Chapter 12 Personality Theory Research and Assessment Defining

Chapter 12: Personality: Theory, Research, and Assessment

Defining Personality: Consistency and Distinctiveness • Personality Traits – used to explain the stability in a person’s behavior over time and across situations (consistency) and the behavioral differences among people reacting to the same situation (distinctiveness). – Personality refers to an individual’s unique constellation of consistent behavioral traits

Defining Personality: Consistency and Distinctiveness • Dispositions and dimensions – adjectives like honest, moody, impulsive, and excitable describe dispositions that represent personality traits • Raymond Cattell used the procedure of factor analysis correlating many variables to identify closely related clusters of variables – to reduce Gordon Allport’s (1937) list of 171 personality traits to just 16 basic dimensions

Defining Personality: Consistency and Distinctiveness • The Five-Factor Model (Mc. Crae and Costa ) – Openness to experience: curiosity, flexibility, vivid fantasy, imaginativeness, artistic sensitivity, and unconventional attitudes – Conscientiousness: diligent, disciplined, well organized, punctual, and dependable (related to high productivity in a variety of occupational areas) – Extraversion: outgoing, sociable, upbeat, friendly, assertive, and gregarious (positive emotionality)

Defining Personality: Consistency and Distinctiveness • The Five-Factor Model (Mc. Crae and Costa) cont. – Agreeableness: sympathetic, trusting, cooperative, modest, and straightforward – Neuroticism: anxious, hostile, selfconscious, insecure, and vulnerable (negative emotionality)

Table 12. 1 Defense Mechanisms, with Examples

Psychodynamic Perspectives • Freud’s psychoanalytic theory (unconscious motives and conflicts, and the methods people use to cope with sexual and aggressive urges) – Structure of personality • Id - Pleasure principle, demands immediate gratification and engages in primary-process thinking • Ego - Reality principle, seeking to delay gratification of the id’s urges until appropriate outlets can be found, thus mediating between the id and the external world • Superego – Morality, incorporates social standards about what represents right and

Psychodynamic Perspectives – Levels of awareness (the Iceberg) • Conscious: what you are aware of right now • Unconscious: things well below the surface that exert influence on your daily life • Preconscious: those things barely beneath consciousness that can be easily recalled

Table 12. 2 Freud’s Stages of Psychosexual Development

Psychodynamic Perspectives • Freud’s psychoanalytic theory – Freud saw behavior as the outcome of an ongoing series of internal conflicts between the id, ego, and superego – conflicts centering on sex and aggressive impulses having far reaching consequences – conflicts lead to anxiety – causes the ego to construct defense mechanisms, exercises in self-deception, as protection

Figure 12. 3 Freud’s model of personality dynamics

Freud on Development: Psychosexual Stages • Freud believed that the foundation of personality is laid by the age of 5 • Sexual = physical pleasure • Psychosexual stages (each with a characteristic erotic focus and developmental challenge) • He proposed 5 psychosexual stages

Freud on Development: Psychosexual Stages • Fixation is a failure to move forward from one stage to another as expected. • Fixation can occur due to excessive gratification or frustration during a particular stage – leads to an overemphasis on the psychosexual needs prominent during the fixated stage in adulthood.

Freud on Development: Psychosexual Stages – Oral: Mouth, Weaning – Anal: anus, toilet training (hostility toward trainer) – Phallic: genitals, identify with adult role models • Oedipal; penis envy – Latency: none, social contracts – Genital: sexual intimacy, intimate relationships

Other Psychodynamic Theorists • Freud had many followers in the early 1900 s. Many of these followers had theories of their own, but Freud was not willing to accept radical departures from psychoanalytic theory. • Carl Jung and Alfred Adler, founded their own brands of psychodynamic psychology

Other Psychodynamic Theorists • Carl Jung: Analytical Psychology – proposing that the unconscious mind is composed of two layers • Personal unconscious: houses material that is not within one’s conscious awareness because it has been repressed or forgotten • Collective unconscious: houses latent memory traces inherited from people’s ancestral past – Archetypes: ancestral memories– emotionally charged images and thought forms that have universal meaning…the mandala. – Introversion/Extroversion: first to describe

