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Personality
Precis of Funder
(2001)
Mission
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Empirical Goal
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How are persons situations and behaviors
related?
Institutional Goal
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Integrating developmental, social, cognitive
and biological psychology to allow
understanding of the whole person
Paradigms
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Psychoanalytic
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Freud’s personal life under criticism
• Crews (1998)
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Renewed interest in a scientific unconscious
Trait Psychology
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Person-Situation Debate resolved
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Mischel’s (1968) contention that behavior is so
unstable and narrow as to render the concept of
personality unimportant has been repudiated
Relative order of individuals preserved over
situational changes.
Deployed in Violence, personality disorder, drug
use, sex and mating, driving, employment, …
The big five and Five factor
models
Five factor model recognized as the
latitude and longitude of any exploration
of personality (Ozer and Reise, 1994)
 Claims the 5FM does not subsume all
other constructs, even if these can all be
mapped onto the 5FM (p200-201)
 What lies beyond?
 What lies within?
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Other
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Behaviorist
Watson (1925); Skinner (1938)
 Social learning (Rotter, 1954; Eysenck, 1968;
Bandura, 1977; 1999)
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Humanistic
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Rogers, Kelly, Maslow
New Paradigms
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Social-Cognitive
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Perception, memory, “schemas” as explanations of
behavior
Higgins (1999) Anxiety and Depression as the
result of comparisons of what we are compared
to what we should be and what we hope to be
(respectively)
Baldwin (1999) Schemas get activated for
situations and then control our response
Criticism by Bandura regarding fragmentation
Attempts to Integrate Social
Cognitive Models
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Bandura (2001) social cognitive theory of
personality
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Mischel (1999) CAPS
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Self-control via self reward and self punishment
Series of if … then rules for behaving in situations
Is this anything other than a redescription?
If it is, then is it anything other than traits?
Social Cognition & Traits
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Much social cognitive research defines its
“schema” types on the basis of 3-4 item
measures of dubious validity and/or reliability
and with unknown relationships to personality
traits
Social cognition workers seem ill disposed to
see the generalizability and stability of the traits
they study. If schemas are stable then they
become traits. If biological then soc-cog
becomes a working model of trait psychology
Someone should compare Bandura, Dweck,
Higgins etc to 5FM
Biological Models
Frontal lobes and personality (Damasio,
1994)
 Amygdala and emotion (Buck, 1999)
 Testosterone, Cortisol, 5HT, DA2
 How do we bridge the “explanatory gap”
between neurons and psyche?
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Behavior and Molecular
Genetics
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All of personality and related constructs are
around half due to differences in genes (Plomin
and others)
Shared environment typically unimportant
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(Rowe, 1997; Scarr, 2000)
Some hint that behaviors are more influences
by families than are self reports (really?)
What are the genes?
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Need very large studies for complex genetic traits (n
= 2000-5000)
Evolutionary
Darwin: Natural Selection & Sexual
Selection determine change
 Buss, Gangestad, Kenrick, Miller
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Sex differences, mating behaviors, selection
for detecting relevant traits, sexual selection
for desired traits of a partner (kindness
intelligence)
Summary
Traits
 Unconscious & conscious motives
 Social Cognition & Schemas
 motivations, attributions …
 If … then rules
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Basic Issues
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Out of Person, situation & Behavior
Need more measures of behavior
If personality correlates .4 with a behavior, the
assumptions is that 84% is situation
What about:
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Unmeasured traits (or schemas etc)
Unmeasured cognitive ability (or sensory
performance)
Error (of measurement of the behavior or the trait)
Noise (unrepeatable accidents)
What about behavior
How do we code it?
 What do we measure?
 How many behaviors did you do today?
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Descriptions
What do extraverts do? (Greenwald,
1999)
 Broader ranges
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Outcomes (job, life, health)
 Peer reports (reputation)
 Interviews (diaries)
 Research observation
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• Expensive
Institutions
Getting over Mischel’s wrecking ball
 Accepting biology, stability
 Transmitting our history
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Note Funder misses all of English difference
research and IQ
Integrating with clinical
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Continuity, causality
• Prozac in normals (great study
• Knutson (1998)
• How does treatment interact with (change?)
personality?
Developmental Integration
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We call the personality of preverbal children
“temperament”
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These are close to identical (Caspi & Siva, 1995)
How does personality develop and set?
Social psychology
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Close to two sides of the same coin
Some social psychologists have a mission to teach
that personality has no place in explaining behavior
(Conner, 2000)
But emotion, self-evaluation, goal orientation are
clear personality constructs