know something about that person’s standing on relevant personality traits, but you also need information about the nature of the situational context he or she is facing. Neither factor alone will allow you to accurately predict an individual’s behavior.
Hans Eysenck
Vieweds personality structure as a hierarchy of traits, in which many superficial traits are derived from a smaller number of more basic traits, which are derived from a handful of fundamental higher-order traits. His studies suggest that all aspects of personality emerge from just three higher-order traits: extraversion, neuroticism, and psychoticism. Extraversion involves being sociable, assertive, active, and lively. Neuroticism involves being anxious, tense, moody, and low in self-esteem. Psychoticism involves being egocentric, impulsive, cold, and antisocial. Each of these traits is represented in the theory as a bipolar dimension, with the endpoints for each dimension as follows: extraversion–introversion, stability–neuroticism (instability), and psychoticism–self-control.
According to Eysenck, “Personality is determined to a large extent by a person’s genes”. How is heredity linked to personality in Eysenck’s model? In part, through conditioning concepts borrowed from behavioral theory. Eysenck theorizes that some people can be conditioned more readily than others because of differences in their physiological functioning. These variations in “conditionability” are assumed to influence the personality traits that people acquire through conditioning processes.
Shown a special interest in explaining variations in extraversion–introversion, the trait dimension first described years earlier by Carl Jung. He has proposed that introverts tend to have higher levels of physiological arousal, or perhaps higher “arousability,” which makes them more easily conditioned than extraverts. According to Eysenck, people who condition easily acquire more conditioned inhibitions than others. These inhibitions make them more bashful, tentative, and uneasy in social situations. This social discomfort leads them to turn inward. Hence, they become introverted.
Sigmund Freud
Psychodynamic theories include all of the diverse theories descended from the work of Sigmund Freud, which focus on unconscious mental force.
Like other neurologists in his era, he often treated people troubled by nervous problems, such as irrational fears, obsessions, and anxieties. Eventually he devoted himself to the treatment of mental disorders using an innovative procedure he had developed, which he called psychoanalysis. It required lengthy verbal interactions with patients, during which Freud probed deeply into their lives. Freud’s psychoanalytic theory grew out of his decades of interactions with his clients. Psychoanalytic theory attempts to explain personality by focusing on the influence of early childhood experiences, unconscious conflicts, and sexual urges.
Although Freud’s theory gradually gained prominence, most of Freud’s contemporaries were uncomfortable with his theory, for at least three reasons. First, in arguing that people’s behavior is governed by unconscious factors of which they are unaware, Freud made the disconcerting suggestion that individuals are not masters of their own minds. Second, in claiming that adult personalities are shaped by childhood experiences and other factors beyond one’s control, he suggested that people are not masters of their own destinies. Third, by emphasizing the importance of how people cope with their sexual urges, he offended those who held the conservative, Victorian values of his time.
The id is the primitive, instinctive component of personality that operates according to the pleasure principle. Freud referred to the id as the reservoir of psychic energy. By this he meant that the id houses the raw biological urges (to eat, sleep, defecate, copulate, and so on) that energize human behavior. The id operates according to the pleasure principle, which demands immediate gratification of its urges. The id engages in primary-process thinking, which is primitive, illogical, irrational, and fantasy-oriented.
The ego is the decision-making component of personality that operates according to the reality principle. The ego mediates between the id, with its forceful desires for immediate satisfaction, and the external social world, with its expectations and norms regarding suitable behavior. The ego considers social realities—society’s norms, etiquette, rules, and customs—in deciding how to behave. The ego is guided by the reality principle, which seeks to delay gratification of the id’s urges until appropriate outlets and situations can be found. In short, to stay out of trouble, the ego often works to tame the unbridled desires of the id.
In the long run, the ego wants to maximize gratification, just as the id does. However, the ego engages in secondary-process thinking, which is relatively rational, realistic, and oriented toward problem solving. Thus, the ego strives to avoid negative consequences from society and its representatives (e.g., punishment by parents or teachers) by behaving “properly.” It also attempts to achieve long-range goals that sometimes require putting off gratification.
While the ego concerns itself with practical realities, the superego is the moral component of personality that incorporates social standards about what represents right and wrong. Throughout their lives, but especially during childhood, people receive training about what constitutes good and bad behavior. Many social norms regarding morality are eventually internalized. The superego emerges out of the ego at around three to five years of age. In some people, the superego can become irrationally demanding in its striving for moral perfection. Such people are plagued by excessive feelings of guilt.
