Personality Theory
 Personality: a person’s characteristic pattern of thinking, feeling and
behaving.
 The questions are:
 Is it changeable?
 Are you born with it?
In the beginning, there was
 Sigmund Freud who followed on the heels of Darwin.
 Freud believed behavior was rooted in the desires for sex and need for
aggression. These desires are hidden in people’s unconsciousness.
Psychoanalysis
 Freud develop the system of talk therapy, or psychoanalysis, designed to
uncover what is hidden in the unconsciousness.
 Freud used hypnotism, dream interpretation and free association to plumb the
depths of unconsciousness.
The Freudian Mind
 The Id: the bubbling cauldron of sexual desires and aggressive impulses. The
id acts on the pleasure principle. Have fun, make babies, take the other guy’s
stuff.
 The Superego: this is the part of the mind which is socialized to be good. It is
the superego that makes us feel guilty and anxious when we act upon the Id’s
wishes.
The Freudian Mind
 The Ego: The executive of the mind. Its job is to mediate the id and superego.
Figures out how to do the id’s desires in socially acceptable, conscious ways.
 Anxiety is caused when this system is malfunctioning.
The Freudian Mind
 Personality is pretty much set in the first years of life according to Freud as we
resolve conflicts in certain psychosexual stages of development. If we do
not resolve the conflicts involved in any of the stages we are said to be
fixated, causing personality problems.
Psychosexual Stages
 The oral stage: 0-18 months. This has to do with breast feeding and
weaning. If we don’t resolve here, we may become too independent or too
dependent. We may become smokers or pencil chewers. We also may
disguise our need for dependence by acting super macho.
Psychosexual Stages
 The Anal stage: This stage has to do with “potty training.” Unresolved
conflicts may create anal expulsiveness or anal retention. The former
would be messy and disorganized and the latter obsessive neat and tidy.
Psychosexual Stages
 The Phallic stage, 3-6 years old: Here we become obsessed with penis and
genitalia. Girls may form penis envy. The Oedipus and Electra complex
also occurs, where the child falls in love with their opposite sex parent and
secretly resents the same sex one. When resolved the child learns it gender
type, in a process called identification, what it means to be a man or
woman, by imitating the competition.
Psychosexual Stages
 From 6 to puberty: Latency. Sexuality takes a break.
 Genital stage: from puberty on when mature sexual desires are at play.
Freudian Slips
 When we make mistakes of language or unconscious mistake are our real
thoughts. For instance, when I was typing a slide I meant to write: “you just
fell in love with a new “hottie, but what I did write was you just feel in love with
a new hottie, a Freudian slip perhaps?
Defense Mechanisms
 Freud believed that if the ego is threatened by the id and conflicts with the
superego, that sometimes it will use defense mechanisms to reduce anxiety.
Defense Mechanisms
 Repression: the mother of all defense mechanisms. Bury thoughts and
desires and forget the reasons for behavior.
 Regression: to act babyish, to regress to a younger level: like when you fight
with your parents.
 Reaction Formation: We we believe we feel the opposite of what we do. We
might get angry or hate people we unconsciously love.
 Projection: when you project your feeling about yourself onto others and then
react to them If you think you are selfish, then you see others as being selfish.
That teacher hates me. (really you hate him/her)
 Displacement: redirect feelings about one thing toward another.
 Sublimation: redirect our hostile/sexual feelings into more socially acceptable
activities.
Defense Mechanisms
 Rationalization: offers a slef-justifying explanation in place of the real,
more threatening, unconscious reasons for one’s actions.
 Denial:Completely rejecting thoughts and feelings from obvious
situations. Alcoholics often deny their problem drinking that is obvious
to everyone else.
Freud’s Descendants
 Karl Jung: a early follower who fell out with Freud. He believed in a
collective unconsciousness, a universal set of knowledge inherited from our
primal past, expressed in myths and by archetypes that are universally
understood: the wise old man, the earth mother, the young warrior, etc. We
try to emulate those archetypes and fall short creating anxiety.
Jung
 The Shadow: Jung believed we were 360 degree people, who bury socially
unacceptable impulses in our shadow. If we don’t recognize and gain energy
from our shadows, the shadow may emerge unconsciously and destroy us.
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Ask Bill Clinton. You know those thoughts you thought nobody knew you
thought, we all have them.
Jung
Persona: According to Jung, we all have masks we put on to show the world.
Those personas vary depending upon circumstances. Imagine that you just
fell in love with a new “hottie.” Now imagine how you would you tell your best
friend, ex-girl/boyfriend, parents, teacher and minister. Would you have on the
same mask.
Other Neo-Freudians
Alfred Adler: agreed with much of Freud’s philosophy, but thought the need
for esteem and competence was as important as sex and aggression. Coined
the idea of the inferiority complex.
Karen Horney: who thought it was love and belongingness we sought.
Thought penis envy was untrue.
Projective Tests
Design to search the unconscious mind.
TAT (Thematic apperception test): vague pictures are shown and the subject
creates stories.
Rorschach Test: Ink Blots are shown and the subjects tells what they say to
them. Can now be used as a diagnostic test and is scored by computer
programs.
Effectiveness of test has some debate.
Assessment of Freud
Most of Freud’s ideas are not testable or observable.
Repression is generally in doubt, people usually remember traumatic events.
There may be hippocampus damage for children with long-term abuse,
affecting memory.
We certainly do process information unconsciously. But is the hypothalamus
sending messages the same as Freud’s unconsciousness?
