Personality
Chapter 11
Personality
The Psychoanalytic
Perspective
 Exploring the Unconscious
 Neo-Freudians and Psychodynamic
Theory
 Assessing Unconscious Processes
 Evaluating the Psychoanalytic
Perspective
Personality
The Humanistic Perspective
 Abraham Maslow’s Self-Actualizing
Person
 Carl Rogers’ Person-Centered
Perspective
 Evaluating the Humanistic
Perspective
Personality
The Trait Perspective
 Searching for Basic Personality Traits
 The Big Five Factors
The Social-Cognitive Perspective
 The Person
 The Situation
 The Interaction
Personality
Exploring The Self
 Self-Esteem: The Good News and the Bad
 Self-Serving Bias
 Culture and the Self
Personality
• Personality is an individual’s
characteristic pattern of thinking, feeling,
and acting
The Psychoanalytic Perspective
• Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)
• One of the first medical
practitioners to emphasize
the importance of the
unconscious – which he
considered a reservoir of
mostly unacceptable
thoughts, wishes, feelings,
and memories.
Exploring the Unconscious
• Freud believed most of the mind is hidden
• We repress unacceptable desires and
thoughts
– He saw the unconscious seeping into dreams,
jokes, slips of the tongue, and daily habits
• How to get around repression roadblock:
He led patients in free association, in
which the person relaxes and says
whatever comes to mind, no matter how
trivial or embarrassing
Origins of Personality
• Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis is the
search for the unconscious motives and
conflicts behind our thoughts and actions
• In this theory, Personality is the
battleground between biology and society.
The battle: our efforts to satisfy biological
drives and impulses, while also avoiding
guilt coming from internalized social
restraints.
Freud’s View of the Mind
• The id operates on the pleasure
principle, striving to satisfy basic sexual
and aggressive drives
• The superego is the conscience,
representing ideals and standards
internalized by society
• The ego is the “executive,” which
balances the demands of id, superego,
and reality
Freud’s View of the Mind
Personality Development
according to Freudian psychoanalytic theory
• Children pass through several psychosexual
stages, during which the id focuses on distinct
erogenous zones
• During the phallic stage, boys develop
unconscious sexual desires for their mother, and
jealousy and hatred for their father (Oedipus
complex)
• By repressing these urges, children come to
identify with the rival parent, developing the
superego
Psychosexual Stages
Unresolved Conflict
• Freud believed unresolved
conflict at any stage of
development could cause
trouble in adulthood
• Fixation: locking the person’s
pleasure-seeking energies at
the unresolved stage
– Stalled at the oral stage, someone
may develop an oral fixation, such
as smoking or eating
Defense Mechanisms
• “Anxiety is the price we pay for civilization” -Anxiety comes from managing the tension
between biological drives and societal ideals.
• The ego uses defense mechanisms, indirectly
and unconsciously, distorting reality to protect
itself from anxiety.
• Examples:
- repression, etc.
Defense Mechanism: Regression
• Faced with a stressor, children and young
orangutans may regress, retreating to the
comfort of earlier behaviors
More Defense Mechanisms
Neo-Freudians and
Psychodynamic Theory
• Psychodynamic Theory: a Freudinfluenced perspective that sees behavior,
thinking, and emotions as reflecting
unconscious motives
• Differences from Freud:
– Placed more emphasis on the role of the
conscious mind
– Doubted that sex and aggression were allconsuming motivations
Some Important Neo-Freudians
Alfred Adler
Karen Horney
Carl Jung
Coined the term
inferiority complex
Believed childhood
feelings of insecurity
can drive later
behavior
Believed children’s
feelings of
dependency give rise
to helplessness and
anxiety. Felt Freud’s
views showed a
masculine bias
Proposed a human
collective
unconscious,
derived from our
species’ experiences
in the distant past
Assessing Unconscious Processes
• To assess personality, psychodynamic
practitioners might use a projective test – an
ambiguous image is designed to trigger
projection of unconscious thoughts or feelings
The Rorschach inkblot
test is the most widely
used projective test
The Rorschach: A Good Test?:
Two Qualities of a Good Test: Reliability and
Validity
• Reliability: raters trained in
different Rorschach scoring
systems showed little
agreement
• Validity: The test is not very
successful at predicting
behavior or discriminating
between groups (e.g., who is
suicidal)
Evaluating the Psychoanalytic
Perspective
• Freud developed his theory before we had
knowledge of neurotransmitters or DNA
• Much research in psychology has taken
place since Freud
• Do Freud’s theories fit well with new
knowledge and today’s ideas about how
the mind works?
