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A little history …
Humans have always cared about personality
The history of “personality”
Personality as personhood
Personality as persona
Personality as character
Theophrastus (319 BC)
“Often before now have I applied my thoughts to the puzzling question — why it is that, while all Greece lies under the same sky and all the Greeks are educated alike, it has befallen us to have characters so variously constituted”
Character types of Theophrastus
Ironical
Flatterer
Boor
Grumbler
Reckless
Chatty
Gross
Surly
Stupid
Superstitious
Gossip
Shameless
Arrogant
Patron of rascals
“The obnoxious man”
“At the theatre he goes on clapping when others cease and hisses the actors whom the public like. In the midst of a general silence he leans back and belches to make everybody turn round. When the market-place is crowded he goes up to the stalls where they sell nuts or myrtle-berries and pilfers from the pile as he talks to the stall-keeper.”
What is personality?
Personality as what is ‘beneath the mask’
Personality as the authentic true self, separate from social roles
Linked to rise of Western individualism
Personality as ‘psychological individuality’
Personality diagram
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Not physical attributes
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Not intellect-related attributes
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Not transient attributes
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And not context-specific attributes
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Individual differences
Personality refers to enduring, relatively broad psychological differences between people, excluding cognitive abilities
These ‘dispositions’ are fundamentally important
Personal identity & self-concept
Social communication & gossip
Person perception
Stereotype
Personality & self-concept
“Describe yourself” (Prentice, 1990)
Likes, beliefs, values 33%
Personality traits 25%
Behaviours 9%
Interpersonal attributes 9%
Demographic attributes 9%
Physical characteristics 8%
Abilities/aptitudes 6%
Personality & social communication
Robin Dunbar argued that human intelligence evolved to handle the complexities of group life
Much of our social communication aims to learn what others are like: their personalities
Person perception
Person perception is judging other people’s personalities
‘Dispositional inference’ and the ‘correspondence bias’
Rapid personality judgments
Stereotypes
Stereotypes are largely made up of personality traits believed (rightly or wrongly) to be associated with social groups
Personality psychology’s place in the field
Dedicated to understanding the ‘whole person’
Focuses on differences between people, not shared mechanisms and processes
Related to clinical psychology
Places emphasis on factors intrinsic to the person
Contrast with social psychology
The person versus the situation
The big picture …
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How should we describe personality?
For a scientific psychology of personality …
We need a descriptive unit
We need a classification or ‘taxonomy’ of these units
Classification gets a bad rap
“All science is either physics or stamp collecting”
Chemical taxonomy
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Biological taxonomy
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Psychiatric taxonomy
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Personality traits
The simplest descriptive unit is the ‘trait’
A trait is a consistent pattern of behaviour, thinking or feeling
Relatively stable over time
Relatively consistent across situations ◦ Varying between people
Dispositional
Trait vary in generality or ‘bandwidth’: some are broad, others narrow
Hierarchy of traits: an example
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How are traits organised?
If traits are the basic units for describing personality, how are they organised?
Are there a few basic dimensions or ‘types’ of personality?
One theory
“People come in four types: the pomegranate (hard on the outside, hard on the inside), the walnut (hard-soft), the prune (soft-hard) and the grape (soft-soft)” Muhammad Ali
The structure of personality traits
Where do we start in developing a scientific taxonomy of personality?
Survey the traits that are encoded in language
This is the “lexical approach”
It assumes that important distinctions for describing people are incorporated in everyday speech
Allport & Odbert
1936 attempt to survey the ‘trait universe’
Searched a large dictionary for words that could describe differences between people
18,000 out of 550,000
These were then filtered
Remove physical attributes (e.g., “tall”)
Remove cognitive abilities & talents (e.g., “smart”)
Remove transient states (e.g., “sad”)
Remove highly evaluative terms (e.g., “moron”)
4,504 terms remained
Raymond Cattell
4,504 trait words is still too many
Many were synonyms
Cattell progressively reduced the set
Sorted words into 171 groups of synonyms or antonyms
Reduced these in several steps to 16 “factors” using a technique called ‘factor analysis’
These factors represented basic dimensions of personality
Cattell’s 16 factors
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Correlation & factor analysis
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Factor analysis- Cattell’s
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Still too many factors?
Cattell’s 16 factors were still correlated
Different factors might both reflect a single underlying “super-factor”
Five basic factors?
Cattell’s 16 factors were still correlated
Different factors might both reflect a single underlying “super-factor”
Ideally, the dimensions of personality should be independent of one another
Donald Fiske showed that the 16 factors could be further reduced by factor analysis to 5