Personality
Defining Some Terms
• Personality = Psychologists define personality as
the reasonably stable patterns of emotions,
thoughts, and behavior that distinguish one person
from another.
• Temperament = Hereditary aspects of personality,
including sensitivity, moods, irritability, and
adaptability
• Personality Trait = Stable qualities that a person
shows in most situations
• Personality Type = People who have several traits
in common
Are we good or bad?
Some more theories…
• Freud = Psychodynamic theory relates personality to the
interplay of conflicting forces within the individual (id, ego,
superego).
• Neo-Freudians = Were psychologists who adopted some
parts of Freud’s theory and modified other parts, such as
Carl Jung (collective unconscious) and Alfred Adler
(inferiority complex).
• Learning approach = Often the experiences from which
we learn are those of other people in our environment.
• Humanistic Psychology = Personality depends on what
people believe and how they perceive and understand the
world, such as Maslow (self-actualization).
Is your personality stable?
• Stable across time?
Look at your own personality. Are you a
different person today than 5 years ago? If so,
how? Do you think you will be a different
person 5 year from now? If so, how?
Is your personality stable?
• Stable across time?
The origins of personality
– Age – in general, the older a person is, the more
consistent his or her personality is over time.
– Age – the increased consistency as people age
can be observed cross-culturally.
– Historical era – researchers have found that
anxiety levels appear to be increasing over the
past few generations.
Is your personality stable?
• Stable across different situations?
Person Variables and
Situational Variables in
Social–Cognitive Theory
According to social–cognitive
theory, person variables and
situational variables interact
to influence behavior.
Is your personality stable?
• Stable because of heredity?
How do we measure
Personality?
• How do we measure if different across
time?
• How do we measure if different across
situations?
http://www.wadsworthmedia.com/psychology/now/videos/PersonalityTraits.ram
How do we measure
Personality?
• Self-report?
– Do people know their own personality?
• Other-report?
– Correlate with how others see you?
• Do we ever know people?
– How are you at reading people?
http://www.youjustgetme.com/
Personality Assessment
• Standardized personality tests
– “Standardized” means created by having very
large representative sample of people take the test
and find average answer.
– Types:
• Objective
• Projective
• Implicit
Personality Assessment
• Standardized personality tests
– Objective personality tests:
• The most widely used of these tests is the
Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory
(MMPI) (a series of 567 true-false questions)
• Measures personality & clinical conditions
Personality Assessment
• Standardized personality tests
– Projective techniques
• Rorschach Technique: Developed by Swiss
psychologist Hermann Rorschach; contains 10
standardized inkblots (the “inkblot” test)
• Thematic Apperception
Test (TAT): consisting of
20 drawings of various
situations; people must
make up stories about
the people in it
Personality Assessment
• Standardized personality tests
– Implicit personality tests:
• Try to measure aspects of personality that may be
beyond a person’s awareness.
• Emotional Troop Test
• Implicit Association Test
– This test measures whether the subject responds faster to
the categories that combine a particular topic with pleasant
or unpleasant words.
– One advantage of this technique is that it is hard for people
to “fake good” or malinger while doing this procedure.
https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/demo/selectatest.html
Personality Traits
• Personality traits and states
– A trait is a consistent, long-lasting tendency in behavior,
such as sociability, shyness or assertiveness.
– A state is a temporary activation of particular behavior.
• The search for broad personality traits
– The idea that people have consistent personality
characteristics that can be measured and studies is called
the trait approach to personality.
– Psychologists have studied many familiar personality
traits.
Personality Traits
•
The Big Five personality traits
– Neuroticism
• the tendency to experience unpleasant emotions
very easily.
– Extraversion
• the tendency to seek stimulation and enjoy the
company of other people.
– Agreeableness
• the tendency to be compassionate rather than
antagonistic towards others.
– Conscientiousness
• the tendency to show self-discipline, to be reliable,
and to strive for competence and achievement.
– Openness to new experience
• the tendency to enjoy new experiences and new
ideas.
According to the five-factor model, basic differences in personality can be “boiled down” to the
dimensions shown here. The five-factor model answers these essential questions about a person:
Is she or he extroverted or introverted? Agreeable or difficult? Conscientious or irresponsible?
Emotionally stable or unstable? Smart or unintelligent? These questions cover a large measure of
what we might want to know about someone’s personality.
Twin studies of personality
Personality Traits
• The search for broad personality traits
– Criticisms of the Big Five description:
• It was based on a study of the English
language, not on observations of human
behavior.
• There are too few traits included.
• There are too many traits included.
• It has limited applicability cross-culturally.
• Do you agree with the “Big Five”?
• Does it describe you?
Personality Traits
• There are more than 5:
– The 16 source traits
The profiles shown here
are group averages for
airline pilots, creative
artists, and writers.
Notice the similarity
between artists and
writers and the
difference between
these two groups and
pilots.
• There are less than 5:
– Neuroticism, Extraversion, Agreeableness