Personality
PowerPoint®
Presentation
by Jim Foley
© 2013 Worth
Publishers
Module 35: Contemporary
Perspectives on Personality
Trait Theories, Social-Cognitive
Theories, and the Self
Getting you to think about the qualities
you may see in yourself:
Traits: Stable components
of personality
 Dimensions and factors
 Assessing traits: MMPI
 The 5 “CANOE” factors
 The impact of traits on
situations & vice versa
Social-Cognitive influences
on personality
 Reciprocal Determinism
among thoughts, social
situation, behavior
 Internal vs. external
locus of control
 Optimism and positive
psychology
The Self:
Spotlight effect, Self-Esteem, Self-serving bias,
Personality: An individual’s characteristic
patterns of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors
[persisting over time and across situations]
Agreeable, Open
Introverted
Naïve
Sensitive,
Reactive
Contentedly
lethargic
Neurotically Conscientious
irritable
Getting you to think about the qualities
you may see in yourself:
Traits: Stable components
of personality
• Dimensions and factors
• Assessing traits: MMPI
• The 5 “CANOE” factors
• The impact of traits on
situations & vice versa
Social-Cognitive influences
on personality
• Reciprocal Determinism
among thoughts, social
situation, behavior
• Internal vs. external
locus of control
• Optimism and positive
psychology
The Self: Spotlight effect, Self-Esteem, Self-serving bias
Personality As Seen in Palms and Stars
And handwriting, and crystal balls,
and tea leaves, and scattered bones
By saying something
that is vague and likely to
be true of you, then
following up on
comments that you
reinforce by nodding,
someone can appear to
see into your soul.
You too can turn your
keen sense of the
obvious into a career in
predicting the present!
I see by your
handwriting you
like bananas.
Trait Theory of Personality
 Gordon Allport decided
that Freud overvalued
unconscious motives and
undervalued our real,
observable personality
styles/traits.
 Myers and Briggs wanted
to to study individual
behaviors and statements
to find how people
differed in personality:
having different traits.
 The Myers-Briggs Type
Indicator (MBTI) is a
questionnaire categorizing
people by traits.
Trait: An enduring quality
that makes a person tend to
act a certain way.
Examples: “honest.” “shy.”
“hard-working.”
MBTI traits come in pairs:
“Judging” vs. “Perceiving.”
“Thinking” vs. “Feeling.”
Trait theory of personality:
That we are made up of a
collection of traits, behavioral
predispositions that can be
identified and measured, traits
that differ from person to
person
Traits: Rooted in Biology?
 Brain: Extraverts tend to have
low levels of brain activity,
making it hard to suppress
impulses, and leading them to
seek stimulation.
 Body: The trait of shyness
appears to be related to high
autonomic system reactivity, an
easily triggered alarm system.
 Genes: Selective breeding of
animals seems to create lifelong
differences in traits such as
aggression, sociability, or
calmness, suggesting genetic
roots for these traits.
Factor Analysis and the Eysencks’
Personality Dimensions
 Factor Analysis:
Identifying factors that
tend to cluster
together.
 Using factor analysis,
Hans and Sybil Eysenck
found that many
personality traits
actually are a function
of two basic dimensions
along which we all vary.
 Research supports their
idea that these
variations are linked to
genetics.
Assessing Traits: Questionnaires
 Personality Inventory: Questionnaire assessing many
personality traits, by asking which behaviors and
responses the person would choose
 Empirically derived test: all test items have been
selected to because they predictably match the qualities
being assessed.
 Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI):
Designed to identify people with personality difficulties
 T/F questionnaire; items were selected because they
correlated with various traits, emotions, attitudes
 Example: depressed people tend to answer “true” to:
“Nothing in the paper interests me except the comics.”
Sample MMPI Test Profile
The “Big Five” Personality Factors
 The Eysencks felt that people
 Conscientiousness:
varied along two dimensions.
self-discipline, careful
 Current cross-cultural research and
pursuit of delayed
theory supports the expansion
goals
from two dimensions to five
 Agreeableness:
factors:
helpful, trusting,
friendliness
To help us
 Neuroticism: anxiety,
remember
insecurity, emotional
the five
instability
factors,
 Openness: flexibility,
remember
nonconformity,
that the first
variety
letters spell
 Extraversion:
“CANOE”…
Drawing energy from
others, sociability
The “Big Five”/ C.A.N.O.E.
Personality Dimensions
Impulsive
Trusting
Anxious
Conforming
Fun-Loving
Questions about Traits
These topics are the subject of ongoing research:
Stability: One’s
distinctive mix of traits
doesn’t change much
over the lifespan.
However, everyone in
adulthood becomes:
 More conscientious
and agreeable, and
 Less extraverted,
neurotic/unstable, and
less open (imaginative,
flexible).
Predictive value: Levels
of success in work and
relationships relates to
traits such as openness
and conscientiousness.
Heritability: For most
traits, genes account for
50% of the variation
among individuals
Change vs. Consistency: Shifts with Age
Over years of development, we change interests, attitudes,
roles, jobs, relationships; we develop skills, maturity. Do traits
stay stable through all this change?
The evidence shows
that it takes time for
personality to
stabilize. Traits do
change, but less and
less so over time. We
change less, become
more consistent.
Person-Situation Controversy
 Trait theory
assumes that we
have traits that
are a function of
personality, not
situation.
 There is evidence
that some traits
are linked to roles
and to personas
we use in different
cultures,
environments.
Personality Affecting the Situation,
Not Just a Function of the Situation
 Your Facebook posts, your website, music lists, choice
of ringtone--these all reflect your personality.
 These choices also may shape how others treat you,
which may affect your personality.