Evaluating Freud: Child Development
• Psychologists now see development as a
lifelong process, not fixed in childhood
• Infant’s neural networks are probably not well
developed enough to process emotional trauma
as Freud suggested
• We gain our gender identity earlier suggested by
Oedipal complex resolution, and even without a
same-sex parent present
• Freud may have overestimated parent influence,
underestimated peer influence in development
Can Memories be Repressed?
• Sometimes we neglect (don’t think about)
uncomfortable information including memories
• Rarely: Extreme, prolonged childhood stress
could disrupt memory formation by damaging
the hippocampus, which is still not repression
• More commonly, high stress enhances
memory; trauma is burned in and recalled too
often
• When Freud’s female patients did recall
memories of abuse, he saw these as false
memories from repressed sexual conflicts
Is there a Freudian Unconscious?
• Current theory does not see dreams as
revealing hidden unconscious wishes
• Slips of the tongue are probably from
competition between similar word choices
in our memory network, not from
unconscious wishes and urges
• There is a lot of unconscious activity in the
brain, but not of the sort Freud had in mind:
instead of censored passions, we have…
(see next slide)
Unconscious Information
Processing
The Unobserved Track in our two-track mind:
– Split-brain patients: left hand can show rightbrain processes that the patient cannot verbalize
– Parallel processing: Schemas, mental sets
influence perceptions and interpretations
– Implicit memories (e.g. how to play piano, walk to
class) operate without conscious recall
– Emotions can activate before conscious analysis
– Self-concepts and stereotypes unconsciously
influence how we process social information
Evaluating Freud:
Defense Mechanisms
• Defense mechanisms are observed, but
they don’t seem to function as a disguise
for sexual and aggressive impulses
• Instead, they defend self-esteem, ego.
Example:
– We see our foibles and attitudes in others.
Freud called this “projection.”
– This resembles today’s concept of the false
consensus effect – when we overestimate
the extent to which others share our beliefs
and behaviors
Final challenge to Freud’s theory:
Does it predict behavior?
• Remember, scientific theories organize
observations and make testable predictions
• Freud’s theory doesn’t do this well: can we
observe and predict the id?
• Response: Freud’s theory was not meant to be
predictive. It was meant to be used by
psychoanalysts to give meaning to what goes on
in the mind
• Other value: Freud created concepts and
models still used today.
The Humanistic Perspective
• Humanists viewed Freud’s views as too negative
and behaviorism as too mechanical
• Focused on the ways healthy people strive for
self-determination and self-realization
Abraham Maslow
(1908-1970)
Maslow’s Self-Actualizing Person
• Abraham Maslow proposed
human motivations form a
hierarchy of needs
• Peak motivations are selfactualization (motivation
to fulfill our potential) and
self-transcendence
(striving for identity,
meaning, and purpose
beyond the self)
Maslow’s Self-Actualizing Person
• His model is based on a different
population than Freud’s: Maslow studied
healthy, creative people, rather than
troubled clinical cases
• He was interested in the mature, adult
qualities of those who lived rich and
productive lives
Person-Centered Perspective
• Carl Rogers (1902-1987)
– Agreed people have selfactualizing tendencies,
and are basically good
– Believed we reach our
potential if given a growthpromoting environment
– This father in the cartoon
is missing one element for
promoting growth (next
slide)
Person-Centered Perspective
• People nurture our growth, and we nurture
theirs, in 3 ways:
– Be genuine, open with your feelings
– Be totally accepting, offering unconditional
positive regard.
– Be empathetic, sharing another’s feelings
and reflecting their meanings back to them.
Listen with real understanding
Humanistic Perspective
• For both Maslow and Rogers, a central
feature of personality is one’s selfconcept
– Definition: All our thoughts and feelings in
response to the question “Who am I?”
