Personality Psychology: WHAT IS PERSONALITY?

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A little history …

  • Humans have always cared about personality

<ul><li><p>Humans have always cared about personality</p></li></ul><p></p>
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The history of “personality”

  • Personality as personhood

  • Personality as persona

  • Personality as character

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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”

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Character types of Theophrastus

  • Ironical

  • Flatterer

  • Boor

  • Grumbler

  • Reckless

  • Chatty

  • Gross

  • Surly

  • Stupid

  • Superstitious

  • Gossip

  • Shameless

  • Arrogant

  • Patron of rascals

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“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.”

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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’

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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

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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%

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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

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Person perception

  • Person perception is judging other people’s personalities

    • ‘Dispositional inference’ and the ‘correspondence bias’

    • Rapid personality judgments

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Stereotypes

Stereotypes are largely made up of personality traits believed (rightly or wrongly) to be associated with social groups

<p>Stereotypes are largely made up of personality traits believed (rightly or wrongly) to be associated with social groups</p>
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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

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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

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Classification gets a bad rap

“All science is either physics or stamp collecting”

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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

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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?

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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

<p>“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</p>
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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

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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

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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

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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”

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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

<ul><li><p>Cattell’s 16 factors were still correlated </p></li><li><p>Different factors might both reflect a single underlying “super-factor” </p></li><li><p>Ideally, the dimensions of personality should be independent of one another </p></li><li><p>Donald Fiske showed that the 16 factors could be further reduced by factor analysis to 5</p></li></ul><p></p>