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Chapter 14
Personality
Personality
• Each person’s unique and relatively
enduring stable behavior patterns
• Personality traits: stable qualities that a
person shows in most situations
– Leads to predictable behavior
– Inferred from behavior
– Stable at age 30
Theories
• Trait theories: what traits make up personality and how
they relate to behavior
• Psychodynamic theories: focus on inner working of
personality, especially internal conflicts and struggles
• Behavioristic theories: importance of external
environment and effect of conditioning and learning
• Social Learning: attribute differences to socialization,
expectation, and mental processes
• Humanistic: stress private, subjective experience and
personal growth
Traits Approach
• Analyze, classify, inter-relate traits
• Allport: individual traits (define unique
qualities)
• Cattell: trait profile (16 PF)
• Trait-situation interactions: when external
circumstances influence the expression of
personality traits
• Heredity accounts for 25 to 50% of
variability in many personality traits
Psychodynamic Theory
• Sigmund Freud
• 3 parts of personality:
– Id: innate, biological instincts; self-serving,
irrational, operates on pleasure principle,
unconscious
– Ego: conscious control of personality;
operates on reality principle
– Superego: internalized parent; conscience
Psychosexual Development
• Oral: feeding
• Anal: toilet training
• Phallic: attracted to opposite sex parent;
Oedipus conflict in males
• Latency: dormant period
• Genital: puberty
• First years of life shape personality
• Not verified scientifically
• Freud believed sexual abuse was a fantasy
Behavioral Theory of Personality
• Personality is a collection of learned
behavior patterns
• Acquired through classical and operant
conditioning, observational learning,
reinforcement, extinction, generalization,
and stimulus discrimination
• Reject notion of personality traits
• Situational determinants interact with prior
learning history
Social Learning Theory
• How person interprets a situation
• Expectancy: anticipation that responding
will lead to reinforcement
• Attach different values to different
reinforcers
Humanistic Theory
• Rogers, Maslow
• Focus on human experiences, problems,
potentials
• Human nature is inherently good
• Person you are is product of choices you
have made
• Stressed private perceptions rather than
prior learning
Maslow
• Self-actualization: process of fully
developing personal potential
– Judge situations correctly
– Comfortable acceptance of self, others
– Resourceful, independent
– Continued freshness for appreciation
Steps to self-actualization: be willing to change,
take responsibility, self-discovery, see yourself
as others do
Carl Rogers
• Self theory
• Fully functioning person lives in harmony with
deepest feelings and impulses
• Trust intuition
• Most likely to occur with love and acceptance
from others
• Behavior understood as attempt to maintain
consistency between self-image and action
• Unconditional positive regard: love and
approval without qualification
Personality Theories
• Trait theories: useful in describing and
comparing personalities
• Psychoanalytic: exaggerates sexuality and
biological instincts, doesn’t predict behavior
• Behavioristic and social learning: can study
scientifically, understate importance of
temperament, emotion
• Humanistic: positive dimensions of personality
Personality Assessment
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Interview
Direct observation
Rating scales
Behavioral assessment
Personality questionnaires (MMPI)
Projective Tests: Rorschach, TAT