Perhaps Freud’s most enduring insight was his recognition of how unconscious forces can influence behavior. He inferred the existence of the unconscious from a variety of observations that he made with his patients. For example, he noticed that “slips of the tongue” often revealed a person’s true feelings. He also realized that his patients’ dreams often expressed hidden desires. Most important, through psychoanalysis, he often helped patients to discover feelings and conflicts of which they had previously been unaware.
Freud contrasted the unconscious with the conscious and preconscious, creating three levels of awareness. The conscious consists of whatever one is aware of at a particular point in time. For example, at this moment your conscious may include the train of thought in this text and a dim awareness in the back of your mind that your eyes are getting tired and you’re beginning to get hungry. The preconscious contains material just beneath the surface of awareness that can easily be retrieved. Examples might include your middle name, what you had for supper last night, or an argument you had with a friend yesterday. The unconscious contains thoughts, memories, and desires that are well below the surface of conscious awareness but that nonetheless exert great influence on behavior. Examples of material that might be found in your unconscious include a forgotten trauma from childhood, hidden feelings of hostility toward a parent, and repressed sexual desires.
Freud’s conception of the mind is often compared to an iceberg that has most of its mass hidden beneath the water’s surface. He believed that the unconscious (the mass below the surface) is much larger than the conscious or preconscious. He proposed that the ego and superego operate at all three levels of awareness. In contrast, the id is entirely unconscious, expressing its urges at a conscious level through the ego. Of course, the id’s desires for immediate satisfaction often trigger internal conflicts with the ego and superego. These conflicts play a key role in Freud’s theory.
Freud assumed that behavior is the outcome of an ongoing series of internal conflicts. He saw internal battles between the id, ego, and superego as routine. Why? Because the id wants to gratify its urges immediately, but the norms of civilized society frequently dictate otherwise. For example, your id might feel an urge to clobber a co-worker who constantly irritates you. However, society frowns on such behavior, so your ego would try to hold this urge in check. Hence, you would find yourself in conflict. You may be experiencing conflict at this very moment. In Freudian terms, your id may be secretly urging you to abandon reading this chapter so that you can fix a snack and watch some videos on YouTube. Your ego may be weighing this appealing option against your society-induced need to excel in school.
Carl Jung
Jung called his new approach analytical psychology to differentiate it from Freud’s psychoanalytic theory. Like Freud, Jung emphasized the unconscious determinants of personality. However, he proposed that the unconscious consists of two layers. The first layer, called the personal unconscious, is essentially the same as Freud’s version of the unconscious. The personal unconscious houses material that is not within one’s conscious awareness because it has been repressed or forgotten. In addition, Jung theorized the existence of a deeper layer that he called the collective unconscious. The collective unconscious is a storehouse of latent memory traces inherited from people’s ancestral past. According to Jung, each person shares the collective unconscious with the entire human race.
Jung called these ancestral memories archetypes. They are not memories of actual, personal experiences. Instead, archetypes are emotionally charged images and thought forms that have universal meaning. These archetypal images and ideas show up frequently in dreams and are often manifested in a culture’s use of symbols in art, literature, and religion. According to Jung, symbols from very different cultures often show striking similarities because they emerge from archetypes that are shared by the entire human race. For instance, Jung found numerous cultures in which the mandala, or “magic circle,” has served as a symbol of the unified wholeness of the self. Jung felt that an understanding of archetypal symbols helped him make sense of his patients’ dreams. He thought that dreams contain important messages from the unconscious, and like Freud, depended extensively on dream analysis in his treatment of patients.
Abraham Maslow
Maslow spent much of his career at Brandeis University, where he created an influential theory of motivation and provided crucial leadership for the fledgling humanistic movement. Like Rogers, Maslow argued that psychology should take an optimistic view of human nature instead of dwelling on the causes of disorders. “To oversimplify the matter somewhat,” he said, “it’s as if Freud supplied to us the sick half of psychology and we must now fill it out with the healthy half”. Maslow’s key contributions were his analysis of how motives are organized hierarchically and his description of the healthy personality.
Maslow proposed that human motives are organized into a hierarchy of needs—a systematic arrangement of needs, according to priority, in which basic needs must be met before less basic needs are aroused. This hierarchical arrangement is usually portrayed as a pyramid. The needs toward the bottom of the pyramid, such as physiological or security needs, are the most basic. Higher levels in the pyramid consist of progressively less basic needs. When a person manages to satisfy a level of needs reasonably well (complete satisfaction is not necessary), this satisfaction activates needs at the next level.
