Psych of Personality Exam 2

Trait approach

Most research within the trait approach relies on

correlational designs

• Traits should be able to predict behavior

Its focus is on individual differences

• Strength: Assesses and attempts to understand

how people differ

• Weakness: Neglects aspects of personality

common to all people and how each person is

unique

Every person is like all other people, like some other

people, and like no other person

• Like all others: Nearly everyone needs comfort, safety,

stimulation, and connections with other people

• Like some others: Properties of people differ in ways that

allow individuals to be grouped. Example: Cheerful people

are alike in a way that allows them to be distinguished from

gloomy people

• Like no others: Each person’s genetic makeup, past

experience, and view of the world are different from those of

anyone else who ever lived or ever will

The person-situation debate

The person-situation debate focuses on this question: Which is

more important for determining what people will do: The person

or the situation?

• Triggered by the publication in 1968 of a book by Walter

Mischel entitled Personality and Assessment

• Mischel believed behavior is too inconsistent to to be

characterized accurately in terms of global personality

traits

The situationist argument has three parts:

1. The upper limit as to how well a person can predict

another’s behavior is low

2. Situations must be more important than personality

traits

3. Everyday intuitions about people are wrong, because

people see others as being more consistent across

situations than they really are

Absolute vs. relative consistency

One size does not fit all

• Even when they are all in the same situation,

some individuals will be more sociable, nervous,

talkative, or active than others

• When the situation changes, those differences

will still be there

• You may travel the world, but your personality

will always travel with you

The accuracy of personality and judgement

Judgments of the personalities of others influence who you

will befriend, date, hire, or avoid

Constructivism:

• Reality, as a concrete entity, does not exist. All that

does exist are human ideas, or constructions, of reality

Critical Realism:

• People gather all the information that might help them

determine if the judgment is valid

Criteria for accuracy

Convergent Validation: The more items of diverse information

that converge, the more confident the conclusion

• If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, swims like a duck,

and quacks like a duck, it is probably a duck

Interjudge Agreement and Behavioral Prediction: A person can

be judged in such a way as to predict their actions

• If everyone agrees on your personality traits, that leads to

predictive validity

First impressions

As soon as you meet a person, you start to make judgments

of their personality—and they are doing exactly the same

thing to you

• One early study sat undergraduates sat together in small

groups for 15 minutes without talking

• Then they rated each person

• Their ratings of each other correlated better than r = .30

on the traits of extraversion, conscientiousness, and

openness to experience (Passini & Norman, 1966)

Moderators of Accuracy

When is accuracy more or less likely?

• Moderator variables: Research has focused on four

potential moderator variables that make accurate

judgments of personality:

• The judge

• The target (the person who is judged)

• The trait that is judged

• The information on which the judgment is based

The good jusge

Who are the best judges of personality?

• High IQ

• But high IQ people are good at tests

(that’s the one thing we know for sure about them)

• Sex differences

• Which gender do you think is a better judge of

personality?

The good target

Two attributes that go together to make a Good Target:

• Consistent

• NOT “Which Bob will we get today?”

• Well-adjusted

• “What you see is what you get”

People with consistent behavior are easier to judge because any

observation of their behavior is more likely to be a representative

sample of how they act in general

Some traits are easier to judge accurately than others

• “Good traits” (easy to judge)

• Cheerful, attractive, likable, assertive, talkative

• “Bad traits” (not truly bad, just harder to judge)

• Fantasizes, overthinks, compares self to others, self-defensive

good information

Quantity

• Acquaintanceship effect

• Knowing someone for more time

• And/or more situations

Quality

• Unstructured situations vs. structured

• Depends on what you want to know

• Job interview study by Melinda Blackman (CSUF)

• Job skills: structured is better

• Job-relevant personality (esp. agreeableness):

unstructured is better

The realistic accuracy model RAM

The person being judged must do something

relevant, that is, informative about the trait to be

judged.

2. The information must be available to a judge.

3. The judge must detect this information.

4. The judge must utilize this information correctly.

For an attribute of an individual’s personality to be judged

accurately, four things must happen: The individual must do something relevant to the attribute; this behavioral information must be available to the judge; the judge must detect this information; and the judge must utilize this information correctly.

