The Humanistic Perspective
of Personality
From Freud, to the Big 5, to
Bandura, to the Ideal Self
Humanistic Psychologists…
• Focus on conscious experiences
• Focus on an individuals own ability to change
attitudes and behavior (free will)
• Focus on personal responsibility and growth
(internal locus of control)
• Have an optimistic perspective on human
nature
• Thought psychology should focus on human
strengths and virtues
Abraham Maslow and Personality
• Said personality comes from the pursuit of meeting
our Hierarchy of Needs
– The pyramid of physiological (food/water) and psychological
(love/esteem) needs
– Ultimately our goal is to obtain our full potential
– self-actualization – the pursuit of realizing one’s
potential that defines personality
• Said most people don’t reach full potential because
they lose focus of the pursuit because they strive for
materialistic, meaningless goals
Maslow developed his ideas
by studying what he termed
“healthy people”
Maslow’s
Hierarchy of Needs
Self-Actualized People
They share certain characteristics:
•They are self aware and self accepting
•Open and spontaneous
•Loving and caring
•Not paralyzed by others’ opinions.
•They are secure in who they are.
•They enjoy work and see work as a mission
to fulfill
Self-Actualized People
• Problem centered rather than self-centered.
Focused their energies on a particular task.
Few deep relationships, rather than many
superficial ones.
Carl Rogers: The Importance of Self
Humanistic psychologist who agreed with Maslow
• Believed people are basically GOOD and are like seeds
•We are like seeds
Need Water, Sun and
Nutrients to Grow into
a big healthy plant
We need acceptance,genuineness,
and empathy for us to grow.
AGE
Acceptance
• Unconditional Positive Regard:
An attitude of acceptance
regardless of circumstances.
Accepting yourself or others
completely regardless of behavior at
that time.
Rogers believed that many parents display what he
called conditional positive regard
children only feel accepted when they are
pleasing others
Genuineness
• Being open with
your own feelings.
•Dropping your
guard.
•Being transparent
and self-disclosing.
Empathy
• Listening, sharing,
understanding and
mirroring feelings
and reflecting their
meanings.
Assessing Personality from a
Humanistic Perspective
• Humanistic psychologists
evaluate your personality by
looking at your self-concept
(or self-identity)
How did Rogers
assess personality?
– How YOU saw yourself and how you
would personally answer the
question…
WHO AM I?
#1 - ask clients to describe their self-concept
#2 – ask them how they would ideally like to be
When your ideal self and your self-concept are alike you are generally happy.
Assessing your Self-Concept
ME
Or my self-concept
My Ideal Self
Self-Concept
Both Rogers and Maslow believed that your
self-concept is at the center of your
personality.
•If our self concept is positive….
We tend to act and perceive the world
positively.
•If our self-concept is negative….
We fall short of our “ideal self” and
feel dissatisfied and unhappy
Rogers said that often people’s selfconcepts don’t exactly match reality
• Congruence
– a fairly accurate match between the self-concept
and reality
• Incongruence
– the difference between the self-concept and reality
Results of Incongruence
– can experience anxiety when self-concepts are
threatened
– therefore people distort their experiences to hold
on to their self-concept
Sometimes to hold on to our Selfconcept we use a Self-Serving Bias
• A readiness to perceive oneself favorable.
• People accept more responsibility for
successes than failures.
•Most people see
themselves as better
than average.
79% thought Mother
Teresa would go to
heaven vs. 87% thought
they would
Does culture play a part in our
personality and our self-identity?
(according to humanistic psychologists)
• Individualism: giving priority to one’s own
goals over group goals. Defining your
identity in terms of yourself.
“the squeaky wheel gets the grease”
•Collectivism: giving priority to the goals
of a group and defining your identity as part
of that group.
“the quaking duck gets shot”
Which is really better?
Criticisms of Humanistic
Theory
• Overly optimistic and unrealistic view of human
nature
– Maslow’s self-actualized people are almost perfect
a hard time finding any self-actualized people)
(had
• Like psychodynamic hard to test
– Believers say this isn’t a problem – you can’t test people’s
journey to ideal self
• “What is a healthy person?”
– concept may just reflect Maslow’s own values and ideals
– What is a loving and productive person??