Module 26 Trait and SocialCognitive Perspectives on Personality

Module 26 Trait and Social-Cognitive Perspectives on Personality

Personality • An individual’s characteristic pattern of thinking, feeling, and acting

Trait • A characteristic pattern of behavior or a disposition to feel and act, as assessed by self-report inventories and peer reports

Trait Perspective • To understand personality you must consider our enduring patterns of behavior, those that we’re born with and that stay fairly constant across situations.

Three important trait researchers: 1. Gordan Allport 2. Raymond Carttell 3. Hans Eysenck

Gordon Allport (1897 -1967) • American psychologist who disagreed with Freud in the following ways/areas: - played down the role of the unconscious in healthy people - current experiences more important than early childhood experiences - personality should only be studied in normal adults

• He believed that personalities are unique. • This caused a problem. It made it difficult to produce general ideas that could be tested by others. • He came up with over 18, 000 ways to describe people.

Raymond Cattell( 1905 -1998) Factor Analysis • English psychologist who reduced the traits down to 16 key personality dimensions or factors to describe personality • Each factor measured by using a questionnaire, and plotted on a continuum.

Hans Eysenck (1916 -1997) • German psychologist who reduced the traits down even further, down to 2 dimensions. • Two major dimensions: – Introversion/Extraversion – Emotionally Unstable/Stable

Dimensions in Detail • • Extraverts – outgoing and sociable Introverts – keep to themselves and quiet Emotionally stable – relaxed and calm Emotionally unstable – anxious and tend to worry

Eysencks’ Personality Factors

The “Big Five” Traits (Mc. Crae & Costa) • • • Openness Extraversion Agreeableness Emotional Stability Conscientiousness

The “Big Five” Traits

Personality Inventories • Questionnaires on which people respond to items designed to gauge a wide range of feelings and behaviors • Used to assess selected personality traits • Often true-false, agree-disagree, etc. types of questions

Personality Inventories(objective test) vs. Projective Test (subjective test) • Show greater validity (measures what it is suppose to) • Offer greater reliability (yields consistent results) • Scoring or interpreting: – Projective tests, months or years of training – Personality Inventories, very simple and uncomplicated

Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) • Most widely used of all personality tests. • Originally developed to identify abnormal behavior. • 500 questions. • MMPI-2, 2 nd version – assesses people on 10 clinical scales used to diagnose psychological disorders and 15 additional content scales used to measure the persons attributes such as anger, anxiety, etc.

Evaluating the Trait Perspective Criticisms: 1. does not consider the situation 2. does not explain why 3. does not consider the effects of our thoughts on our behavior

Social-Cognitive Perspective • Perspective stating that understanding personality involves considering the situation and thoughts before, during, and after an event

Albert Bandura • People learn by observing and modeling others or through reinforced or rewarded.

Reciprocal Determinism: Three Factors Shape Personality • Bandura believed our personality is shaped by the interaction between three factors, this model is called reciprocal determinism. • The three factors are: – Thoughts or cognitions – The environment – A person’s behaviors

Reciprocal Determinism

How do our feelings of personal control affect our behavior? Locus of Control – Two Types: 1. External locus of control 2. Internal locus of control

External Locus of Control • The perception that chance, or forces beyond a person’s control, control one’s fate • Example – When you try to get a job, it’s not what you know that matters, but who you know.

Internal Locus of Control • The perception that we control our own fate • Example – If you want to be a success, depend on hard work, not luck.

Internal vs. External Control People with an internal locus of control are: - healthier - cope better with stress - are less likely to be depressed

Learned Helplessness • The hopelessness and passive resignation an animal or human learns when unable to avoid repeated bad events • Martin Seligman studied dogs that were unable to escape a painful stimulus and eventually stopped trying to escape.

Learned Helplessness

Positive Psychology • Seligman leads the positive psychology movement, which focuses on how we can function at optimal levels and on the factors that help us to reach those levels.

Optimistic Explanatory Style • When something goes wrong the person explains the problem as: – Temporary – Not their fault – Something limited to this situation

Pessimistic Explanatory Style • When something goes wrong the person tends to: – Blame themselves – Catastrophize the event – See the problem as beyond their control

Assessing Personality • Social-cognitive perspective would stress putting people into simulated actual conditions to determine how they would behave • They use experiments • They look at the person’s past behaviors to predict the person’s future behaviors.

Evaluating Social-Cognitive Perspective • Positive –Objective and easily tested • Negative - Fails to consider the influence of emotions and motivation on behavior

The End