EXPLORING
PSYCHOLOGY
EIGHTH EDITION IN MODULES
David Myers
PowerPoint Slides
Aneeq Ahmad
Henderson State University
Worth Publishers, © 2011
Personality
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Contemporary Perspectives
on Personality
Module 31
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The Trait Perspective
 Exploring Traits
 THINKING CRITICALLY ABOUT:
How to Be a “Successful” Astrologer
or Palm Reader
 Assessing Traits
 The Big Five Factors
 Evaluating the Trait Perspective
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The Social-Cognitive Perspective
 Reciprocal Influences
 Personal Control
 CLOSE UP: Toward a More Positive
Psychology
 Assessing Behavior in Situations
 Evaluating the Social-Cognitive
Perspective
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Exploring the Self
 The Benefits of Self-Esteem
 Self-Serving Bias
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The Trait Perspective
Gordon Allport offered an alternative to Freud’s
view of personality.
He came to define personality based on traits,
people’s characteristic behavior patterns or
dispositions to feel or act a certain way.
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Exploring Traits
Each personality is uniquely made up of
multiple traits.
Allport & Odbert (1936), identified almost
18,000 words representing traits.
One way to condense the immense list of
personality traits is through factor analysis, a
statistical approach used to describe and relate
personality traits.
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Exploring Traits
Personality dimensions are influenced by genes.
1. Brain-imaging procedures show that extraverts
seek stimulation because their normal brain
arousal is relatively low.
2. Genes also influence our temperament and
behavioral style. Differences in children’s shyness
and inhibition may be attributed to autonomic
nervous system reactivity.
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Assessing Traits
Personality inventories are questionnaires
(often with true-false or agree-disagree items)
designed to gauge a wide range of feelings and
behaviors assessing several traits at once.
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MMPI
The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality
Inventory (MMPI) is the most widely
researched and clinically used of all personality
tests. It was originally developed to identify
emotional disorders.
The MMPI was empirically derived by testing a
large pool of items and then selecting those that
discriminated between diagnostic groups.
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The Big Five Factors
Today’s trait researchers believe that simple trait factors
are important, but fail to tell the whole story. So, an
expanded range, Big Five, traits does a better job of
assessment.
The recent wave of Big Five research asks various
questions including:
-How stable are these traits?
and
-How heritable are they?
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The “Big Five” Personality
Factors
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Evaluating the Train Perspective
The Person-Situation Controversy
Trait theorists argue that behaviors from a situation
may be different, but average behavior remains the
same. Therefore, traits matter.
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The Person-Situation Controversy
Walter Mischel (1968, 1984, 2004) points out that
people do not act with predictable consistency.
This inconsistency makes personality tests weak
predictors of behavior.
However, people’s average outgoingness,
happiness, or carelessness over many
situations is predictable.
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The Person-Situation Controversy
Samuel Gosling and his colleagues studied music
preferences, dorm room and offices, personal Web sites, and
email and found that our traits can be found consistently in
all of these.
John Langford Photography
Samuel Gosling
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The Social-Cognitive Perspective
Bandura (1986, 2001, 2005) believes that personality
is the result of an interaction between a person and
their social context.
He emphasized this interaction when he proposed
the social - cognitive perspective.
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Reciprocal Influences
Bandura views the person-environment interaction as
reciprocal determinism – behavior, internal cognition,
and environment all influence one another.
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Reciprocal Influences
Specific ways in which individuals and
environments interact
•Different people choose different environments.
•Our personalities shape how we react to events.
•Our personalities shape situations.
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The Biopsychosocial Approach to
the Study of Personality
Behavior emerges from an interplay of external
and internal influences.
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Personal Control
Social-cognitive psychologists emphasize our
sense of personal control, whether we control
the environment or the environment controls
us.
External locus of control refers to the perception
that chance or outside forces beyond our
personal control determine our fate.
Internal locus of control refers to the perception
that we can control our own fate.
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Learned Helplessness
When unable to avoid repeated adverse events
an animal or human develops a sense of passive
resignation called learned helplessness.
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Optimism vs. Pessimism
An optimistic or pessimistic attributional style is
your way of explaining positive or negative
events.
Positive psychology aims to discover and
promote conditions that enable individuals and
communities to thrive.
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Toward a More Positive Psychology
Positive psychology, the study of optimal
human functioning, attempts to foster human
fulfillment. The movements three pillars are
positive emotions, positive character, and
positive social groups.
Martin Seligman
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Assessing Behavior in Situations
Social-cognitive psychologists observe people in
realistic and simulated situations because they
find that it is the best way to predict the behavior
of others in similar situations.
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Evaluating the Social-Cognitive
Perspective
The social-cognitive perspective on personality
sensitizes researchers to the effects of situations on
and by individuals. It builds on learning and
cognition research.
Critics say that social-cognitive psychologists
pay a lot of attention to the situation and pay
less attention to the individual, his unconscious
mind, his emotions, and his genetics.
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Exploring the Self
Research on the self, the center of our
personality, has a long history because the self
organizes thinking, feelings, and actions.
1.
2.
Research focuses on the different selves we
possess. Some we dream and others we dread.
Research studies how we overestimate our
concern that others evaluate our appearance,
performance, and blunders (spotlight effect).
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Benefits of Self-Esteem
How we feel about ourselves is important.
High self-esteem – a feeling of self-worth –
has benefits like better sleep, more
persistence at difficult tasks, and being less
shy, anxious, and lonely.
But, low self-esteem also has effects, such as
becoming overly critical of others when your
own sense of self has been deflated.
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Self-Serving Bias
One of psychology’s most provocative and
recent conclusions is that of the self-serving
bias – our readiness to perceive ourselves
favorably.
We take responsibility for good deeds and
successes more than for bad deeds and
failures and most people see themselves as
better than average.
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