LECTURE 11/3 PERSONALITY
How does the mind work?
● We always assume that everyone's minds work the same way
Personality - a person’s characteristic style of behaving, thinking, …
● We try to
● The approach in personality research is to be more specific than humans in general, but more
particular in each human being
● Personality traits are aspects that differ between each person → helps make you the person that
you are
Testing/measuring personality
● Test-retest reliability - tests if a test has the same results for the same person if they took it
multiple times ‘reliability is not the same as accuracy
● Validity - test should be accurately aimed at property of interest
○ Suppose someone wants to measure my intelligence, but measures the size of my forehead
to test this - this is a bad way to test intelligence, but is reliable in the sense of test-retest
reliability - it will give you the same answer every time, but it is not valid
○ You want to have a test that is both reliable and valid
● Which female superhero are you test
○ What makes this a bad test - its not reliable or valid - he was asked questions about
leonardo decaprio which is totally unreliable
● Rorschach test - two blots that are seen either as clowns or two elephants
○ It is important to see this bl
○ This is invalid because you shouldn't be able to tell what kind of person you are
depending on what you see
● State vs trait components
○ State → being anxious right now (but maybe not later)
○ Trait → being an anxious person (in general)
● When it comes to traits, you want to learn about what kind of person you are in general
● Myers-briggs type indicator
○ This is not a reliable test
○ 50% of people get a different type upon retaking the test
○ Weakly predicts good managers, teammates, etc.
● The “Big Five”
○ The big five personality traits
■ Openness to experience (how open minded you are)
■ Consciousness (are you tidy, do you like routine, or are u messy and
disorganized)
■ Extraversion (how social are you, would you rather go out or stay in)
■ Agreeableness (are you friendly, polite, do you trust others, do you stay out of
trouble)
■ Neuroticism (emotional stability) (how often does your mood change, are you the
same when times are tough vs good, how do you do under pressure)
● Acronym - OCEAN
○ These are supposed to be neutral traits
○ Its not that any one way to be is better than the other
○ Why is it only 5 and not more or less
■ When you have these 5 traits in mind, think about how well you can describe a
person with just those traits
■ There's also not much overlap with these traits - you can change one without
changing the other
● Nature versus nurture
○ Studies involving twins gives a lot of information about this debate
○ Monozygotic tins - identical
○ Dizygotic twins - fraternal
● Approach to see how genetic your personality is that wouldn’t really work
○ ask how similar are the williams sisters to each other versus each one to another guy
■ You would learn that the williams sisters are more similar in their personalities to
each other than roger federer, but they are also different from him in the sense
that where they are raised where they went to school etc.
■ When monozygotic twins are more similar in a single trait than dizygotic twins,
you can conclude that there is a genetic correlation
● What do we discover when comparing dizygotic twins
● Heritability - the proportion of trait variation that is explained by genetic variation
○ When considering how similar monozygotic twins are compared to dizygotic twins, you
get a score
○ How heritable is eye color in humans? - this has high heritability (~1)
■ Why is that? Because when people differ in eye color, it is usually due to genetic
variability
○ How heritable is heart disease? ~5
■ When people differ in how healthy their heart is, this is influenced by family
history but also personal lifestyle choices
○ # of eyes? ~ 0
■ Because when people dffer in the number of eyes they have, it is very rarely for
genetic reasons. When people have one eye over two, its usually due to an injury
● Heritability does not equal how genetic a trait is in some person
● Heritibility IS how “genetic” are differences in trait X across people
● What is heritable?? - ALMOST EVERYTHING
○ Big 5 traits
○ Political views
○ Religiosity
○ Sexual orientation
○ Scores on intelligence tests
● What does this say about group differences? - NOTHING
○ Why??
○ A tempting (but fallacious) argument
■ 1. Trait X is heritable within groups
■ 2. Groups differ in X
■ Therefore group differences in X are explained by differences in genes - THIS IS
NOT TRUE
○ suppose you have 2 groups of genetically variable seeds, but the two piles of seeds are
genetically identical
○ You plant the seeds and treat them quite differently. One groupgets high quality water,
light, and soil, and the other group gets low quality water, light, and soil
■ The high quality group will grow very well, and the low quality group won’t
grow high
■ Heritability is high in high quality planter
● Who gets to be high and low is up to the seeds
■ The heritability is also high in the low quality planter because this is up to the
seeds
■ But the group differences are completely environmental - the reason why high
qualoty group grew taller than low quality is because of how they were treated
● Do parents matter?
○ Parenting matters less than we think
● Behavior has to do with your personality and the situation you are in
○ How much can you attribute to each category
○ Inherently bad people versus inherently good people
■ Think about the role of the situation you are in, not just what you have done
■ Would you shock a dog?? Example
● Sheridan and King (1972)
○ Subjects shown a real cute fluffy puppy
○ Asked to watch the puppy complete a task and shock it if it got the wrong answer
○ Each wrong answer increases voltage up to 450 V
○ The key thing is that subjects got credit just for showing up, there was no reward, and
there was no obligation to continue
● The miligram experiment
○ Same thing but with humans and a doctor is telling them to shock the man
○ Was redone in 2009
conformity
● We might behave differently than we normally would in a situation because an authority figure
tells us to
○ Peer pressure ■ You are in a room answering easy questions with other people that are purposely
getting wrong answers
● Will you give into peer pressure and also get the answer wrong??
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