Like Rogers, Maslow argued that humans have an innate drive toward personal growth—that is, evolution toward a higher state of being. Thus, he described the needs in the uppermost reaches of his hierarchy as growth needs. These include the needs for knowledge, understanding, order, and aesthetic beauty. Foremost among them is the need for self-actualization, which is the need to fulfill one’s potential; it is the highest need in Maslow’s motivational hierarchy. Maslow summarized this concept with a simple statement: “What a man can be, he must be.” According to Maslow, people will be frustrated if they are unable to fully utilize their talents or pursue their true interests. For example, if you have great musical talent but must work as an accountant, or if you have scholarly interests but must work as a salesclerk, your need for self-actualization will be thwarted.
Because of his interest in self-actualization, Maslow set out to discover the nature of the healthy personality. He tried to identify people of exceptional mental health so that he could investigate their characteristics. In one case, he used psychological tests and interviews to sort out the healthiest 1 percent of a sizable population of college students. He also studied admired historical figures (e.g., Thomas Jefferson and William James) and personal acquaintances characterized by superior adjustment. Over a period of years, he accumulated his case histories and gradually sketched, in broad strokes, a picture of ideal psychological health. According to Maslow, self-actualizing persons are people with exceptionally healthy personalities, marked by continued personal growth. Maslow identified various traits characteristic of self-actualizing people. Many of these traits are listed in Table 12.3. In brief, Maslow found that self-actualizers are accurately tuned in to reality and that they’re at peace with themselves. He found that they’re open and spontaneous and that they retain a fresh appreciation of the world around them. Socially, they’re sensitive to others’ needs and enjoy rewarding interpersonal relations. However, they’re not dependent on others for approval or uncomfortable with solitude. They thrive on their work, and they enjoy their sense of humor. Maslow also noted that they have “peak experiences” (profound emotional highs) more often than others. Finally, he found that they strike a nice balance between many polarities in personality. For instance, they can be both childlike and mature, both rational and intuitive, both conforming and rebellious.
Walter Mischel
Like Bandura, Mischel is an advocate of social learning theory. Mischel’s chief contribution to personality theory has been to focus attention on the extent to which situational factors govern behavior
According to Mischel, people make responses that they think will lead to reinforcement in the situation at hand. For example, if you believe that hard work in your job will pay off by leading to raises and promotions, you’ll probably be diligent and industrious. But if you think that hard work in your job is unlikely to be rewarded, you may behave in a lazy and irresponsible manner. Thus, Mischel’s version of social learning theory predicts that people will often behave differently in different situations. Mischel reviewed decades of research and concluded that, indeed, people exhibit far less consistency across situations than had been widely assumed. For example, studies show that a person who is honest in one situation may be dishonest in another.
Mischel’s provocative ideas struck at the heart of the concept of personality, which assumes that people are reasonably consistent in their behavior. His theories sparked a robust debate about the relative importance of the person as opposed to the situation in determining behavior. This debate has led to a growing recognition that both the person and the situation are important determinants of behavior. As William Fleeson puts it, “The person–situation debate is coming to an end because both sides of the debate have turned out to be right”. Fleeson reconciles the two opposing views by arguing that each prevails at a different level of analysis. When small chunks of behavior are examined on a moment-to-moment basis, situational factors dominate and most individuals’ behavior tends to be highly variable. However, when larger chunks of typical behavior over time are examined, people tend to be reasonably consistent and personality traits prove to be more influential.
Delroy Paulhus
According to Delroy Paulhus, the Dark Triad refers to a specific combination of three traits leading to negative, antisocial behavioral tendencies. The Dark Triad consists of three separate but intercorrelated traits—Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and narcissism. According to Paulhus, the three traits characterize someone who has a “socially malevolent character with behavioral tendencies toward self-promotion, emotional coldness, duplicity, and aggressiveness”. Psychopathy is a term we will explore in Chapter 15. Someone scoring high on psychopathy is someone we might refer to colloquially as a psychopath—someone who feels little empathy, who likes to control and hurt others, who is impulsive, and who often lives a parasitic lifestyle. Narcissism refers to a tendency to focus almost exclusively on the self and one’s self image, and to maintain an inflated view of the self and demand attention. Someone high in Machiavellianism is someone who enjoys, and is good at, manipulating others.
