Psychology 105 - Chapter 14 PDF

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105 CHAPTER 14 Personality When we talk about personality, we talk about how someone deals with the world and how someone reacts to things. __________________________________________________________________________________ ______________ What Makes You Really You? Personality: We are describing the relatively consistent patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving that influence how that person lives. It’s important to note that these patterns or predispositions are relatively consistent. They’re not perfectly consistent, because the situation and social influences will have big effects on our behaviours, but we do use personality to predict how someone will react in a new situation. Relatively Distinct: We can categorize people into different groups or types based on our observations that their personalities provide useful information. Extraversion is one dimension or trait. We typically think of personality as reflecting a combination of various traits that will interact. We know that personality has a strong heritable component. Heritability: It is the estimate of how much of a trait can be explained by genes and how much can be explained by environment. Personality can be influenced by those effects of genes and other biological factors. The environment can also influence those biological factors. For example, when you win a competition of some sort you will have a boost in your testosterone levels, etc. Shared Environments: For example, if you have siblings then there will be some things that you all experienced (similar parenting styles, you may have gone to the same school and eaten most of the same foods) Non-Shared Environments: For example, parents were more lenient with one child than another, or things changed across time that affected one child more than others, like family income or parental attitudes. It seems that nonshared environments contribute more to personality than shared environments. What does that mean? It means that not all kids in the same family will end up

with the same personalities. And when it comes to explaining why you are the way that you are? We can’t estimate how much is because of your genes and how much is because of your experience. __________________________________________________________________________________ ______________ Early Psychological Views ***it is important to remember that none of them provide us with a complete explanation of how personality develops. Psychoanalytic Perspective: Psychoanalytic theory is associated with Sigmund Freud. In this theory your experiences interact with your very active unconscious mind to produce behaviours. Those behaviours are designed to protect you from scary thoughts about things like sex, or death, or things that make you feel guilty. Active Unconscious Mind: Freud argued, accurately, that people aren’t always consciously aware of why they do things. In some cases, we aren’t even aware that we are doing some things. The idea that some of our behaviours or responses are unconscious or affected by unconscious processes is not controversial. Freud argued that there are three components to our psyche or mind… 1. The id - is very selfish and focused on immediate gratification 2. the ego - is the rational part, that mediates between the other two and makes decisions about what to do. 3. the superego - overarching sense of morality, an impossible standard of right and wrong. Better than a real person could ever be. Freud felt that personality resulted from a lifetime of experience with these conflicts. ^ For example, someone with a very strong id would be selfish and impulsive, whereas someone with a very strong superego would feel a lot of guilt. Someone with a strong ego would be very practical and balanced. Defence Mechanisms: respond to anxiety or conflict in some very predictable ways. He felt that our use of defence mechanisms was to reduce anxiety and keep us mentally healthy. The biggest problem with all of these defence mechanism theories is that many of them are unfalsifiable, meaning that they can’t be adequately tested. Second is our modern knowledge that genetic predisposition predicts a lot of personality,

and shared environment does not. Psychoanalytic theories can’t account for the heritability of personality. __________________________________________________________________________________ ______________ Behaviourist Perspective Behaviourists focus on what can be measured, which is overt behavior. Neo-behaviourists also include cognition, as a way of understanding that behaviour, but the focus is still on what the person does. For this reason, behaviourists think of personality as a description of what a person does rather than who a person is or what causes those behaviours. When behaviourists talk about causes of behaviour, they focus on the environment. In particular, they focus on a person’s history of punishment and reinforcement for behaviours or a person’s history of learning particular associations -> The negative about behaviourist is that is fails to incorporate genetic predisposition, and it can’t account for that evidence that shared environment doesn’t have. __________________________________________________________________________________ ______________ Humanist Perspective Humanism, arose as a rejection of both psychoanalytic theory and behaviourist theory. The humanists felt that both of those approaches were too negative, and too deterministic (meaning that humans were controlled, rather than being the ones in control). Free will: That we are all striving to be better, but that sometimes the world gets in the way o that. Self-Actualization: This concept of striving for improvement. Working toward developing our full potential, of being the best version of ourselves that we can be. The humanists felt that there were some ideals of personality associated with self-actualized people. They were confident, creative, spontaneous, and not particularly concerned with how others view them. If you didn’t have those traits, then you must still be working towards that ideal. Differences in personality, to the humanists, were all about where you were stuck in your journey toward self-actualization. Seems very positive, but it is an unattainable and unrealistic goal for many people because they don’t have the underlying predispositions toward those traits. It also ignores the

