Chapter 12- Personality PDF

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PERSONALITY What is personality? -A characteristic pattern of thinking, interaction, and reacting that is unique to each individual, and remains relatively consistent over time and situations -Predictable traits in people that don’t fluctuate moment-to-moment.! -People often go and search out personality tests in popular magazines and on the internet! -A lot of fluff out there about personality tests that aren’t very reliable and are pseudo-scientific! -The Myers Briggs test is not very reliable and not used by any reputable personality researchers!

The Barnum Effect -Tendency to believe that vague descriptions of personality are tailored specifically for us! -We manufacture examples from our life to make the descriptions fit! -Ex: fortune cookies, tarot cards, astrological signs, etc.! -These things play a trick on our psychology and our tendency for confirmation bias! -Make very big generalizations they generalizations; at first it seems like they apply to us when in reality they can apply to everyone !

Approaches to Studying Personality Idiographic approach: Focus on detailed description of individuals and their unique personality characteristics! -When you do a case study on an individual and build a rich profile of a single person as you can -Ex: What makes them THEM, what makes them unique, what are their sets of interests and specific traits and ways of being, etc.! -Ex. Largely what criminal profilers are doing and how they predict about them( things about this person does not apply to the population at large! -Nomothetic approach: Examines personality in large groups, with the aim of making generalizations about personality structure! -What are the universal aspects of personality, traits that apply to all people, that can be

measured in all people and show variation along those specific traits!

Other -Studying personality is the mixture of the two! -Most likely are universal fundamental rules to personality; might leave out but those details of individuals needed for better understanding! PSYCHODYNAMIC APPROACH The Psychodynamic Perspective: Focus on how personality arises through complex interaction involving conscious and unconscious processes that occur from early development through adulthood! -One of the earliest approaches to studying personality! -Included Freud and his followers! -One of the central tenants of the psychodynamic perspective is putting a lot of emphasis on the role of the unconscious mind! -Much of our behaviour and personality were due to things that were outside of our conscious awareness that we didn't have direct conscious access to! -This approach also put a lot of emphasis on early childhood development! -Ex: If we didn’t develop properly or normally, it could have long lasting effects on our adult behaviours and adult personalities !

Freud's Structure of Personality Id: collection of basic biological drives (impulsive moments, act out) DEVIL ON SHOULDER! Superego: responsible for moral judgements (urge to act righteously, do good, act according to norms of society) ANGEL ON SHOULDER Ego: mediates between desires of id and superego (make decisions on present moment) YOURSELF! -More along the lines of idiographic approach where you would bring clients in and study them on an individual basis! -Techniques used were hypnosis, dream analysis in attempt to assess components of id and ego and superego! -Believed a lot of peoples problematic aspects to their personality could be traced to imbalances in these unconscious components

-Pessimistic view of human nature! -Believed we were born with a fully developed id (born to be bad or evil)! -Not until through our development that we learn and develop our superego and ego! -Thought this development occured through various psychosexual stages!

Freud's Psychosexual Stages Believed our personalities were influenced by our progression, or lack thereof through psychosexual stages! Fixation: when an individual becomes preoccupied with obtaining the pleasure associated with a specific stage and does not develop normally causing problems in your adult personality! -Proposed some odd psychological tendencies, not supported by any empirical evidence! -Believed in these stages, the id was trying to manifest itself in different ways! Sexist theory that came from a male perspective!

Stage 1: ORAL STAGE (0-2 years)! -Infant achieves gratification through oral activities such as feeding, thumb sucking, and babbling! -Id would gratify itself by making us put things in our mouth -If we couldn’t restrain this impulse, would manifest to addictive personalities (excessive drinking or smoking)

Stage 2: ANAL STAGE (2-3 years)! -The child learns to respond to some of the demands of society (such as bowel and bladder control) -Id would drive pleasure to itself through pooping! -Potty training was crucial! -Fixation of this stage largely contributed to parents help! -Ex: strict parents would cause fixation at anal stage (later known as anal retentive) and cause children to become overly organized, neat, tidy! -Ex: Too hands off parents would cause fixation at anal stage (called anal explosive) and cause children to become messy, sloppy. disorganized