The traits forming the Dark Triad represent the dark side to human personality. Individuals displaying this personality type exhibit vengeful attitudes and show a tendency to engage in antisocial activities that harm others, such as exploiting others sexually in short-term relationships, showing no empathy for the suffering of their victims, and often enjoying the physical and emotional abuse they cause others. Recently, Paulhus has added a fourth trait to the mix—sadism. The new term used by Paulhus to incorporate sadism is the Dark Tetrad. Sadism adds an additional type of negativity to the description of an evil personality: “The sadistic personality is unique among the Dark Tetrad in involving an appetite for cruelty—as opposed to callous indifference”.
Defense mechanisms are largely unconscious reactions that protect a person from unpleasant emotions such as anxiety and guilt. Typically, they’re mental maneuvers that work through self-deception. Consider rationalization, which is creating false but plausible excuses to justify unacceptable behavior. For example, after cheating someone in a business transaction, you might reduce your guilt by rationalizing that “everyone does it.”
According to Delroy Paulhus from the University of British Columbia and his colleagues, repression is “the flagship in the psychoanalytic fleet of defense mechanisms”; repression is the most basic and widely used defense mechanism. Repression is keeping distressing thoughts and feelings buried in the unconscious. People tend to repress desires that make them feel guilty, conflicts that make them anxious, and memories that are painful. Repression has been called “motivated forgetting.” If you forget a dental appointment or the name of someone you don’t like, repression may be at work.
Carl Rogers
Carl Rogers was one of the founders of the human potential movement. This movement emphasizes self-realization through sensitivity training, encounter groups, and other exercises intended to foster personal growth. Like Freud, Rogers based his personality theory on his extensive therapeutic interactions with many clients. Because of its emphasis on a person’s subjective point of view, Rogers’s approach is called a person-centered theory.
Rogers viewed personality structure in terms of just one construct. He called this construct the self, although it’s more widely known today as the self-concept. A self-concept is a collection of beliefs about one’s own nature, unique qualities, and typical behavior. Your self-concept is your own mental picture of yourself. It’s a collection of self-perceptions. For example, a self-concept might include beliefs such as “I’m easygoing” or “I’m sly and crafty” or “I’m pretty” or “I’m hard-working.” According to Rogers, individuals are aware of their self-concept. It’s not buried in their unconscious.
Rogers stressed the subjective nature of the self-concept. Your self-concept may not be entirely consistent with your experiences. Most people tend to distort their experiences to some extent to promote a relatively favorable self-concept. For example, you may believe that you’re quite bright, but your grade transcript might suggest otherwise. Rogers called the gap between self-concept and reality incongruence. Incongruence is the degree of disparity between one’s self-concept and one’s actual experience. In contrast, if a person’s self-concept is reasonably accurate, it’s said to be congruent with reality. Everyone experiences some incongruence. The crucial issue is how much. As we’ll see, Rogers maintained that too much incongruence undermines one’s psychological well-being.
In terms of personality development, Rogers was concerned with how childhood experiences promote congruence or incongruence between one’s self-concept and one’s experience. According to Rogers, people have a strong need for affection, love, and acceptance from others. Early in life, parents provide most of this affection. Rogers maintained that some parents make their affection conditional. That is, it depends on the child’s behaving well and living up to expectations. When parental love seems conditional, children often block out of their self-concept those experiences that make them feel unworthy of love. They do so because they’re worried about parental acceptance, which appears precarious.
At the other end of the spectrum, some parents make their affection unconditional. Their children have less need to block out unworthy experiences because they’ve been assured that they’re worthy of affection, no matter what they do. Hence, Rogers believed that unconditional love from parents fosters congruence and that conditional love fosters incongruence. He further theorized that if individuals grow up believing that affection from others is highly conditional, they will go on to distort more and more of their experiences in order to feel worthy of acceptance from a wider and wider array of people.
According to Rogers, experiences that threaten people’s personal views of themselves are the principal cause of troublesome anxiety. The more inaccurate your self-concept, the more likely you are to have experiences that clash with your self-perceptions. Thus, people with highly incongruent self-concepts are especially likely to be plagued by recurrent anxiety.