evidence that there are plenty of very happy and well-adjusted people who don’t share the traits associated with self-actualization. Like the other two theories, humanism is unable to account for a number of pieces of evidence including genetic predisposition and the weak effects associated with shared environments. __________________________________________________________________________________ ______________ The Trait Approach The trait approach tends to ignore the causes of personality and focuses instead on measuring and describing how people differ, how some traits tend to interact, and on determining how many unique traits are needed to adequately describe human personality and predict human behaviour. dimensional approaches: where people are seen as varying along some dimension. For example, some people have a lot of extraversion and others have very little extraversion, and some will be somewhere in between. categorical: meaning that they identify people as belonging to particular clusters that are associated with different combinations of traits. The trait approaches range from description of two traits that interact, up to 16 different factors. The most commonly used model includes five. It has the very creative name of The Big Five model. The Big Five Model: (OCEAN) O - Openess Openness to experiences refers to curiosity and willingness to try new things. People who are high in openness are somewhat more adventurous in terms of their behaviours and also their thoughts. They are more likely to consider new ideas, or pick up on new trends. People who are low in openness are more rigid and less willing to consider change. C - Conscientiousness Conscientiousness refers to your tendency to be responsible and careful. People with high conscientiousness get things done, and get them done accurately. People with low conscientiousness tend to miss deadlines, or do things sloppily. E - Extraversion Extraversion refers to sociability and liveliness. People who are extraverts are more outgoing, and tend to gravitate toward social situations. People who are low in extraversion (who are sometimes called introverts) tend to prefer smaller or briefer social events and are less comfortable with being the center of attention.

A - Agreeableness Agreeableness is your ability and eagerness to get along with others. People with very high agreeableness don’t like conflict, and tend to go along with what others want. They are easy to please, and eager to make sure that others are happy. People with low agreeableness are more argumentative, are less easily satisfied, and may be more assertive or aggressive. N - Neuroticism Neuroticism refers to the tendency toward anxiety and other negative emotions. People who are high in neuroticism tend to have more irritable and worried and have larger negative reactions to events, whereas people who are lower in neuroticism tend to be calmer and experience less negative affect in response to events. __________________________________________________________________________________ ______________ How do we measure personality? Structured Personality Tests: Which ask people to indicate their preferences and indicate the extent to which particular words or concepts describe them. You create a test that represents different traits, and have a lot of people who are known to have those traits answer the questions. Criterion Validity: Meaning that a test is able to distinguish between people in different categories. We also expect a personality test to be somewhat reliable, with regard to both test-retest reliability and interrater reliability. The structured personality tests tend to have really good interrater reliability because it is based on concrete numerical scores. Some structured personality measures are very valid and reliable. For example, the most up to date versions of the MMPI and NEO-PI have been well-tested and are very useful for distinguishing between different personality types. Other not so great, one of the most popular personality tests in the world is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. This test has very low validity, meaning that it doesn’t seem to predict anything particularly useful about behaviours, and it has low reliability, because people can get very different results each time they take it. __________________________________________________________________________________ ______________ Projective: Where ambiguous stimuli are shown and then the person is asked to tell a story or provide other feedback about the item in order to reveal aspects about their personalities.

The idea here is not to systematically ask questions of the person, but rather to let them reveal things about themselves that can then be interpreted. Rorschach Test: Presents you with inkblots and asks you what you see in them. They are very subjective in their interpretation, and are very vulnerable to cultural and experiential influences. TAT or Thematic Apperception Test: With this one, you would look at a picture of a scene and be asked to tell as story about that scene. The idea is that how you interpret the scene will reveal things about your own worries and conflicts, and that will reveal aspects of your own personality. Projective tests tend to have very poor validity and reliability. Where they can have value is in a therapeutic context where they are used to start conversations....