Trait’s Perspective
Describes personality in terms of fundamental traits: characteristic behaviors
and conscious motives for behaviors.
Looks for behaviors that are associated with basic traits, like
extroversion/introversion.
More concerned with describing personality that looking for a cause.
 Type A vs. Type B Personality: hard driving v. Easy going. Externally
motivated v. internally motivated.
 Myers-Briggs: Jungian Archetypes.
Sensing v. Intuition
Judging v. percieving
 thinking v. feeling
 Introvert/extrovert.
The Big Five: Personality traits
 See chart on page 432.
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 Traits are generally uncovered by using inventories that ask people to self-
report preferences. Factor analysis is then use to analyze clusters of
responses that are associated with the basic personality types.
Problems with Traits Theory
 Rely on self-reports and people will often guide their responses to the way
they’d like to be. Self-serving bias: people see themselves and remember
themselves as being better/different than they are/were.
 People aren’t consistent in behavior, in respect to traits, in different situation.
Think of yourself at dinner with your grandparents and with your friends.
Expressiveness as a consistent trait.
 Expressiveness is a trait that is consistent. In fact expressive people trying to
fake non-expressiveness are more demonstrative than non-expressive people
faking expressiveness.
MMPI
 Minnesota Multiphasic Inventory: one of the most researched traits inventories.
Designed to find clusters of traits associated with abnormal personalities.
Humanism
 Good self-esteem in nurtured through genuineness acceptance and
empathy: unconditional positive regard. With this people will gravitate to
self-actualization.
Humanism
 The major goal according to humanists was self-actualization which requires a
basis of self-esteem.
 The closer your ideal self is to your real self the higher your self esteem
will be.
 With humanists, individuality and free will determine your ideal self and
self-concept.
Traits of those with High Self esteem
 Fewer sleepless nights.
 Conform less
 Less likely to use drugs
 persistent at difficult tasks
 report being happier
Humanism
 Low self-esteem brings unhappiness and depression. So the further apart your
ideal self and real self, the unhappier you will be.
 In experiments where subjects are made to feel unhappy, they were more
likely to disparage other people and express higher degrees of racial prejudice
and stereotyping. Suffer more anxiety/depression.
Culture and Self-esteem
 Minorities have no greater incidences of low self-esteem, despite prejudice
and stereotyping from general culture.
 They value the things at which they excel.
 They attribute problems to prejudice.
 They compare themselves to others in their group-relative deprivation theory.
Evaluating Humanistic Perspective
 Self concept is key to happiness.
 People are innately good and capable of self-improvement.
 In 1930s only 9% agreed with those concepts, while in 1989 85% did,
indicating the strength of humanists effect on American culture.
 Emphasis meshes well with American cultural values of independence and
self-reliance.
Evaluating Humanistic Perspective
 However, Humanism is criticized from being vague and subjective.
 Ideals may promote selfishness, self-indulgence and lack of restraint.
 Fails to appreciate humans capacity for evil.
Self-Serving Bias
 One problem with traits inventories and self-reports of esteem is the
pervasiveness of self-serving bias: the tendency for people to belief good
things about themselves and to blame external events or others for bad thins.
Self-Serving Bias
 People accept more responsibility for good deeds than for bad. “The devil
made me do it.”
 Most people rate themselves as better than average.
 Our memories tend to build ourselves up. “The older I get, the better I was.”
 We overestimate our behaviors in hypothetical situations.
Self-Serving Bias
 We readily believe positive descriptions of ourselves: horoscopes, MeyersBriggs types.
 Underlies “other blaming” in marital discord and ethnic snobbery.
 However, self-affirming is generally adaptive keeping our self-esteem up,
optimism and happiness.
Social Cognitive Approach
 That personality is formed by a combination of learned experiences
(operantly,classically, socially), mixed with thought processes (cognition).
 Focuses on how we respond to different stimuli in our environment.
Reciprocal determinism
 “Behavior, internal personal factors and environmental influences all
operate as interlocking determents of each other”-Bandura
 Past learned behaviors, influence new choices of environment which
determines future behavior. Personality dispositions lead us to the choices of
environment.
Reciprocal determinism
 Different people choose different environments: what classes you take,
what outside of school activities you are attracted to, what social events you
attend are cognitive choices, influenced by personality characteristics. Your
success/failures in these determine future choices of environment, which in
turn interact and influence traits that you express.
Reciprocal determinism
 In addition your personality influences the environment. If you act
aggressive or passive, interested/disinterested, happy/moody all influence how
others respond to you. Final behavior emerges from the interplay of your
expressed personality traits, your choice of environment (cognition), and
learning (previous experiences, reinforced or not)
Personal Control
 Our sense of personal control is a great influence on our personality and
behavior.
 Internal locus of control: we feel we can determine/influence our
environment and mood.
 External locus of control: we are reactive and have little to say about
which way our lives go.
Personal Control
 Internals achieve more in school, feel less depressed, act more independently,
.
 Learned helplessness: extreme feel of external locus of control results in
giving up, allowing the world to beat us down, depression.
 People thrive when given control: people in democracy, even poor ones, are
happier than in totalitarian countries.
Optimism.
 The trait of optimism is associated with feelings of happiness and wellbeing.
 Pessimists are worse students than optimists.
 Optimists are healthier, not stressing their immune systems as much.
Optimism.
 However, overconfidence can blind us to real danger, and not give us enough
eustress (good stress), so that we become complacent.
 The moral: enough optimism to believe there is always hope, enough anxiety
to realize that if we don’t try, failure is possible.