To ward off this anxiety, individuals often behave defensively in an effort to reinterpret their experience so that it appears consistent with their self-concept. Thus, they ignore, deny, and twist reality to protect and perpetuate their self-concept. Consider a young woman who, like most people, considers herself a “nice person.” Let’s suppose that in reality she is rather conceited and selfish. She gets feedback from both boyfriends and girlfriends that she is a “self-centered, snotty brat.” How might she react in order to protect her self-concept? She might ignore or block out those occasions when she behaves selfishly. She might attribute her girlfriends’ negative comments to their jealousy of her good looks. Perhaps she would blame her boyfriends’ negative remarks on their disappointment because she won’t get more serious with them. As you can see, people will sometimes go to great lengths to defend their self-concept.
B. F. Skinner
Modern behaviorism’s most prominent theorist has been B. F. Skinner, an American psychologist who lived from 1904 to 1990. Skinner spent most of his career at Harvard University. There he achieved renown for his research on the principles of learning, which were mostly discovered through the study of rats and pigeons. Skinner’s concepts of operant conditioning were never meant to be a theory of personality. However, his ideas have affected thinking in all areas of psychology and have been applied to the explanation of personality. Here we’ll examine Skinner’s views as they relate to personality structure and development.
Skinner made no provision for internal personality structures similar to Freud’s id, ego, and superego because such structures can’t be observed. Following the tradition of Watson’s radical behaviorism, Skinner showed little interest in what goes on “inside” people. He argued that it’s useless to speculate about private, unobservable cognitive processes. Instead, he focused on how the external environment molds overt behavior. Indeed, he argued for a strong brand of determinism, asserting that behavior is fully determined by environmental stimuli. He claimed that free will is but an illusion, saying, “There is no place in the scientific position for a self as a true originator or initiator of action”.
According to his view, people show some consistent patterns of behavior because they have some stable response tendencies that they have acquired through experience. These response tendencies may change in the future, as a result of new experiences, but they’re enduring enough to create a certain degree of consistency in a person’s behavior. Implicitly, then, Skinner viewed an individual’s personality as a collection of response tendencies that are tied to various stimulus situations. A specific situation may be associated with a number of response tendencies that vary in strength, depending on past conditioning.
Skinner’s theory accounts for personality development by explaining how various response tendencies are acquired through learning. He believed that most human responses are shaped by the type of conditioning that he described: operant conditioning. Skinner maintained that environmental consequences—reinforcement, punishment, and extinction—determine people’s patterns of responding. On the one hand, when responses are followed by favorable consequences (reinforcement), they are strengthened. For example, if your joking at a party pays off with favorable attention, your tendency to joke at parties will increase. On the other hand, when responses lead to negative consequences (punishment), they are weakened. Thus, if your impulsive decisions always backfire, your tendency to be impulsive will decline.
Because response tendencies are constantly being strengthened or weakened by new experiences, Skinner’s theory views personality development as a continuous, lifelong journey. Unlike Freud and many other theorists, Skinner saw no reason to break the developmental process into stages. Nor did he attribute special importance to early childhood experiences.
Skinner believed that conditioning in humans operates much the same as in the rats and pigeons that he studied in his laboratory. Hence, he assumed that conditioning strengthens and weakens response tendencies “mechanically”—that is, without the person’s conscious participation. Thus, Skinner was able to explain consistencies in behavior (personality) without being concerned about individuals’ cognitive processes.
Archetypes
Jung called ancestral memories archetypes. They are not memories of actual, personal experiences. Instead, archetypes are emotionally charged images and thought forms that have universal meaning. These archetypal images and ideas show up frequently in dreams and are often manifested in a culture’s use of symbols in art, literature, and religion.
Behaviorism
Behaviorism is a theoretical orientation based on the premise that scientific psychology should study only observable behavior.
Collective Unconscious
The collective unconscious is a storehouse of latent memory traces inherited from people’s ancestral past. According to Jung, each person shares the collective unconscious with the entire human race
Collectivism
Collectivism involves putting group goals ahead of personal goals and defining one’s identity in terms of the groups one belongs to (e.g., one’s family, tribe, work group, social class, caste, and so on).
Compensation
Compensation involves efforts to overcome imagined or real inferiorities by developing one’s abilities.
Conscious
The conscious consists of whatever one is aware of at a particular point in time. For example, at this moment your conscious may include the train of thought in this text and a dim awareness in the back of your mind that your eyes are getting tired and you’re beginning to get hungry.
Defense Mechanisms
Defense mechanisms are largely unconscious reactions that protect a person from unpleasant emotions such as anxiety and guilt. Typically, they’re mental maneuvers that work through self-deception.
