PERSONALITY PSYCHOLOGY
Lyra Stein, PhD
“Who am I?”
“I am . . .”
◦ 1.
◦ 2.
◦ 3.
Personality

How did you describe yourself? (what types of
words?)

Would everyone agree with your description?
(would other people describe you the same way?)

How do you know about your personality? (i.e. on
what did you base your descriptions?)

Why are you the way you are?
Definitions of Personality

“What do we know when we know a person?”
• “An individual’s characteristic patterns of
thought, emotion, and behavior, together with
the psychological mechanisms—hidden or
not—behind those patterns” (p. 5)
• An individual’s unique and relatively consistent
patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving
3
The Things Personality Psychologists
Study
Psychological triad-feel, think and behave
 Overlap with clinical psychology

◦ Normal versus extreme patterns of
personality
◦ Personality disorders
◦ Both attempt to understand the whole
person

The whole person
◦ How all other areas of psychology come
together
2
Which of these statements are accurate
for most people?
1. Opposites attract.
2. We only use 10% of our brain.
3.You are safer in a crowded environment
4. Low self-esteem can be cured with positive thinking.
5. Mozart’s music makes infants smarter.
6. Full moons trigger wacky behavior.
7. Is it always better to express anger than to hold it in.
8. Human memory is like a video camera.
9. Repressed memories can be recalled with hypnosis.
10. Individuals with schizophrenia have multiple personalities.
6
6
3 Levels of Personality Analysis
 Human
Nature
 Individual and Group Differences
 Individual Uniqueness
Human Nature
 How
we are “like all others”
 Traits and mechanisms of personality
that are typical of our species and
possessed by nearly everyone
Individual and Group Differences
How we are “like some others”
 Individual differences refer to ways in which
each person is like some other people (e.g.,
extraverts, sensations-seekers, high selfesteem persons)
 Group differences refer to ways in which the
people of one group differ from people in
another group (e.g., cultural differences, age
differences)

Individual Uniqueness
How we are “like no others”
 Individual uniqueness refers to the fact
that every individual has personal and
unique qualities not shared by any other
person in the world
 Individuals can be studied nomothetically
or ideographically

Goal of personality psychology


Explain whole people
In this mission, idea is to combine subfields
of psychology into an integrated whole

Mission impossible – very difficult to look at
everything at once and still maintain a
scientific approach

Think of an important behavior that you performed
recently and ALL of the reasons for that behavior.
Basic Approaches:
Competitors or Complements?
Not mutually exclusive
 They address different questions
 Each ignores many key concerns


One Big Theory (OBT)
◦ It’s difficult to do everything well
8
Pigeonholing Versus Appreciation of
Individual Differences
Other areas of psychology treat all people
as if they were the same
 Personality psychologists emphasize
individual differences

◦ Negative: pigeonholing
◦ Positive: leads to sensitivity and respect for
individual differences
11
Consistency of personality

One theory is that an individual’s behavior
may be consistent across changing situations.

The situation may or may not play a greater
role in determining behavior than personality.
Personality and Science

Scientific methods are used to test
personality theories
◦ Importance of data and statistics to test
theories
◦ Superiority over conclusions from
astrology, palm-reading, etc.
Evaluation
 Scientific
theories need to be distinguished
from beliefs
 Beliefs are based on leaps of faith, not on reliable
facts and systematic observations, whereas theories
are based on systematic observations that can be
repeated by others to yield similar conclusions
Disadvantages of Theories:

1. No theory explains all that is known about
a given phenomenon.

2. Theories affect what new information is
published, biasing the knowledge we have
about personality.

Can we ever prove a theory?
Advantages of theories:

1. Theories allow us to summarize the results of
many research studies & integrate numerous
principles of learning.
2. Theories provide starting points for
conducting new research.

3. Theories offer us a way for describing why
things happen.
The Many Ways Science Has (Wrongly) Assessed Your Personality

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kt8Ru
pLIkBQ
The Zodiac
Does the
Barnum
Effect
explain some
of the appeal
of astrology?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=
qPCsCiOqmXA
A Brief History of Personality
Psychology

Theater and self-presentation
◦ “All the world’s a stage and all the men and
women are merely players”
-- William Shakespeare
◦ The relative self