Stage 3: PHALLIC STAGE (3-7 years)! -The child learns to realize the difference between male and females and becomes aware of sexuality! -Young boys became sexually attracted to their mothers and fearful of their fathers! -Young girls sexually desired mothers then shift sexual attraction to the father ! -Believed women never came out this stage because they were jealous of not having penises thus why they desired male children

! Stage 4: LATENCY (7-11 years)! -The child continues his or her development but sexual urges are relatively quiet! Stage 5: GENITAL (11-adult)! -The growing adolescent shakes off old dependencies and learns to maturely deal with the opposite sex! -Last two stages is where children learn to balance their basic urges with the need to conform to social norms! -Learn to restrain sexual impulses and how to have healthy relationships with opposite sex individuals/ romantically linked individuals

The Oedipal Complex Children became aware of their genitals and become sexually attracted to the parent of the opposite sex! -Occurred in the phallic stage in Freud's Psychosexual Stages theory! -During the final two stages, children learn to balance their basic urges with the need to conform to social norms -Sexist drivel or profound symbols for power and masculinity? ! -Believed young boys went through this!

DEFENSE MECHANISMS Defense Mechanisms: unconscious strategies to reduce or avoid anxiety, guilt, and other unpleasant feelings -Anna Freud focused on how defense mechanisms influenced child psychology !

-Believed ego was engaging in anxiety defense and egos jobs was to resolve these anxieties! -When this would not work, brain would go into self-protection mode and would use unconscious strategies to reduce or avoid anxiety, guilt, and other unpleasant feelings -Freud’s daughter (Anna Freud) was important on elaborating on defense mechanisms and how defense mechanisms influenced child psychology! Repression: Keeping distressing information out of consciousness -Believed to be the foundational defense mechanism (other defense mechanisms were based off of it) Regression: Falling back into a previous stage of development -Ex: person resorts to sulking and crying and acting in an immature way as a way to regain sense of comfort from earlier stages of development! Projection: Remaining ignorant of one’s undesirable qualities by attributing them to others! -Have anxieties of ourselves but instead of realizing having these self damaging thoughts, you see it on others (mainly insecurities) -Ex: Eating too much and not feeling great about your body, but when you see others who look fatter, you don't feel bad cuz you're not the worst. Reaction Formation: Altering an impulse into its opposite -One thought or belief that's not appropriate -Instead of acting in a way that is consistent with thought, you act the opposite of how you feel -Ex: A person in a committed relationship finds themselves attracted to a person outside the relationship. In reality they have a positive opinion of the person they are attracted to and would normally result in treating the attractive person nicely. But because of reaction formation, they would treat the person they find attractive in the opposite manner by making fun of them or criticize them. -Sublimation: Transforming unacceptable impulses into acceptable ones! -Believed to be a healthy form of a defense mechanism -Taking an inappropriate impulse and transforming it into an appropriate one

-Ex: Mean Girls; Regina was able to reform herself and channel the undesirable tendencies to be mean and criticize and bully others into a physical domain (sports)! BEYOND FREUD Analytical Psychology -Started by people like Carl Jung (1875-1961) -Collaborated with Freud a lot but fell out -Views personality as the result of unconscious archetypes derived from a “collective unconscious” -Agreed there is an unconscious aspect to our minds but also believed we had a collective unconscious -Shared repository of thoughts and feelings and memories from our collective ancestors -Contained universally understood archaic symbols and images; things that we regularly and easily understand or learn about ( psychic instincts) -Believed archetypes from collective unconscious was the basis to many behaviours and guided behaviours as well as our personality ! Alternative Psychodynamic Approaches Inferiority Complex: An abnormal personality that results from struggling with feelings of inferiority in one's social environment! -Alfred Adler (1870-1937)! -Disagreed with Freud’s emphasis on role of sexual and aggressive urges on our behaviour and put more emphasis on role of social environment! -Believed we often compared ourselves to others and found inadequacies that we sometimes resolved by overcompensating in other aspects of our life! -Ex: A person feels they are not attractive and respond by buying fancy clothes and a sports car as a way to compensate their shortcomings and insecurities!

