Week 3 - Personality: Theories and Debates Flashcards
What is personality?
- A process that adjusts depending on experiences we have and changes in our lives
- Is relatively stable and characteristic of an individual
- Influential across a wide range of human experiences, activities
- Personality refers to both our minds, and our body, which interact to produce behaviour
An example of an Idiographic theorist is Maslow. What was his humanistic assumptions?
- Human nature is positive
- Emphasis on personal growth
- Emphasis on the uniqueness of human beings, understand individual experience and consciousness
- Emphasis on free will and human responsibility
- Personality is NOT FIXED - we can change
Maslow (and Rohers) did not agree with dominant psychonalytic and behaviourist theories
What is Maslow’s Self-Actualisation?
Instinctoid tendenies towards healthy growth and developement.
* Healthy environment = honesty, trust kindness, love, generosity
* Unhealthy environment = destructive, aggressive, unloving, self-defeating
Socilisation is an important stage of personality development in kids
What is maslows hierarchy of needs
- SELF-ACTUALISATION = need to reach full potential
- ESTEEM NEEDS = see ourselves as competent, others respect/admire us
- **BELONGINGESS NEEDS **= Belongingess, love, acceptance
- SAFETY NEEDS = Security, safe place to live, law abiding society, sense of order
- PHYSIOLOGICAL NEEDS = hunger, thirst, sex, sleep
What are the characteristics of self-actualisers?
- creative
- Non-judgemental thinkers (B-Cognition)
- High levels of self-acceptance
- More accepting of others
- Perceive reality more accurately
- High ethical and moral standards - social interest
- Problem solvers
- Independent, less likely to conform
- Deep personal relationships with smaller number of people
Judgemental thinkers = D-Cognition
Evaluating maslow
- Description = overly optimistic
- Explanation = neat, but simplistic
- Empirical evidence = very limited
- Heuristic value = firt to focus on the positive side of human nature
- Applied value = management and organisational psychology
- Too parsimonious
What are trait theorists?
CATTEL.
Take a NOMOTHETIC approach - use questionnaires to carry out factor analysis to dtrmine minimum number of dimensions that describe personality.
What are Cattel’s background assumptions?
Defined personality as ‘‘characteristics of the individual that allow prediction of how they will behave in a given situation’’
* Traits are genetically determined, evolve from environment
* Traits influences ability to respond to a situation, how we approach a situation, and how we are motivated
* Traits are relatively stable, long lasting, building blocks of personality
* Invovles common and unique traits
* Ability (intelligence), Temperament (Irritable) and Dynamic (Motivators) traits
What are the 3 dynamic traits that motivate us?
- Attitudes
- Sentiments
- Ergs
Evaluate Cattell
- Theory was comprehensive
- Empirically valid / included testable concepts
- Had heuristic value
- Applied value
- Explanatory
- Lack parsimony
what are the BIG 5 personality factors
- Neuroticism
- Extraversion
- Openness to experience
- Agreeableness
- Conscientiousness
GORDON ALLPORT (1937) personality is stable therefore plays a signficiant role in determening behaviour.
Evidence shows every individual, no matter their culture, has some level of the BIG-5 traits (John and Srivastava, 1999)
Traits are relatively stable across and individuals life (Wagner et al 2019)
MASLOW DEBATES
- Idiographic - Humanistic
- Environment
- Interaction
- Possible to change
CATTELL DEBATES
- Nomothetic - trait
- Genes and Environment
- Personality
- Occurs during childhood - fixed
What is situationism
WALTER MISCHEL (1968) Believed behaviour is influenced by an external force: situation/context they find them selves in
* claimed research evidence doesnt support idea that if people score highly on a trait, that trait will remain stable across various situations.
* high extraversion = talkative behaviour
* situational cue has more influence
What is interactionism?
BEM (1983) ‘‘certain kinds of persons will behave in certain kinds of ways in certain kinds of situations’’
* behaviour can best be explained by accounting both the individual and the situation
most psycholigists accept this theory
