Download Chapter 11: Personality

Chapter 11: Personality:
Theory, Research, and
Assessment
Defining Personality:
Consistency and Distinctiveness
• Personality- explains 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 Traits- durable disposition to behave in a
particular way in a variety of situations
– Adjectives like honest, moody, impulsive, and excitable
describe dispositions that represent personality traits
• The Five-Factor Model
– Factor analysis- correlations among many variables
are analyzed to identify closely related clusters of
variables
– McCrae and Costa have used factor analysis to create
the five-factor model of personality
5 Factor Model
– Extraversion-High Extraversion scores signify
that a person is outgoing, sociable, upbeat,
friendly, assertive, and gregarious. Some trait
models refer to this as positive emotionality
– Neuroticism-High Neuroticism scores signify
that a person is anxious, hostile, selfconscious, insecure, and vulnerable. Some
models call this negative emotionality
– Openness to experience- Openness to
experience is associated with curiosity,
flexibility, vivid fantasy, imaginativeness,
artistic sensitivity, and unconventional
attitudes
5 Factor Model
– Agreeableness- Agreeableness is associated
with people who are sympathetic, trusting,
cooperative, modest, and straightforward. It
may have its roots in temperament
– Conscientiousness-are diligent, disciplined,
well organized, punctual, and dependable.
Some models refer to this trait as constraint. It
is related to high productivity in a variety of
occupational areas
Psychodynamic Perspectives
• Freud’s Structure of personality
• Id - the primitive, instinctive component of personality that
operates according to the pleasure principle, which
demands immediate gratification and engages in primaryprocess thinking (primitive, illogical, irrational, and fantasy
oriented).
• Ego - the decision-making component of personality that
operates according to the 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 - he moral component of personality that
incorporates social standards about what represents right
and wrong. The superego emerges out of the ego at
around 3-5 years of age.
Freud’s Psychoanalytic Theory
Unconscious forces can influence behavior.
– Levels of awareness
• Conscious-consists of whatever one is aware of
at a particular point in time.
• Unconscious-contains thoughts, memories, and
desires that are well below the surface of
conscious awareness but that nonetheless exert
great influence on behavior.
• Preconscious- contains material just beneath the
surface of awareness that can easily be
retrieved.
• conflicts center on sex and aggressive impulses having far
reaching consequences. These conflicts lead to anxiety,
which causes the ego to construct defense mechanisms,
exercises in self-deception, as protection.
Figure 11.2 Freud’s model of personality structure
Figure 11.3 Freud’s model of personality dynamics
Table 11.1 Defense Mechanisms, with Examples
Freud on Development:
Psychosexual Stages
• Freud believed that the foundation of personality is laid by
the age of five. He theorized that the ways in which
children deal with immature sexual urges (sexual used as
a general term meaning physical pleasure) during different
stages of development shape personality.
• Psychosexual stages
– Oral, Anal, Phallic, Latency, Genital
• Fixation = Excessive gratification or frustration
• Overemphasis on psychosexual needs during
fixated stage
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUB85lSj4pM
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&NR=1&v=
gFNU-RHTMO0
Table 11.2 Freud’s Stages of Psychosexual Development
Other Psychodynamic Theorists
• Carl Jung: Analytical Psychology
– Personal (houses material that is not within
one’s conscious awareness because it has
been repressed or forgotten) and collective
unconscious (houses latent memory traces
inherited from people’s ancestral past)
– Archetypes- emotionally charged images and
thought forms that have universal meaning,
such as the mandala
• Alfred Adler: Individual Psychology
– Striving for superiority
– Compensation
Other Psychodynamic Theorists
• Alfred Adler: Individual Psychology
– The foremost source of human motivation
is striving for superiority – a universal
drive to adapt, improve oneself, and
master life’s challenges.
