Week 10 Lecture 2 - Trait Personality

The “Big Five”

O - Openness to Experience - “I have an active imagination”

C - Conscientiousness - “I almost always complete projects on time”

E - Extraversion - “I laugh easily”

A - Agreeableness - “I am a considerate person”

N - Neuroticism - “I often feel inferior”

Neuroticism

How easily a person experiences negative emotions like anxiety or sadness

Anxiety, Depression, Hostility, Self-consciousness (embarrassment), Impulsiveness, Vulnerability

Conscientiousness

How organised, responsible, and hardworking a person is

Order, Dutifulness, Competence, Achievement striving, Self-discipline, Deliberation

Extraversion

How outgoing, talkative and energetic a person is

Eg. Piglet Extraversion = frequency of snout-touching

Agreeableness

How kind, cooperative, and caring a person is toward others

Openness to experience

How curious, imaginative and open to new ideas a person is

Value of the “Big Five”

Suggests that there are five fundamental ways in which people differ in personality

• Assessment of personality

• Investigation of personality correlates

• Explanation of the underpinnings of personality

Provides a framework of mapping specific personality traits

• Eg. Shyness is a combination of (low) Extraversion and (high) Neuroticism

Correlates of the “Big Five”

Extraversion - Preference for stimulant drugs, Quicker reaction time, Positive emotionality

Agreeableness - Trustingness, Cooperation in experimental games, Altruistic behaviour

Conscientiousness - Longevity, Work performance, Low rates of substance use

Neuroticism - Low self-esteem, Vulnerability to depression and anxiety, Negative emotionality

Openness to Experience - Artistic interests, Higher educational attainment, Less prejudice

Alternative to the “Big Five”

• The Big Five derives from the lexical approach

• But what if this approach is flawed?

• The “questionnaire approach” does not assume that all important personality variation is captured by single adjectives

• It uses personality test items to derive basic factors

For example…

1. Do you often long for excitement?

2. Do you often need understanding friends to cheer you up?

3. Are you usually carefree?

4. Do you find it very hard to take no for an answer?

5. Do you stop you think things over before doing anything?

6. Do your moods go up and down?

7. Do you generally do and say things quickly without stopping to think?

8. Do you ever feel ‘just miserable’ for no good reason?

Hans Eysenck

• Major proponent of this method

• Developed a two-factor model

  • Extraversion

  • Neuroticism

• Later proposed a third factor

  • Psychoticism

• Proposed biological foundations for these factors

Eysenck re-discovers Hippocrates

• Black bile

• Yellow bile

• Blood

• Phlegm

“The human body contains phlegm, yellow bile and black bile. These are the things that make up its constitution and causes pains and health. Health is primarily that state in which these constituent substances are in the correct proportion to each other, both in strength and quantity, and are well mixed.”

Summary so far

• Personality psychology describes individual differences in terms of traits

• Research has developed a scientific framework for describing the structure of traits

• 5- and 3- dimensional models have some support

• The broad dimensions represent primary dimensions of individual differences

• They have wide-ranging associations with human behaviour

Controversies in trait psychology

Despite its success, trait psychology has been challenged in several ways:

1. Are individual differences consistent?

2. Is the structure of traits universal?

3. Traits or types?

4. Are traits sufficient for describing personality?

1. Are individual differences consistent

• Traits are ways in which behaviour is consistent across situations

• But is behaviour consistent

• Mischel (1968) & ‘situationism’

  • Behaviour expressing a trait in different situations often correlates weakly (< .3)

  • The situation is the main determinant of behaviour (ie. social psychological factors)

  • Traits are weak predictors of behaviour

  • So personality tests must lack validity

Eg. Hartshorne & May (1928), Studies in deceit

• Gave thousands of 10- to 13- year children multiple behavioural tests of dishonesty

  • Lying

  • Cheating

  • Stealing

• Dishonesty was displayed inconsistently across the tests

• Average correlation among tests = 0.26

How to think about inconsistency

• We can consider a person as having a distribution of behaviours along a trait dimension, from low to high

• People high on a trait just engage in trait-related behaviour more than others

2. Is the structure of personality universal?

• Translate English language personality tests

• Multiple tests across many translations of the NEO-PI-R test of the 5 factors suggest strong consistency

• But some evidence of subtle differences: factors sometimes have minor differences of content

  • Extraversion & Agreeableness better described as Dominance & Love in Filipino, Korean & Japanese samples

Indigenous personality systems

• Another approach is to start from other cultures’ personality lexicon

• Among several European languages (ie. English, French, German, Polish, Hungarian, Dutch, Italian, Czech) strong congruence for most Big Five factors, except Openness

• Occasionally apparent culture specific factors emerge

  • ‘Chinese tradition’ factor (Harmony, REN Qing [relationship orientation], Thrift, Face, low Adventurousness

• 6900 person-descriptive terms extracted from a Filipino dictionary, reduced to 1297 by expert judges

• Factor analyses of ratings Yield 7 dimensions

1. Concern for others vs. egotism

2. Conscientious

3. Self-assured

4. Temperamental

5. Intellect

6. Gregarious

7. Negative valence

3. Is personality a matter of traits or types?

• Traits vary by degrees: they are dimensions

• Might some personality variation be best described by categories or types?

• ‘Type’ concept proposed by Carl Jung

Extraversion - Introversion

Sensation - Intuition

Perception - Judgement

Thinking - Feeling

4. Are traits enough?

• Traits are behavioural dispositions

• Other aspects of personality might not be reducible to such behavioural tendencies

  • Values - concepts or beliefs about desirable end states or behaviours

  • Interests

    • Realistic - hard-headed, practical, materialistic, conforming

    • Investigative - analytical, rational, curious, critical

    • Artistic - Intuitive, independent, open, idealistic

    • Social - Friendly, kind, empathic, responsible

    • Enterprising - Energetic, optimistic, ambitious, confident

    • Conventional - orderly, efficient, pragmatic, careful

  • Character strengths - ‘positive psychology’ aims to study and promote human character strengths - created in opposition to traditional focus on abnormality and conflict

VIA classification

Wisdom: strengths involving acquisition and use of knowledge

Courage: strengths involving use of will in the face of opposition

Humanity: strengths that are interpersonal in nature

Justice: strengths that are civic in nature

Temperance: strengths that protect from excesses

Transcendence: strengths that connect us to the larger universe

Personality description

• There are many alternative units for describing personality beyond traits

  • Motives, needs, goals

  • Schemas, personal constructs, interests

Levels of personality

1. Dispositional traits - traits - general nature - low depth - short time to perceive

2. Characteristic adaptations - goals, values, constricts - contextual nature - medium depth - medium time to perceive

3. Life stories - indie titles, self-narratives - temporal and unique nature - high depth - long time to perceive