PSYC 309: Exam #2

The Type Approach to Personality

• Categorical

• Different ‘Kinds” of people

• Not a matter of degree

  • No 1-5 scale

  • Its either-or, binary

Meyers-Briggs Types

• Based on Jung

• Created by two non-experts in the 40s

• Created by thinking about their friends and family

• Reliable but not valid

• Forced-choice dichotomous

The Trait Approach

• Adjectives that describe characteristic patterns of thoughts, feelings, and behavior

• Trait Theory

  • traits can be used to understand personality

  • Every trait is a spectrum

    • Not all-or-nothing categories

    • Its not, do you have this trait or not?

    • It is, how much of that trait you do have?

Why do we measure traits with numbers?

• We don’t use dichotomous items

• We use polytomous items

Traits > Types

• Are there really extraverts and introverts?

  • Or are people just some degree of extraversion

• What would a ‘pure’ extrovert look like?

• Are you ever kind of extraverted?

Value Judgments

• We don’t make these

• There are few ‘good’ or ‘bad’ traits

• there are no ‘good’ or ‘bad’ amounts of traits

Essential traits

• try to identify the most important traits

• Seek parsimony

  • Find the fewest traits that explain the most personality

The lexical approach to narrow down traits.

• meaningful traits → lots of words

• more words → more important trait

• Allport and Odbert

  • Extracted terms from english dictionary

    • Traits

    • States

    • Judgements

    • Physical characteristics

  • 4500

  • Researchers had people rate how much these traits applied to them.

Factor Analysis Sorted Traits

1. Conscientiousness

   1. hard working

   2. industrious

   3. meticulous

2. Compassionate

   1. tender-hearted

   2. loving

   3. mild

3. Brainy

   1. knowledgeable

   2. wise

   3. intelligent

The Big Five

• Consensus (broadly) reached in the five-factor model of personality (the big five)

  • The ‘Structure of Personality”

  • Replicated hundreds of times using different data sources

• OCEAN

Openness to Experience

• Creative, intellectual, curious

  • vs. narrowly interested, unintellectual

• Predicts artistic interests, political liberalism, drug use, and belief in UFOs

• Most debated factor

Conscientiousness

• highly organized, neat, reliable

  • vs. disorderly, careless

• Predicts academic/occupational success, good health habits, longevity, good relationships, religiosity, conservatism

Extraversion

• Outgoing, excited, joyful, adventurous

  • vs. introverted, shy, inhibited

• Predicts relationship satisfaction, high-status leadership positions, popularity.

Agreeableness

• kind, warm, friendly, helpful

  • vs. aggressive, mean, selfish

• Predicts forgiveness, humor, psychological health, no criminal record

Neuroticism

• Difficulty regulating emotions, mood swings, volatile & high negative emotions

• Difficulties in work and relationships, more likely to divorce

The Big Five in Animals

• O (Playfulness) in primates, dogs

• C primarily in humans and chimps

• E & N replicated across species

• A found often, except+ in guppies + octopus

Person-Situation Debate

• How do you predict human behavior?

  • Personality?

  • Situation?

• Personality Psych Almost Died

  • 40 years of “dormancy”

Historical Context: 1940s-50s

• Post-World War II

• Painful to accept that people can be dispositionally cruel

• Must’ve been the situation!

Rise of Situationism: 1960s

• Social Psychology

  • Milgram’s obedience study

  • Zimbardo’s prison study

  • Asch’s conformity study

Situationism

• Situations and environments determine behavior, not personality.

• Personality is an illusion.

  • Due to biases

• Water Mischel’s (1968) Critique

  • Personality doesn’t predict behavior wll

    • Upper r = 0.30

    • ~10% of the variance

  • Situation must be the real cause

Personality Psychology’s Rebuttal

• Reply #1: Too Much Focus on Lab Studies

  • Mischel’s estimates all came from lab studies

  • Trait Behavior correlations much stronger in real life.

• Reply #2: You Can’t Just Look At One Instance of Behavior

  • Aggregating Principle

    • Personality predicts behavior better the more you measure it.

• Reply #3: “Small” Correlations Aren’t Meaningless

  • How reliably would someone’s personality predict their behavior?

  • r = ).40

    • Accurately predict behavior 70% of the time.

• Reply #4: Situations Don’t Automatically Explain the Rest

  • Situationist assumption

  • If a traits predict 16% of the variance, the rest (84%) must be caused by the situation, right?

    • NO!!!!!

    • Social Psych Experiments

      • Forced Compliance

        • r = -0.36

      • Bystander Effect

        • r = -0.38

      • Milgram Obedience Study

        • r = 0.36/0.42

Interactionism: Personality x Situation

• Personality and situations constantly interact to determine behavior

• Behavior = Personality + Situation + (Personality x Situation)

How Personality Interacts w/ Situations

• Selection:

  • Different people choose different situations

• Evocation:

  • Different people create new situations

• Manipulation

  • Different people change existing situations.

Selection

• seek out and avoid different situations depending on personality

Evocation

• elicit different responses from others

Manipulation

• change others in different ways

Strong vs Weak Situations

• Some situations eliminate vs. Magnify personality effects

Personality Judgements

• Attempts to accurately perceive others’ traits

Assessment

• “Professional” personality research

  • What personality psychologists do

  • Using validated measurement systems

Judgement

• “Amateur” personality research

  • What we all do

  • Using your intuition, friends, family, etc.

Can we judge accurately?