Figure 12. 4 Jung’s vision of the collective unconscious

Other Psychodynamic Theorists • Alfred Adler: Individual Psychology (argued that Freud had gone overboard with his focus on sexual conflict) – Striving for superiority: foremost source of human motivation – Compensation: everyone feels some inferiority and works to overcome it – Inferiority complex/overcompensation: People can also conceal, even from themselves, their feelings of inferiority, resulting in overcompensation, seeking status and power, and flaunting their success to cover up underlying inferiority – Birth order: first to stress the possible importance

Evaluating Psychodynamic Perspectives • Pros – The unconscious – The role of internal conflict – The importance of early childhood experiences • Cons – Poor testability – Inadequate empirical base – Sexist views

Behavioral Perspectives • Skinner’s views – Skinner’s views on personality were similar to his views on all other human behavior; it is learned through conditioning. – He had little interest in unobservable cognitive processes and embraced a strong determinism – asserting that behavior is fully determined by environmental stimuli, and free will is but an illusion. – acquired through learning over the course of the lifespan

Figure 12. 5 A behavioral view of personality

Figure 12. 6 Personality development and operant conditioning

Bandura’s Social Cognitive Theory • Argue that pure behaviorism does not take into account cognitive processes – Behavior is largely shaped through learning, but humans are not passive (we make our own decisions) – Reciprocal Determinism: internal mental events, external environmental conditions, and overt behaviors all influence one another • We use observational learning to learn from “models” • Self-efficacy influences personality and how well you perform

Figure 12. 7 Bandura’s reciprocal conditioning

Mischel and the Person-Situation Controversy • Focuses on how the situational factors govern behavior – People look at the possible outcomes to choose a behavior – Does away with the personality consistency component – Found that, when looking at small chunks of behavior are examined, there is a variety, but when large chunks of life are examined there is consistency

Behavioral Perspectives • Mischel’s views – The person-situation controversy If you believe your job will pay off, you will be more industrious.

Evaluating Behavioral Perspectives • Pros – Based on rigorous research – Insights into effects of learning and environmental factors • Cons – Over-dependence on animal research – Fragmented view of personality (carving up personality into stimulus-response relations with no unifying structural concepts tying these pieces together) – Dehumanizing views (free will is an illusion)

Humanistic Perspectives • Humanistic Perspectives – Emphasize the unique qualities of humans (freedom, potential for growth, etc. ) – Very optimistic view – A person’s subjective view of the world is more important than objective reality • How you think you will behave will affect your behavior – Phenomenological Approach: you must look at personal subjective experiences to understand behavior • Quote on 487

Humanistic Perspectives • Carl Rogers: Person Centered Therapy – Viewed personality structure in terms of “self-concept” or the beliefs about ones own behavior, nature, and qualities – Individuals are aware, it is not unconscious – Most people distort reality to promote favorable self-concepts – Incongruence is the degree of difference b/w self-concept and actual experience (if it is accurate, it is congruent)

Figure 12. 2 Freud’s model of personality structure

Humanistic Perspectives • Carl Rogers: Person Centered (cont. ) – Concerned with how childhood experiences promote cong. or incong. – Conditional Parental Love (love based on good behavior or living up to expectations) • Children block out experiences that make them feel unworthy of love – Unconditional Love: • Less need to block out exp. B/c children are assured they are worthy of love

Humanistic Perspectives • Carl Rogers: Person Centered (cont. ) – Experiences that threaten personal views are principle cause of anxiety – To avoid anxiety, we behave defensively • Ignore, deny, twist reality • How would that work for someone who is told their outfit is ugly?

Figure 12. 9 Rogers’s view of personality structure

Figure 12. 10 Rogers’s view of personality development and dynamics

Humanistic Perspectives • Abraham Maslow: proposed that human motives are organized into a hierarchy of needs – a systematic arrangement of needs, according to priority, in which basic needs must be met before less basic needs are aroused • Like Rogers, Maslow argued that humans have an innate drive toward personal growth, culminating in the need for self-actualization, which is the need to fulfill one’s potential (the highest need in his hierarchy). “What a man can be, he must be. ”

Humanistic Perspectives • The healthy personality: – open and spontaneous and sensitive to others’ needs, – marked by continued personal growth, – not dependent on others for approval, – comfortable in solitude – thrive at work (good sense of humor) • Maslow found that these people are tuned in to reality and at peace with themselves, making for rewarding interpersonal relations.