Improving accuracy of RAM

Accuracy is hard

• Failure at any stage will make accuracy impossible

Implications of stages for improve accuracy

• Relevance

• Allow person to “be self” (e.g., bad bosses, touchy people don’t see

others as they really are)

• Interact in informative contexts (e.g., going to a movie vs. going on a

hike)

• Availability

• Spend time with person, in different situations

• Detection

• Pay attention to other, not self (e.g., listen rather than plan your next

speech)

• Utilization

• Awareness of possibility of bias

Accurate self-knowledge

Accurate self-knowledge has long been considered a

hallmark of mental health

• Healthy and secure people will tend to see

themselves more accurately

• People with higher self-esteem also have more

accurate images of what their faces look like

• A person with accurate self-knowledge is better at

deciding what occupation to pursue to whom to

marry

• You need to know at least as much about yourself

as you do about your partner to choose the right

person to marry

Self knowledge vs. Knowledge of others

One study found that acquaintances’ judgments more accurately

predicted behavior than did the self-judgments (Kolar et al.,

1996)

• Such as talkativeness, humor, and being cheated by life

Another study found that when results of self and others’

judgments were used to predict behavior outside the laboratory,

in normal daily life

• Close acquaintances were as accurate as the self, and the

average ratings of two or three acquaintances are

sometimes even more accurate (Vazire & Mehl, 2008)

It might be possible to take an outsider’s view on your own behavior

• Example: Perhaps Lenny Skutnik realized later how exceptional

his behavior was, but at the time he was too focused on someone

in need to wonder whether his action was atypical

• An outsider may view his heroism as extraordinary

• Example: When an alcoholic explains the cause of a recent drinking

relapse, the person may attribute the relapse to outside factors

such as stress

• An outsider may see the problem drinking as a chronic addiction

Personality traits

Traits characterize what any person may do in any

situation – on average!

• They do not determine what everyone does in every

situation

• Someone high on a certain trait may, at times, act in

a conflicting manner from their trait

• E.g., an introverted person may act extraverted

at times and vice versa

4 ways to study personality

Single-trait approach

• Examines behaviors associated with a particular trait

Many-trait approach

• Looks for traits associated with a particular behavior

Essential-trait approach

• Identifies which traits are most important

Typological approach

• Focuses on the patterns of traits that characterize a

person

The single trait approach: self-monitoring

Self-monitoring: An ability to regulate behavior to

accommodate social situations

• High self-monitors may be described as:

• Adaptable, flexible, popular, sensitive, and able to

fit in wherever they go

• Wishy-washy, two-faced, lacking integrity, and

slick

• Low self-monitors may be described as:

• Self-directed, having integrity, and being

consistent and honest.

• Insensitive, inflexible, and stubborn

The single trait approach: narcissism

Narcissism: Excessive self-love and need for admiration, which

may be a personality disorder

• They tend to make good first impressions, but people dislike

them in the long run

• They tend to be manipulative, overbearing, entitled, vain,

arrogant

• They will aggressively defend themselves if they feel

threatened

• They may not like themselves; people with the strongest

sense of superiority and need for admiration are the same

ones who are most anxious underneath

People with high self-esteem feel good about

themselves without necessarily feeling

superior to others

Narcissists want and tend to feel superior to

others

• When rejected they may take out their

frustration on others

• They don’t handle failure well

• They brag

• They may have low impulse control

The many trait approach: California Q-set

California Q-set: Raters express judgments of

personality by sorting the items into nine categories

ranging from highly uncharacteristic of the person

being described (Category 1) to highly characteristic

(Category 9)

• 100 personality descriptions, or phrases

• Sort into a forced choice, symmetrical, and normal

distribution

• Compare characteristics within an individual

The many trait approach: talking

181 UCR undergraduates

• Life history interview

• Recorded and transcribed

• Count words LIWC program

• Personality ratings from

acquaintances

• 100 item Q-sort

• Results

• Interpretation?

• Talking and writing may have

implications for personality.

• Certainty words: Absolutely, exact,

truly

The many trait approach: political beliefs

One study assessed the personalities of a group of

children in nursery school and compared that to their

political beliefs

• Conservative: Tended to feel guilty, anxious in

unpredictable environments, and unable to handle

stress well as children

• Liberal: Were more likely to have been described

years earlier as resourceful, independent, self-

reliant, and confident as children

Both liberals and conservatives favor kindness,

gentleness, nurturance and justice, rights, and fairness

Conservatives are more likely than liberals to value:

• In-group loyalty

• Authority

• Purity

Essential trait approach

Reducing the Many to a Few: Theoretical Approaches

• Murray (1938): 20 needs

• e.g., aggression, autonomy, exhibition, order, play, sex

• Block & Block (1980): Ego-control and ego-resiliency

• Overcontrolled people (those high in the ego-control

dimension) inhibit impulses

• Undercontrolled people (low in ego control) are more

likely to act on impulses

Factor Analytic Approaches: Correlating every measured variable with

every other variable in order to reduce the overall number of traits

considered to be important

• Cattell: 16 essential traits

• These included “friendliness,” “intelligence,” “stability,”