– Compensation- involves efforts to
overcome imagined or real inferiorities by
developing one’s abilities
• everyone feels some inferiority and works
to overcome it
Figure 11.4 Jung’s vision of the collective unconscious
Evaluating Psychodynamic Perspectives
• Pros
– The unconscious
– The role of internal conflict
– The importance of early childhood
experiences
– The use of defense mechanisms
• Cons
– Poor testability
– Inadequate empirical base
– Sexist views
Behavioral Perspectives
• Skinner’s views- personality is learned through
conditioning
– Conditioning and response tendencies
• response tendencies are constantly be strengthened
and weakened by new experiences; acquired
through learning over the course of the lifespan.
• Bandura’s social cognitive theory- focusing on how
cognitive factors such as expectancies regulate
learning
– Observational learning-behavior is shaped by
exposure to models, or a person whose behavior
they observe.
Behavioral Perspectives
• Self-efficacy-one’s belief about one’s ability
to perform behaviors that should lead to
expected outcomes
• Mischel’s views
– People make responses that they think will
lead to reinforcement in the situation at
hand
– The person-situation controversy- both
the person and the situation are important
determinants of behavior
Figure 11.5 A behavioral view of personality
Figure 11.6 Personality development and operant conditioning
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 (no free will)
Humanistic Perspectives
• Carl Rogers’s person-centered theory
– Self-concept- a collection of beliefs about
one’s own nature, unique qualities, and typical
behavior, a person’s mental picture of himself
or herself.
• Conditional/unconditional positive regard
• Incongruence (When self-concepts don’t
match reality) creates anxiety
Figure 11.7 Rogers’s view of personality structure
Figure 11.8 Rogers’s view of personality development and dynamics
Humanistic Perspectives
• Abraham Maslow’s theory of self-actualization- a
persons need to fulfill one’s potential
– Hierarchy of needs-a systematic arrangement of
needs, according to priority, in which basic needs
must be met before less basic needs are aroused
– The healthy personality- are tuned in to reality and
at peace with themselves. They are open and
spontaneous and sensitive to others’ needs, making
for rewarding interpersonal relations. They are selfactualizing persons
Figure 11.9 Maslow’s hierarchy of needs
Figure 11.10 Maslow’s view of the healthy personality
Evaluating Humanistic Perspectives
• Pros
– Recognized importance of subjective views
– Recognized importance of self-concept
– Laid foundation for positive psychology
• Cons
– Many aspects of theory are difficult to test
– Unrealistic optimism
– More empirical research needed
Biological Perspectives
• Eysenk’s theory- views personality as a hierarchy of
traits
– Determined by genes- genes influence physiological
functioning, thereby influencing ease of acquiring
conditioned responses
– Extraversion-introversion
• Behavioral genetics
– Twin studies-identical twins are more similar than
fraternal twins in personality characteristics, with
heritability estimates in the vicinity of 40%.
• The evolutionary approach- certain traits and the ability
to recognize them may contribute to reproductive fitness—
a reproductive advantage.
Figure 11.11 Eysenck’s model of personality structure
Evaluating Biological Perspectives
• Pros
– Convincing evidence for genetic influence
• Cons
– Too much reliance on heritability estimates
(vary depending on sampling procedures and
other considerations, and should only be used
as ballpark figures)
– No comprehensive biological theory
A Contemporary Empirical Approach:
Terror Management Theory
• Conflict between self-preservation and ability to foresee
death
– We feel terror because we have a desire to preserve
ourselves, but also have the cognitive ability to recognize
that death is inevitable
• Culture and self-esteem
– Cultures provide worldviews—traditions, stories, and
institutions—that salve this existential anxiety, and
provide us with a sense of order in our lives. Our selfesteem corresponds to our sense of self-worth
engendered by our confidence in our culture’s solutions.
Figure 11.13 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
• Other research indicates that people are also willing
to discriminate against others to preserve their self
esteem.
Culture and Personality
• Independent self
– American culture seems to foster an
independent view of self, in which children
are encouraged to see themselves as
autonomous and self-reliant
• Interdependent self
– Some East Asian cultures seem to foster a
view of self in which children are
encouraged to see themselves in relation
to others, as part of a social unit
Figure 11.14 Culture and conceptions of self