Humanistic Perspectives – Self-actualization theory: the need to fulfill one’s potential

Figure 12. 11 Maslow’s hierarchy of needs

Figure 12. 12 Maslow’s view of the healthy personality

Evaluating Humanistic Perspectives • Humanistic theories are credited with highlighting the importance of a person’s subjective view of reality. They are also applauded for focusing attention on the issue of what constitutes a healthy personality. • They are criticized for lacking a strong research base, poor testability, and what may be an overly optimistic view of human nature (Maslow had a hard time finding live people who had self-actualized).

Biological Perspectives • Biological theories stress the genetic origins of personality • He believes that genes influence physiological functioning, thereby influencing ease of acquiring conditioned responses. • Eysenk’s theory – 3 higher order traits – Extraversion: sociable, outgoing people – Neuroticism: anxious, tense, moody, low self-esteem – Psychoticism: egocentric, cold, antisocial • Determined by genes

Biological Perspectives • Eysenk (cont. ) – The big three traits are a combination of a conglomeration of much smaller traits – Your maturation process makes it easier to be conditioned toward certain behaviors

Biological Perspectives • Based on twin studies, theorist say genetic factors exert considerable influence over personality – Is it nature or nurture? – Studies suggest it is more nature…

Biological Perspectives • Twin studies – Twin studies indicate that identical twins are more similar than fraternal twins in personality characteristics, with heritability estimates in the vicinity of 40%. – Interestingly, shared family environment does not lead to similar personality characteristics among siblings, leading some theorists to assert that parents matter very little in how their children develop.

Biological Perspectives • Some studies have suggested that there is a specific gene for novelty seeking, which involves being impulsive, exploratory, excitable, and extravagant. Evidence is, at this point, inconclusive. • Evolutionary analyses of personality suggest that certain traits and the ability to recognize them may contribute to reproductive fitness…a reproductive advantage

Figure 12. 14 Twin studies of personality

The evolutionary approach • Traits conducive to reproductive fitness – Natural selection has favored certain traits over human history and those traits become more apparent • Who will be a good member of my coalition, can I depend on, and share resources – Bond with others (extraversion – Cooperate (agreeableness) – Reliable (conscientious) – Innovative (open to experience) – Handle stress (low neuroticism)

Evaluating Biological Perspectives • Pros – Convincing evidence for genetic influence • Cons – Conceptual problems with heritability estimates – Artificial carving apart of nature and nurture – No comprehensive biological theory

Contemporary Empirical Approaches: Terror Management Theory • Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, and Tom Pyszczynski have proposed that one of the key functions of self-esteem is to protect us against terror. • We feel terror because we have a desire to preserve ourselves, but also have the cognitive ability to recognize that death is inevitable. • Cultures provide worldviews--traditions, stories, and institutions--that solve this existential anxiety, and provide us with a sense of order in our lives.

Contemporary Empirical Approaches: Terror Management Theory • Our self-esteem corresponds to our sense of self-worth engendered by our confidence in our culture’s solutions. • According to terror management theory, our self esteem provides us with an anxiety buffer. – Excessive materialism can be used to supplant self-esteem

Figure 12. 15 Overview of terror management theory

Contemporary Empirical Approaches: Terror Management Theory • Increasing subjects’ mortality salience causes them to: – Punish moral transgressions more harshly – Be less tolerant of criticism of their country – Give greater rewards to those who uphold cultural standards – Respect cultural icons more

Contemporary Empirical Approaches: Terror Management Theory • How does T. M. T. explain the 2008 election?

Contemporary Empirical Approaches: Terror Management Theory • When death anxiety is heightened, there is increased preferences for: – Charismatic people with grand visions – People who make others feel they are apart of an important movement

Cultural Differences • Does it affect personality? – Most agree the big 5 traits are found across cultures • Individualistic cultures promote independent views of the self (extraversion, assetiveness, competitiveness, and self-confidence) and lead to self-enhancement • Collectivist cultures promote cooperation, mutual interdependence, and consciousnesses (focus on neg. attributes and how to fix them)