Lecture 4
PERSONALITY I:
Class Outline
• Video - ABC News “Back with a
vengeance” (10 mins)
• Lecture – What is personality?
– Why should we care?
– How do we measure personality?
Personality
• The relatively enduring individual traits
and dispositions that form a pattern
distinguishing one person from all others
– Traits – Dispositions -
• Reflected by stylistic differences in
behavior of people
What Determines Personality?
• Heredity (“nature”)
– Personality is determined at conception by
an individual’s genes
• Environment (“nurture”)
– Situations that a person is exposed to shape
and alter personality traits
– e.g. Birth order
What Determines Personality?
(cont.)
• Integrated View
– Heredity may predispose a person to certain
patterns of behavior
– Environmental factors such as birth order
and traumatic experiences, influence the
development of specific personality traits
(e.g. extraversion; emotional stability)
The Integrated View
Heredity:
Inherited
genetic
characteristics
Environment:
Life
experiences
Personality
characteristics:
e.g.
Aggression
Extraversion
Locus of control
Emotional stability
Assessing Personality Traits
•
•
•
•
Personality Ratings
Situational Tests
Personality Inventories
Projective Techniques
Personality Ratings
• Typically involve the use of five or sevenpoint scales containing a list of adjectives
acting as anchors for the scales
– Approach is open to various interpretations
of users
– Improvement is seen when scales are tied to
specific behavioral dimensions e.g.
competitiveness
– Observations of rater can distort results
Situational Tests
• Involve the direct observation of an
individual’s behavior in a setting
designed to provide information about
personality
• Very expensive
• Less subjective than rating scales
• Assessment in natural settings
• Certain traits don’t lend to this
Personality Inventories
• The most widely used method of
assessing personality characteristics
• Ease of administration
• Social Desirability is a potential problem,
where people answer as they perceive
they should and not according to their
actual feelings
Projective Techniques
• Designed to probe subtle aspects of
personality
• Based on belief of individualistic
interpretation
• Types of Projective Techniques
– Story Telling
– Sentence Completion
Story Telling
• Good in standardized interpretation,
reliability, and usefulness
• Most widely used is TAT, Thematic
Apperception Test
• 20 Pictures, each portraying a social
setting of ambiguous meaning
Sentence Completion
• Asks respondents to supply endings for a
series of partial sentences
• Best used when respondents have little to
gain by faking answers
• Team building exercises may
appropriately use this technique
Review
• Individual personality has serious
behavioral implications for organizations
• Adult personality is the result of both
heredity and environment
• There are many ways to measure
personality with varying accuracy and cost