– If positive, we act and perceive the world
positively
– If negative, we fall short of our ideal self,
and feel dissatisfied and unhappy
Evaluating the Humanistic Perspective
Where it succeeds:
• Humanistic ideas have influenced counseling,
education, child rearing, and management
• Many believe that a positive self-concept is the
key to happiness and success, and that people
are basically good and capable of improving
Evaluating the Humanistic Perspective
Criticisms:
• Concepts are vague and based on personal
opinions, rather than on scientific research
• Emphasis on self-actualization could lead to selfindulgence, selfishness, lack of moral restraint
– Humanistic response: secure self-acceptance is the
first step toward loving others
• Fails to appreciate human capacity for evil
The Trait Perspective
• A trait is a characteristic pattern of
behavior or a tendency to feel and act in a
certain way
– Can be assessed by self-reports on a
personality test
• Trait researchers are less concerned with
explaining individual traits than with
describing them
Searching for Basic Personality Traits
• We can begin to describe people by
placing them on trait dimensions
• Trait psychologists identify factors,
clusters of behavioral tendencies that
occur together
• E.g., extraversion – outgoing, like
excitement and practical jokes, dislike
quiet study
Eysenck Personality Questionnaire
• The Eysencks believed that personality varied
on just two dimensions
The Big Five Factors
• Assessed with the Minnesota
Multiphasic Personality Inventory
(MMPI).
• An extension of the Eysencks’ factors
• Very stable in adulthood
• About 50% heritable
• Applies to various cultures pretty well
The Social-Cognitive Perspective
• Do our personality traits change from one
situation to another?
• The socio-cognitive perspective views
behavior as influenced by the interaction
between persons (and their thinking) and
their social context
Does Personality Change?
• As people grow older, their personality stabilizes
Age
Young children
College-age
Correlation
+0.3
+0.54
70
+0.73
Within-subject trait score
correlations after 7-year interval
• Specific behaviors are less consistent – people
are not always predictable
The Person
• Traits do a good job at
describing average
behavior
– Extraverts really do talk
more
• We can tell a lot about
a person from things
like music preferences,
personal spaces,
personal Web sites,
and writing styles
The Situation
• In unfamiliar, formal situations, our traits
may remain hidden
• In familiar, informal settings, our traits
emerge
– In these settings, our expressive styles are
impressively consistent
The Interaction
• Reciprocal determinism – our personality traits
interact with our environment to influence our
behavior
The Interaction
We are both the products and the architects
of our environments
1. Different people choose different
environments
2. Our personalities shape how we interpret
and react to events
3. Our personalities help create situations to
which we react
Self-Image
• We create an image and understanding of
the self, of who we are now
• Your possible selves include your vision
of who you dream of (or fear) becoming
– This can motivate us to work on specific goals
for self-improvement and achievement
The Spotlight Effect
• We may overestimate how much
others notice and evaluate our
appearance, performance, and
blunders
– Researchers had students wear a
Barry Manilow T-shirt in a room
other students.
– Subjects thought 50% of the others
would notice
– Fewer than 25% actually did
Self-Esteem
• Self-esteem is your feelings of high or low selfworth
• Reminding others of their good points only goes
so far – problems and failures lower self-esteem
• People who feel negative about themselves tend
to be negative toward others
• Inflated self-esteem is also a problem – people
can be conceited and nasty
Categories of Self-Esteem
• Defensive self-esteem
– Fragile. Its goal is to sustain itself. Feeds
anger and disorder.
• Secure self-esteem
– Less fragile. Relies less on others’
evaluations. In line with Maslow’s and Rogers’
ideas about the benefits of a healthy selfimage
Maintaining Self-Esteem
Members of stigmatized groups appear to
maintain self-esteem in 3 ways:
1.They value things at which they excel
2.The attribute problems to prejudice
3.They do as everyone else does – they
compare themselves to people in their
own group
Self-Serving Bias
• Most people display a self-serving bias –
a tendency to perceive ourselves favorably
– People accept more responsibility for good
deeds than bad, and for successes more than
failures
– Most people see themselves as better than
average
– Average, even in terms of immunity to selfserving bias!
Self-Serving Yet Self-Critical
• If we have a self-serving bias, why do so
many people put themselves down?
– Highlighting our mistakes may protect us from
repeating them
– Self put-downs are sometimes meant to
prompt positive feedback
– Highlighting our weaknesses may prepare us
for possible failure
– We may be putting down our old selves, not
our current selves
Culture and the Self
Cultures vary in their meaning of self
• Individualist cultures like mainstream U.S.
give priority to our personal goals over
group goals and define identity in terms of
personal traits
• Collectivist cultures give priority to goals
of the group (often extended family or work
groups) and define identity accordingly
Culture and the Self