Theories of personality 1

Honest--Humility (H)

sincere, honest, faithful, loyal, modest/unassuming versus sly, deceitful, greedy, pretentious, hypocritical, boastful, pompous

Internal causal properties

• Internal: individuals carry their desires, needs, and wants from one situation to the next

• Causal: desires and needs explain the behavior of the individuals who possess them
  EX:Cheryl goes to parties because she is extraverted and likes the stimulation of being around people

Purely Descriptive Summaries

• Make no assumptions about internality, nor is causality assumed

• Trait describes expressed behavior

• The basis for interpersonal perception and personality development
  Ex:Cheryl goes to a lot of parties, strikes up conversations with strangers, and frequently initiates party games. She is exhibiting extraverted behavior.

Act Frequency Research (Descriptive)

• Act Nomination ( Vote traits common for extroverted)

• Prototypicality Judgment (does this actively represent someone is extroverted)

• Recording Act Performance

• The more observable the acts, the higher the agreement between observers (extraversion, conscientiousness)

Learn the characteristics of the three major approaches to defining traits

• Lexical Approach

• Statistical Approach

• Theoretical Approach

Lexical Approach

• All important individual differences have become encoded within the natural language

• Synonym Frequency

• Cross-Cultural Universality

• The lexical approach in psychology, or the sedimentation hypothesis, assumes that the most significant personality traits are encoded into natural language as single words.

• Ex: Resilient, hard-working, courageous

Statistical Approach

• Pools of personality items are assembled and a large sample rates themselves on the items

• Statistical procedures, such as factor analysis, identify groups/clusters that covary

Theoretical Approach

1. Starts with a theory, which then determines which variables are important.

2. "Dust-Bowl" Empiricism: Separate people into groups, find test items that differentiate them. - MMPI
   - TARGET learns an expensive lesson

Eysenck's Hierarchical Model (PEN

> Extraversion-Intraversion

— Sociable, Lively, Active, Assertive

> Neuroticism-Emotional Stability

— Anxious, Depressed, Tense, Moody

> Psychoticism

— Aggressive, Cold, Unempathic, Egocentric

Good: Moderate Heritability ( Twins preform the same or sae personality traits)

Bad:

- Argued for Physiological Substrate

• Extraversion = Low CNS arousal

• Neuroticism = CNS instability

• Psychoticism = High testosterone,
  low MAO - Eysenck's P Problem

• Eysenck used the term Psychoticism in a highly idiosyncratic, non-clinical way

• P subtraits are: Aggressive, Cold, Egocentric, Impersonal, Impulsive, Antisocial, Unempathic, Creative, Tough-Minded

Solution:Eysenck's P Problem

• Other researchers have suggested psychopathy, sensation seeking, constraint (low), honesty/humility (low)
  as alternative names is The Dark Triad of personality

Cattell's Taxonomy

The Big 5: NEO-PI

(Costa & McCrae)

Consistency Over Time

Trait theories assume that there is a degree of consistency in personality over time

Expression of trait may change over time

Consistency Across Situations

Trait psychologists assume that traits will exhibit some consistency across situations

Situationism (Mischel, 1968)

Situtation determines behavior

Lack of consistency across situation ex: cheating behavior if one cheats in a game like a kid they were not likely to cheat on exams or other things

Is 16% of explained variance meaningful?

• Hypothetical: No test - 50% job failure rate

• Assume a correlation of .40 between predictor and success.
  100 trainees $10,000 each

• No test: 50 fail, $20,000/employee

• With test: 30 fail, $14,300/employee

Failure rate of 50% reduces to 30%

100 successful trainees w/o test = $2,000,000

100 successful trainees w/test = $1,430,000

Situationism combined with personaity psychologists

Both personality and situation interact to produce behavior

B = f(Px S)

Situational selection:

Situational selection: Picking your environment

Evocation:

Eliciting responses from others

Manipulation:

Manipulating others

Aggregation

Adding or averaging several single observations results in a better measure of a personality trait than a single observation of behavior, e.g., greater reliability

e.g., The full NEO-PI has 30 questions per dimension vs. only 4 questions in the version you took.