This room may
reflect the
personality of the
guy who lives
there.
The setup and
contents of the
room may also
shape his
personality.
Social-Cognitive Perspective
Albert Bandura believes that Personality is:
The result of an interaction that takes place between a person
and their social context, involving how we think about
ourselves and our situations.
Questions raised in this perspective:
How do we
interpret and
respond to
external
events? How
do those
responses
shape us?
How do our
memories,
expectations,
schemas,
influence our
behavior
patterns?
How do the
personality
and social
environment
mutually
influence
each other?
Reciprocal Influences in Becoming
“The Kind of Person Who Does Rock Climbing”
Reciprocal: a back and forth
influence, with no primary cause
Example: a tendency
to enjoy risky behavior
affects choice of
friends, who in turn
may encourage rock
climbing, which may
lead to identifying with
the activity.
Avoiding the highway today
without identifying or
explaining any fear: the
“low road” of emotion.
Reciprocal Determinism:
How personality, thoughts, social environment
all reinforce/cause each other
 Why is Jake a happy, smiley
person? He may have started
with an “easy” temperament;
 He may attract other happy
people, and people are more
likely to smile when around
him, which reinforces his
smiles;
 His mind fills in the reasons why
he’s smiling even if some of it
was a reflection of his happy
friends, and these happy
reasons give him more reason
to smile.
Evaluating Behavior in Situations:
Blindness to One’s Own Faults
 Donald Trump as the host of
“The Apprentice” prided
himself on assessing executive
skills in others.
 Assessments based on
performance in such
simulations predict future job
performance better than
interviews and questionnaires.
 Donald Trump as a politician
could not understand why
more people didn’t join his
candidacy, his debates, his
theories.
Evaluating the Social-Cognitive
Perspective
 The social-cognitive perspective
on personality helps us focus on
the interaction of behaviors,
thoughts, and social situations.
 This focus, though, may distract
us from noticing an individual’s
feelings, emotions, inner
qualities.
 Critics note that traits may be
more a function of genetics and
upbringing, not just situation.
 Example of two people with
different reactions in the same
situation: Two lottery winners
sharing a jackpot; one sobbed,
the other slept.
Biopsychosocial Approaches to
Personality
Exploring the Self, Viewing the Self
 Research in personality
includes the topic of a
person’s sense of self.
 Topics of research include
self-talk, self-esteem, selfawareness, selfmonitoring, self-control.
 The field has refined a
definition of “self” as the
core of personality, the
organizer and reservoir of
our thoughts, feelings,
actions, choices, attitudes.
Topics for our study of
people’s sense of self:
 The Spotlight Effect
(self-consciousness)
 Self-esteem, low and
high, benefits and risks
 Self-Serving Bias
 Narcissism
 Culture and the Self:
Individualism and
Collectivism
Self-Consciousness: The Spotlight Effect
Experiment: Students put on Barry Manilow
T-shirts before entering a room with other
students. (Manilow was not even cool “back
in the day.”)
Result: The students thought others would
notice the T-shirt, assumed people were
looking at them, when this was not the case;
they greatly overestimated the extent to
which the spotlight was on them.
The spotlight effect: assuming that
people are have attention focused on you
when they actually may not be noticing
you.
Lesson: People don’t notice our errors,
quirks, features, and shirts as much as we
think they do.
Self-Esteem:
High and Low, Good and Bad
 People who have normal or
high self-esteem, feeling
confident and valuable, get
some benefits:
 Increased resistance to
conformity pressure
 Decreased harm from
bullying
 Increased resilience and
efforts to improve their
own mood
 But maybe this “high” selfesteem is really realistic, and
is a result, not a cause, of
these successes.
 Low self-esteem, even
temporarily lowered by insults,
leads to problems: prejudice,
being critical of others
Self-Serving
Bias
We all generally
tend to think
we are above
average.
This bias can
help defend
our selfesteem, as it
does for the
people in this
wheel.
Self-Focus and Narcissism
 Since 1980, song lyrics have become more focused on the
self, both gratification and self-praise.
 Empathy scores and skills are decreasing, being lost;
people increasingly don’t bother trying to see things from
the perspective of others.
 There is a rise in narcissism (self-absorption, selfgratification, inflated but fragile self-worth).
 Narcissists see themselves as having a special place in the
world.
 Danger, especially in narcissism: When self-esteem is
threatened, it can trigger defensive aggression.
 Preventing this aggressive defense of self-esteem: not
raising self-esteem, but reinforcing it, having people state
their own values and qualities
Self-Disparagement, Self-Acceptance
Left behind in the supposed increase in egotism: those
who feel worthless, unlovable
Some people have a habit of self-disparaging self-talk:
“I’m no good. I’m going to fail.”
Sometimes such remarks are a sign of depression or at
least feeling inferior.
Sometimes such remarks may elicit pity, or prepare us
for possible bad events, or help us learn from mistakes
(people are more critical of their past selves).
Moving from defensive to secure self-esteem requires
realistic expectations and self-acceptance.
Culture and the Self:
Individualism and Collectivism
 Individualist cultures value independence. They promote personal
ideals, strengths, and goals, pursued in competition with others,
leading to individual achievement and finding a unique identity.
 Collectivist cultures value interdependence. They promote group
and societal goals and duties, and blending in with group identity,
with achievement attributed to mutual support.
Individualist and Collectivist Cultures Compared
Thinking about the self:
Cultural differences
People in collectivist cultures (those which
emphasize group unity, allegiance, and purpose
over the wishes of the individual) do not make
the same kinds of attributions:
1. The behavior of others is attributed more
to the situation; also,
2. Credit for successes is given more to
others,
3. Blame for failures is taken on oneself.