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Chapter 12
Personality: Theory, Research, and Assessment
Defining Personality: Consistency and Distinctiveness
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Personality Traits
 Dispositions and dimensions
The five-factor Model
 Extraversion
 Neuroticism
 Openness to experience
 Agreeableness
 Conscientiousness
Figure 12.1
The five-factor model of personality. Trait models attempt to analyze personality into its basic
dimensions. McCrae and Costa (1985, 1987) maintain that personality can be described
adequately with the five higher-order traits identified here.
Psychodynamic Perspectives
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Freud’s psychoanalytic theory
 Structure of personality
 Id - Pleasure principle
 Ego - Reality principle
 Superego - Morality
 Levels of awareness
 Conscious
 Unconscious
 Preconscious
 Conflict
 Sex and Aggression
 Anxiety
 Defense Mechanisms
Figure 12.2
Freud’s model of personality structure. Freud theorized that people have three levels of
awareness: the conscious, the preconscious, and the unconscious. The enormous size of the
unconscious is often dramatized by comparing it to the portion of an iceberg that lies beneath
the water’s surface. Freud also divided personality structure into three components—id, ego,
and superego—which operate according to different principles and exhibit different modes of
thinking. In Freud’s model, the id is entirely unconscious, but the ego and superego operate at
all three levels of awareness.
Figure 12.3
Freud’s model of personality dynamics. According to Freud, unconscious conflicts between the
id, ego, and superego sometimes lead to anxiety. This discomfort may lead to the use of
defense mechanisms, which may temporarily relieve anxiety.
Figure 12.4
Arousal in response to depiction of male homosexual activity. This graph shows the progression
of participants’ sexual arousal over time, as measured by a penile strain gauge, in response to
a video depicting male homosexual activity. The homophobic men in the Adams et al. (1996)
study did not rate the video as arousing, but the physiological measure showed that they
experienced substantial sexual arousal. (Adapted from Adams et al., 1996)
Freud on Development: Psychosexual Stages
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Sexual = physical pleasure
Psychosexual stages
 Oral, Anal, Phallic, Latency, Genital
 Fixation = Excessive gratification or frustration
 Overemphasis on psychosexual needs
during fixated stage
Other Psychodynamic Theorists
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Carl Jung
 Analytical Psychology
 Personal and collective unconscious
 Archetypes
 Introversion/Extroversion
Alfred Adler
 Individual Psychology
 Striving for superiority
 Compensation
 Inferiority complex/overcompensation
 Birth order
Figure 12.5
Jung’s vision of the collective unconscious. Much like Freud, Jung theorized that each person
has conscious and unconscious levels of awareness. However, he also proposed that the entire
human race shares a collective unconscious, which exists in the deepest reaches of everyone’s
awareness. He saw the collective unconscious as a storehouse of hidden ancestral memories,
called archetypes. Jung believed that important cultural symbols emerge from these universal
archetypes. Thus, he argued that remarkable resemblances among symbols from disparate
cultures such as the mandalas shown here are evidence of the existence of the collective
unconscious.
Evaluating Psychodynamic Perspectives
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Pros
Insights regarding
 The unconscious
 The role of internal conflict
 The importance of early childhood experiences
Cons
 Poor testability
 Inadequate empirical base
 Sexist views
Behavioral Perspectives
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Skinner’s views
 Conditioning
Bandura’s views
 Social leaning theory
Cognitive processes and reciprocal determinism
 Observational learning
 Models
 Self-efficacy
Mischel’s views
 The person-situation controversy
Figure 12.6
A behavioral view of personality. Staunch behaviorists devote little attention to the structure of
personality because it is unobservable, but they implicitly view personality as an individual’s
collection of response tendencies. A possible hierarchy of response tendencies for a specific
stimulus situation is shown here.
Figure 12.7
Personality development and operant conditioning. According to Skinner, people’s characteristic
response tendencies are shaped by reinforcers and other consequences that follow behavior.
Thus, if your joking at a party leads to attention and compliments, your tendency to be witty and
humorous will be strengthened.
Figure 12.8
Bandura’s reciprocal determinism. Bandura rejects Skinner’s highly deterministic view that
freedom is an illusion and argues that internal mental events, external environmental
contingencies, and overt behavior all influence one another.