Displacement
Displacement is diverting emotional feelings (usually anger) from their original source to a substitute target. If your boss gives you a hard time at work and you come home and slam the door, kick the dog, and scream at your spouse, you’re displacing your anger onto irrelevant targets. Unfortunately, social constraints often force people to hold back their anger, and they end up lashing out at the people they love most.
Ego
The ego is the decision-making component of personality that operates according to the reality principle. The ego mediates between the id, with its forceful desires for immediate satisfaction, and the external social world, with its expectations and norms regarding suitable behavior. The ego considers social realities—society’s norms, etiquette, rules, and customs—in deciding how to behave. The ego is guided by the reality principle, which seeks to delay gratification of the id’s urges until appropriate outlets and situations can be found. In short, to stay out of trouble, the ego often works to tame the unbridled desires of the id.
Extraverts
People who score high in extraversion are characterized as outgoing, sociable, upbeat, friendly, assertive, and gregarious. They also have a more positive outlook on life and are motivated to pursue social contact, intimacy, and interdependence.
Factor Analysis
In factor analysis, correlations among many variables are analyzed to identify closely related clusters of variables. If the measurements of a number of variables (in this case, personality traits) correlate highly with one another, the assumption is that a single factor is influencing all of them. Factor analysis is used to identify these hidden factors. In factor analyses of personality traits, these hidden factors are viewed as very basic, higher-order traits that determine less basic, more specific traits.
Fixation
Fixation is a failure to move forward from one stage to another as expected. Essentially, the child’s development stalls for a while. Fixation can be caused by excessive gratification of needs at a particular stage or by excessive frustration of those needs. Either way, fixations left over from childhood affect adult personality. Generally, fixation leads to an overemphasis on the psychosexual needs prominent during the fixated stage.
Hierarchy of Needs
Maslow proposed that human motives are organized into a hierarchy of needs—a systematic arrangement of needs, according to priority, in which basic needs must be met before less basic needs are aroused. This hierarchical arrangement is usually portrayed as a pyramid. The needs toward the bottom of the pyramid, such as physiological or security needs, are the most basic. Higher levels in the pyramid consist of progressively less basic needs. When a person manages to satisfy a level of needs reasonably well (complete satisfaction is not necessary), this satisfaction activates needs at the next level.
Hindsight Bias
Hindsight bias is the tendency to mold one’s interpretation of the past to fit how events actually turned out.
Humanism
Humanism is a theoretical orientation that emphasizes the unique qualities of humans, especially their freedom and their potential for personal growth. Humanistic psychologists don’t believe that animal research can reveal anything of any significance about the human condition. In contrast to most psychodynamic and behavioral theorists, humanistic theorists take an optimistic view of human nature. They assume that (1) people can rise above their primitive animal heritage and control their biological urges, and (2) people are largely conscious and rational beings who are not dominated by unconscious, irrational needs and conflicts.
Id
The id is the primitive, instinctive component of personality that operates according to the pleasure principle. Freud referred to the id as the reservoir of psychic energy. By this he meant that the id houses the raw biological urges (to eat, sleep, defecate, copulate, and so on) that energize human behavior.
Identification
Identification is bolstering self-esteem by forming an imaginary or real alliance with some person or group. Youngsters often shore up precarious feelings of self-worth by identifying with rock stars, movie stars, or famous athletes. Adults may join exclusive country clubs or civic organizations as a means of identification.
Incongruence
Incongruence is the degree of disparity between one’s self-concept and one’s actual experience. In contrast, if a person’s self-concept is reasonably accurate, it’s said to be congruent with reality. Everyone experiences some incongruence. The crucial issue is how much. Rogers maintained that too much incongruence undermines one’s psychological well-being.
Individualism
Individualism involves putting personal goals ahead of group goals and defining one’s identity in terms of personal attributes rather than group memberships
Introverts
Eysenck has shown a special interest in explaining variations in extraversion–introversion, the trait dimension first described years earlier by Carl Jung. He has proposed that introverts tend to have higher levels of physiological arousal, or perhaps higher “arousability,” which makes them more easily conditioned than extraverts. According to Eysenck, people who condition easily acquire more conditioned inhibitions than others. These inhibitions make them more bashful, tentative, and uneasy in social situations. This social discomfort leads them to turn inward. Hence, they become introverted.
Model
In observational learning, a model is a person whose behavior is observed by another. At one time or another, everyone serves as a model for others.