• Correlations between self-judgements and other-judgements:

  • r = 0.20-0.40

• Close Others

  • r = 0.49

• Difficult

  • Self-presentation biases

  • Deception

  • Basing trait inference off of state observation

    • State → fluctuates

    • Trait → stable

How long does an accurate judgement take to make?

• as short as 2 seconds

• Very brief observations of faces/behavior

• Can be as accurate as ones made after months of interaction

How can we make accurate judgements?

• Fusiform Face Area

• Judgements are based on stereotypes

• Can create stereotypic faces of the big five

Do these judgements predict real-world outcomes?

• Yes

4 Determinants of Judgement Accuracy

• Judge

• Target

• Trait

• Information

Good Judges

• Assume positive traits

• Agreeable, consistent, and content

• Bad judges:

  • Anxious, power-oriented, or hostile

Good Targets

• Transparent in thoughts, feelings

• Low in self-monitoring

• Extraverted, agreeable, conscientious, emotionally stable

Good Traits

• More visible

• Self-other knowledge asymmetry:

  • Less visible = higher self-accuracy

  • More visible = higher other-accuracy

Good Information

• More is better

• Naturalistic settings

Be Careful About Expectancy Effects

• Self-fulfilling prophecies

• Bloomers Study

  • Teachers were warmer

  • Gave better feedback

  • Taught harder material

  • Gave more opportunities

Bainbridge et al (Evaluating the Big Five as an Organizing Framework for Commonly Used Psychological)

• RQ: Psychology faces significant “construct proliferation”- thousands of stand-alone trait scales exist in isolation, leading to research silos, redundant measures (Jangle Fallacy), and fragmented literature.

  • Can the Big Five framework serve as a comprehensive, overarching taxonomy for these standalone psychological trait scales?

• Method:

  • 83% of author-selcted standalone trait scales were as strongly related to the Big Five as at least 4 out of 30 standard Big Five facets

  • 71% of scales selected based on high citation counts passed the same critetion.

  • Several standalone scales showed extremely strong correlations with specific Big Five facets, some exceeding r = 0.90.

• Results:

  • The Big five can successfully serve as an organizing framework for a large majority of standalone trait scales, many of which can essentially be understood as facets of the Big Five.

  • Integrative pluralism approach: researchers should locate reliable, valid trait scales within the Big Five and account for relevant Big Five research to reduce construct proliferation and improve cross-field synthesis.

Jayawickreme et al. (Whole Trait Theory: An integrative approach to examining personality structure and process)

• RQ: What is WTT, how does it relate to other parts of psychology, and what are the possible applications of WTT to non-Big Five traits?

• Method:

• Results:

  • Whole Trait theory is an integrative model of traits that incorporates mechanisms of differential reaction to situations.

  • It unifies the descriptive aspect of traits and the explanatory aspect

    • Descriptive:

      • density distribution of personality states over time

      • Recognizes that an individual’s short-term beahvior (states) fluctuates significnalty across isutations, but their aggregate average behavior remains remarkably stable and predictable over longer periods.

      • Resolves the person-situation debate by showing that people possess broad, flexible behavioral ranges while mainitaining distinct, stable central tendencies

    • Explanatory

      • consists of the social-cognitive mechanisms that produce daily trait manifestations

      • Comprises five primary underlying processes

        • Interpretative Processes: how situations are encoded and cog processesed

        • Motivational processes:” desired or feared goals and end-states that direct behavior.

        • Stability-Inducing Processes: biological, genetic, habit, or homeostatic forces maintaining baseline tendencies.

        • Temporal Processes: historical influences, inertia, or behavioral cycles over time.

        • Random error processes: unpredictable or stochastic influences on behavior.

      • Structural and Dynamic Elements

        • Structural elements: include inputs (internal or external situational triggers), intermediates (cog/affect units), outputs (changes in 5 personality states), and links (connections binding inputs, intermediates, and outputs.

        • Dynamic Elements (Flows): The activation that spreads across structural elements via links, driving real-time state changes in specific contexts.

• Integration: traits are “wholes” where social-cognitive mechanisms directly cause the distribution of behaviors and emotions.

• Research Focus: investigating state variability allows researchers to uncover the specific production mechanisms that translate internal processing into observed personality traits.

• Broader Scope: The paper highlights WTTs' utility in understanding personality development across the lifespan, its potential application beyond the Big Five framework, and its implicaitons for targeted personality interventions.

Rogers and Biesanz (Reassessing the Good Judge of Personality)

• RQ: Is a good target needed for perceptual accuracy to emerge?

• Methods:

  • 4 large samples

  • Experiment

• Concl:

  • A good judge exists; some are better able to detect and utilize valid cues from targets.

  • A good judge is only strongly evident when perceiving a good target.

  • Judgement requires four steps: relevance, availability, detection, and utilization.

  • For a good judge to demonstrate their ability, the person being judged must first make relevant behavioral cues available.

  • If a target does not provide clear cues, even a highly skilled judge cannot form an accurate impression; therefore, individual differences in perceptual accuracy only strongly emerge when interacting with a good target. (multiplicative hypothesis).

  • Distinctive vs. Normative Accuracy:

    • Separates distinctive accuracy (perceiving someone’s unique individual traits) from normative accuracy (perceiving someone as similar to the average person, which tends to be generally positive).

    • The necessity of a good target applies specifically to distinctive accuracy. For normative accuracy, judgements do not depend on cue availability in the same way.