Evaluating Behavioral Perspectives
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Pros
 Based on rigorous research
 Insights into effects of learning and environmental
factors
Cons
 Overdependence on animal research
 Fragmented view of personality
 Dehumanizing views
Humanistic Perspectives
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Carl Rogers
 Person Centered Theory
 Self-concept
 Conditional/unconditional positive regard
 Incongruence and anxiety
Abraham Maslow
 Self-actualization theory
 Hierarchy of needs
 The healthy personality
Figure 12.9
Rogers’s view of personality structure. In Rogers’s model, the self-concept is the only important
structural construct. However, Rogers acknowledged that one’s self-concept may not be
consistent with the realities of one’s actual experience—a condition called incongruence.
Figure 12.10
Rogers’s view of personality development and dynamics. Rogers’s theory of development
posits that conditional love leads to a need to distort experiences, which fosters an incongruent
self-concept. Incongruence makes one prone to recurrent anxiety, which triggers defensive
behavior, which fuels more incongruence.
Figure 12.11
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. According to Maslow, human needs are arranged in a hierarchy,
and people must satisfy their basic needs before they can satisfy higher needs. In the diagram,
higher levels in the pyramid represent progressively less basic needs. Individuals progress
upward in the hierarchy when lower needs are satisfied reasonably well, but they may regress
back to lower levels if basic needs are no longer satisfied.
Evaluating Humanistic Perspectives
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Pros
 Emphasizing subjective experience
 Study of the healthy personality
Cons
 Lack of research base
 Difficult to test empirically
 Possibly overly optimistic about human nature
Biological Perspectives
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Eysenk’s theory
 3 higher order traits
 Extraversion, neuroticism, and psychoticism
 Determined by genes
Twin studies
 Novelty seeking and genetics
The evolutionary approach
 Traits conducive to reproductive fitness
Figure 12.13
Eysenck’s model of personality structure. Eysenck described personality structure as a
hierarchy of traits. In this scheme, a few higher-order traits, such as extraversion, determine a
host of lower-order traits, which determine a person’s habitual responses.
Figure 12.14
Twin studies of personality. Loehlin (1992) has summarized the results of twin studies that have
examined the Big Five personality traits. The N under each trait indicates the number of twin
studies that have examined that trait. The chart plots the average correlations obtained for
identical and fraternal twins in these studies. As you can see, identical twins have shown greater
resemblance in personality than fraternal twins have, suggesting that personality is partly
inherited.
Figure 12.15
Heritability and environmental variance for the Big Five traits. Based on the twin study data of
Riemann et al. (1997), Plomin and Caspi (1999) estimated the heritability of each of the Big Five
traits. The data also allowed them to estimate the amount of variance on each trait attributable
to shared environment and nonshared environment. As you can see, the heritability estimates
hovered in the vicinity of 40%, with two exceeding 50%. As in other studies, the influence of
shared environment was very modest. (Based on Plomin and Caspi, 1999)
Figure 12.17
Self-monitoring and dating. Snyder and Simpson (1984) found that college students who were
high in self-monitoring had dated more people in the preceding 12 months than had students
low in self-monitoring. Apparently, high self-monitors commit themselves to romantic
relationships less readily than low self-monitors do.
Evaluating Biological Perspectives
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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 to Personality Traits
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Marvin Zuckerman
 Sensation Seeking
Mark Snyder
 Self-monitoring
Markus and Kitayama
 Independence vs. interdependence and culture
Figure 12.18
Culture and conceptions of self. According to Markus and Kitayama (1991), Western cultures
foster an independent view of the self as a unique individual who is separate from others, as
diagrammed on the left. In contrast, Asian cultures encourage an interdependent view of the self
as part of an interconnected social matrix, as diagrammed on the right. The interdependent view
leads people to define themselves in terms of their social relationships (for instance, as
someone’s daughter, employee, colleague, or neighbor).
Figure 12.20
MMPI profiles. Scores on the 10 clinical scales of the MMPI are often plotted as shown here to
create a profile for a client. The normal range for scores on each subscale is 50 to 65. People
with disorders frequently exhibit elevated scores on several clinical scales rather than just one.