Personality
Why you may or may not have one!
What determines your
personality?
• Prior Events
• Prior experiences AND prior biological
“events,” i.e., inheriting genes from parents
• Includes repressed, unconscious thoughts and
wishes
• Anticipated events
• Hopes, fears, goals
Wait…how do you
measure personality?
• Self-reports
• A series of answers to a questionnaire that asks
people to indicate the extent to which sets of
statements or adjectives accurately describe their
own behavior or mental state
• Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory
(MMPI): a well-researched, clinical questionnaire
used to assess personality and psychological
problems
• Validity scales: assess a person’s attitudes toward
test taking and any tendency to try to distort the
result by faking answers
Another Measuring
Method!
• Projective Techniques: a standard series of
ambiguous stimuli designed to elicit unique
responses that reveal inner aspects of an
individual’s personality
• People will “project” personality factors that
are out of awareness—wishes, concerns,
impulses
Projective Techniques
(Part 2)
• Rorschach Inkblot Test
• A projective personality test designed by
Hermann Rorschach in 1918—uses abstract
shapes
Projective Techniques
(Part 3)
• Thematic Apperception Test (TAT)
• Asks subjects to create stories based on
ambiguous pictures of people
Criticisms of Personality
Measures
• Criticisms of Projective Tests
• Too open to the subjective interpretation and
theoretic biases of testers (interpreters)
• Criticisms of Self-Reports
• Subjects can lie, try to deceive testers
• All the problems encountered in single-blind
tests
Ways of explaining
personality
• Trait
• A relatively stable disposition to behave in a
particular and consistent way
• The Trait Approach
• Uses trait terms to characterize differences
among individuals
• Attempts to create manageable and meaningful
sets of descriptors to cover all aspects of
personality
Allport vs. Murray
• Gordon Allport
• Argued that traits are preexisting dispositions that
cause behavior
Cleanliness  Cleaning the bathroom
• Henry Murray
• Argued that traits reflect needs or desires and
derive from consequent behavior
Desire for order  Cleaning the bathroom 
Cleanliness
Generalizing Traits
• Eysenck’s Personality Model
• First dimension: identifies people who are
sociable (extraverted) from those who are not
(introverted)
• Second dimension: identifies emotional stability
Generalizing Traits (Part
2)
• The Big Five (Traits)
• The traits of the five-factor model: (1)
conscientiousness; (2) agreeableness; (3)
neuroticism; (4) openness to experience; (5)
extraversion
• Why the Big Five?
• (1) Accounts for variability in traits without creating
overlap (factor analysis)
• (2) Big Five have emerged over the course of many
studies
• (3) Big Five shows up across a wide range of
participants—age groups, cultures, languages, etc.
The Big Five!
Are traits set in stone?
• Many trait theorists believe that traits are
decided by genetics and brain chemistry
• Studies of twin pairs reveal that roughly half of
the variability among individuals results from
genetic factors
• Adopted twins raised in different environments
tend to share political views
• Does this mean genes determine political
views?
More on biology…
• Different animals of the same species show
differences in personality
• Why?
• Evolutionary perspective…
• Different observers agree on where an animal
falls on a given dimension
• Does not simply reflect tendency to
“anthropomorphize” animals
Neurology of Personality
• “Extravert” vs. “Introvert” may really be “Hard to
Stimulate” vs. “Easy to Stimulate”
• Eysenck’s Theory
• Reticular formation, part of the brain that regulates
arousal (alertness) works differently in different people
• Jeffrey Gray’s Theory
• Two brain systems: the behavior activation system (BAS)
and the behavioral inhibition system (BIS)
• People with highly reactive BAS’s explore environment
• People with highly reactive BIS’s tend toward emotional
instability
Psychoanalysis
• “The Talking Cure”
• Personality is formed by needs, wishes largely
operating outside consciousness
• Unconscious is inferred from parapraxes,
dreams,
Economic, Topographic,
and Structural Models
• Economic
• Topographical
• Structural
Defense Mechanisms
• Defense Mechanisms
• Unconscious coping mechanisms that reduce
anxiety generated by threats from unacceptable
impulses
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Rationalization
Reaction Formation
Projection
Regression
Displacement
Identification
Sublimation
Psychosexual Stages and
Development
• Psychosexual stages
• Distinct early life stages through which personality is
formed as children experience sexual pleasure from
specific body areas and caregivers redirect or interfere
with those pleasures
• Erotogenic Zones
•
•
•
•
•
•
Oral Stage
Anal Stage
Phallic Stage
Oedipus Conflict
Latency period
Genital Stage
Humanistic Approach
• Self-Actualizing Tendency
• The human motive towards realizing inner potential
• Malsow Pyramid!
• Peak experiences
• Altered states of consciousness in which a person loses sense of time
and feels in touch with a higher aspect of human existence
• States of Flow
• Felt when completing tasks suited perfectly to our skill level; people
report increased happiness during these experiences
• Unconditional Positive Regard
• An attitude of nonjudgmental acceptance toward another person
Existential Approach
• Personality is governed by an individual’s ongoing
choices and decisions in the context of the realities
of life and death
• Dread
• The fear of death and the questions that one must
ask in the face of it
• Angst
• The anxiety caused by the realization that we are
responsible for our fates
• Mortality Salience
• The tendency to become overly protective of family,
culture, country, or religion in the face of death
Social Cognitive
Approach
•
Views personality in terms of how the person thinks about the situations encountered
in daily life and behaves in response to them
•
Locus of Control
•
•
•
Outcome Expectancies
•
•
Internal vs. External
Tendency to perceive control of rewards as internal to the self or external in the
environment
Person’s assumptions about the likely consequences of a future behavior
Personal Constructs
•
Dimensions people use in making sense of their experiences
•
•
Kind of like schemas in Piaget’s thinking
Person-Situation Controversy
•
The question of whether behavior is caused more by personality or by situational factors
•
Honest behavior in one situation does not correlate to honest behavior in another
Self-Concept vs. SelfEsteem
• Self-Concept
• A person’s explicit knowledge of his or her own behaviors,
traits, and other personal characteristics
• Self-Schemas
• The traits people use to define themselves
• Self-Narrative
• Story we tell ourselves about our lives, our actions
• Self-Esteem
• The extent to which an individual likes, values, and accepts the
self
• Formed via comparisons with others, unconscious
perspectives, and feedback from others
• Evolutionary explanation for why high self-esteem feels good?