Feminist Psychology Karen Horney (1885-1952)! -Started a feminist psychology movement in which the male-centric view of psychology questioned -Womb envy! -Differences between men and women were not inherent but rather due to societal and cultural influences -A lot of research was done on men, but she believed that data collected from this research was not accurate for men and women -Pushed back on Freud’s idea of penis envy with womb envy -Insecurity to feel miracle of childbirth and compensate by denigrating women and devaluing and subjugating them ! -Pointed out all of Freud’s ideas were’t all that scientific and testable! -Differences between men and women were not inherent of nature but driven by societal and cultural influences -Very modern perspective!

Projective Tests -Personality tests in which ambiguous images are presented to elicit responses that reflect unconscious desires or conflicts -Rorschach inkblot test and thematic apperception test

-Methods lack validity and reliability ! -Rorschach inkblot test ! -Blotches of ink somehow determines your personality and your psychological conflicts that are deeply buried in your mind Thematic apperception test -Person is shown a neutral picture and participant is asked to provide narrative around it! -Even though they were thought to be more scientific methods, they lack validity and reliability -Validity: Not measuring what they’re supposed to be measuring -Reliability: Not getting the same measurement time after time! -Believed Freud's approaches of dream analysis and hypnosis therapy were unscientific! -Projecting what's in the unconscious mind to ambiguous stimulus!

HUMANISM Humanistic Perspectives -Emphasized the unique and positive qualities of human experience and potential! -Abraham Maslow and self- actualization: reaching our fullest potential -Carl Rogers’ Person- Centered perspective: people are basically good, and given the right environment their personality will develop fully and normally -Humanism largely emerged as a push back of the psychodynamic perspective of the time! -People like Freud tried to take people from the disordered end of the spectrum (malordered personalities) and bring them back to the neutral point in order to give them minimalistic functioning -Humanists took regular people from neutral part of spectrum and attempted to bring them to the positive ends -Humanists were using idiographic methods by building rich profile of each individual and come up with strategies to get them to self actualize -People were inherently good and as long as they were in a healthy environment their goodness would be fully emerged -Opposite of Freud’s theory -The more self-actualized a person became, the more of their good nature would be expressed and would dominate their personality! -Humanist movement started to fade with the cognitive revolution!

Positive Psychology -More modern approach to promoting well being and happiness in people -Uses scientific methods to study human potential and how to promote well-being! -Money and happiness -As long as basic needs are being met, excess money of materials do not promote happiness -Social environment and activities makes us happier people ! -Flow:feeling of full immersion in an activity -Being in the zone -Doing something that is really challenging -Lose track of everything else going on in the environment!

Graph: In order to achieve state of flow, you need to be in upper right quadrant of graph! -Want to do things that require us to learn/develop a new skill and use that skill at a high level to enjoy the task -Want to avoid feeling of apathy (lower left quadrant) which doesn’t require learning new skills or developing them -Apathy is also doing things that aren't challenging to us -Causes feeling of not progressing and waste of time ! -Not doing anything of particular value or changing their lives

TRAITS AND FACTORS Traits and Factors -Personality traits: labels applied to specific attributes of personality ! -Any way to describe a person's personality/character -18,000 descriptors tallied by early studies! Factor analysis: reveals statistical similarities among a wide variety of items! -Finds the patterns of correlation amongst various items or variables -Find ones related to one another and come up with the core concepts of personality! -Finding the redundancies

-Ex: If you ask a person how eccentric are you?, how closed minded are you?, or how inflexible are you? -they are asking about the same underlying factor (openness).!

The Five Factor Model -Also called the big five -A trait-based approach to personality measurement that includes: -Openness -Conscientiousness Extraversion -Agreeableness -Neuroticism ! -Openness -High in openness means people who are open to experience and like to try new things to view the world from different perspectives! -Often non-conformists! -Low in openness means they are less willing to consider other perspectives or try new things -Like to maintain status quo and are traditionalists! Conscientiousness! -High in conscientiousness are often very organized, disciplined, detail-oriented and good at meeting deadlines -Often good students

-Low in conscientiousness are disorganized and messy people who are not able to meet deadlines as effectively and not as successful as a student but are very spontaneous!

Extraversion -High in extraversion are to be extroverts; very social and are the life of the party! -Have more friends and are risk-seeking (sky-diving,roller coasters,etc.)! -Low in extraversion are introverts; people who are more shy, reserved, and often feel overwhelmed by larger groups of people! -Feel like they got to go home after large social gathering and rest -Agreeableness! -High in agreeableness tend to avoid conflicts and make great efforts to get along with other people, cooperative with other people and also functionally in team settings! -Low in agreeableness are people who are stubborn and often a bit more assertive (have a backbone)! Neuroticism -High in neuroticism people are a little bit more emotionally volatile, anxious, tendency to catastrophize conflicts and blow situations out of proportion! -Low in neuroticism people are more emotionally stable and keep emotional balance

-Each traits are not binary distinctions (Sliding scaling ranging from high to low) -Healthiest to have a mix of these traits to be a well rounded healthy person! -People will not always act in accordance to this classification!

Traits vs. State -State: a temporary physical or psychological engagement that influences behaviour! -Traits: Temporary breaks from our normal personality/ normal way of being! -Four general aspects of situations! -Locations -Associations -Activities! -Subjective states!

PREDICTING PERSONALITY Sex Differences -Commonly question whether there are significant differences between personalities of men and women -Differences overwhelmed by variability within each sex, rendering discussion moot! -Statistically vs practical significance! -Small effect size (shouldn’t read too much into them)! -Women tend to score higher in scales of neuroticism, agreeableness, extraversion, and openness, men score slightly lower -Conscientiousness cannot be accurately measured for any! -Studies found people who are more liberal in their political views tend to be a little bit higher in their openness to experience! -Conservative people tend to be a little bit more conscientious! -Same argument there's so much variability within these groups, meaning they aren’t meaningful differences! Predicting Personalities -Home and office spaces predict personality -Online profiles: idealized self or reflection of actual personality?! -Some research says by looking at how people keep their spaces (conscientiousness) plays a role in finding out how their personality is! -Types of material in the room of a person could be linked their openness -How many types of books are displayed, etc

-Other traits (agreeableness, extraversion, neuroticism) are harder to pull out from people’s work and home environments! -Need the in-person interactment in order to better found out about these traits of the specific person and guess their personality along those factors -Some researchers found we are putting select things on our profile but people can still see through that to get a general sense of our personality ! THE DARKER SIDE OF PERSONALITY The Personality of Evil? -Big Five Factor did not capture all of human nature and did not fully explain the darker aspects of our personality (people acting in evil ways)! -Big question coming off of world war II (why people went along the nazi regime and propaganda) -Authoritarian Personality -Tendency to separate social world into us and them! -People you relate to and feel like you belong with and everyone else! -Easier to justify discrimination and racism and acts of violence against them groups because they’re fundamentally different (don’t matter as much)! HEXACO! -Added Honesty-Humility dimension to Big Five to capture dark side of human nature! -Honesty-humility! -People high in honesty-humility are more honest, humble, and more willing to act for the welfare and sake of other people! -Scoring low means that person is more deceitful, greedy, and isn’t regarding other people to the same extent! Emotionality (neuroticism)! eXtroversion! Agreeableness! Conscientiousness! Openness!

The Dark Triad -Predicts when people are generally bad people ! -Combination of three traits that comprise a socially destructive person likely to commit harm! 1. Machiavellianism! -A. Referring to people who are scheming and conniving ! -B. Name comes from 16th century man named Niccolo Machiavelli who had political and philosophical teaching that to climb the power hierarchy you should pretend to be people's friends and rub shoulders with people ! C....