“sensitivity,” and “dominance,” among others

• Eysenck: 3 traits

• Extraversion, neuroticism, psychoticism

• Tellegen: 3 traits

• Positive emotionality, negative emotionality, constraint

The essential trait approach: the big five and beyond

Lexical hypothesis: Important aspects of life will be

labeled with words, and if something is truly important and

universal, there will be many words for it in all languages

For personality descriptors

• Allport identified 4,500 words

• Cattell identified 35 traits

• Fiske found 5 factors – now known as The Big Five

The Big Five: Neuroticism, Extraversion, Agreeableness,

Conscientiousness, and Openness

• Big Five traits are not orthogonal

• Higher-order factors: stability (agreeableness,

conscientiousness, and low neuroticism) and plasticity

(extraversion and openness)

• May have a biological basis; stability is similar to ego control

and plasticity is similar to ego resilience.

• Each Big Five trait can be divided into facets and aspects (see

next slide)

The essential trait approch: Eysench’s view of extraversion

Eysenck’s view of extraversion: Introverts react more

strongly and often more negatively to bright lights,

loud noises, strong tastes, and other kinds of sensory

stimulation than do extraverts

• Introversion is on the opposite end of the

extraversion scale

• Introverts react more to sensory stimuli (the lemon

juice test)

• Extraverts crave extreme levels of stimulation,

which may lead to a life of crime

The big five: extraversion

Less dangerous-sounding than Eysenck’s view

• Active, outspoken, dominant, forceful, adventurous, spunky,

cheerful

• Has a powerful influence on behavior

• Walk quickly, make moral judgments, are popular and

physically attractive

• Sensitive to rewards

• Spend more money on food, travel, and positive experiences

Disadvantage: Mate poaching, argumentative, need to be in

control, annoying, at risk for becoming overweight

The big five: neurotocism

Ineffective problem solving: Strong negative reactions to

stress

• Sensitive to social threats, unhappy, anxious, and even

physically sick

General tendency toward psychopathology and vulnerability

• More likely to develop mental illness, stress, and lack the

ability to handle criticism

Associated with undesirable life outcomes

• More likely to be unhappy, engage in criminal behavior,

have poor family relationships, and low job

dissatisfaction

The big five: conscientiousness

Dutiful, careful, rule-abiding, ambitious

• Valuable employees, are careful and considerate drivers,

avoid risks

• Live longer

• Less likely to smoke, overeat, or use alcohol to excess.

They avoid violence, risky sex, and drug abuse, more

likely to exercise regularly.

Disadvantage: Prone to feel guilty when they don’t live up to

expectations

The big five: agreeableness

Conformity, friendly compliance, likeability, warmth, love

• Facets: Compassion, morality, trust, affability, and

modesty

• Aspects: Compassion, and politeness

• Predicts life outcomes

• Likely to be involved in religious activities, have a

good sense of humor, and be psychologically well

adjusted, not likely to engage in criminal behavior

• Can also make children less vulnerable

• Less likely to be bullied or abused

The big five: openness to experience/culture/intellect

Most controversial trait

• Approach to intellectual matters or basic intelligence

• Value of cultural matters

• Creativity and perceptiveness

• People can score high on this trait regardless of education,

culture, or IQ

• Unlikely to be viewed as simple, shallow, or unintelligent

Beyond the big five

Although the Big Five have proved useful, they have also long been

controversial

• Many attributes are not encompassed within the Big Five,

such as sensuality, frugality, humor, cunning,

manipulativeness, integrity, religiosity

Honesty/humility may be another trait, although it correlates with

agreeableness

• Religious people may score high on this trait

May not be sufficient for really understanding people

• Other traits like narcissism and self-monitoring do not fully

map on to the Big Five

typological approaches to personality

he structure of traits across individuals is not the

same thing as the structure of personality within a

person

• Important differences between people may be

qualitative.

• It may make sense to slice people’s personalities in

to types, rather than claiming everyone has the

same traits, but at varying degrees

Typological approach: evaluating typologies

Types were found across seven studies with diverse participants

from all over the world

• Three replicable types: well-adjusted, maladjusted

overcontrolling, maladjusted undercontrolling

• Well-adjusted: adaptable, flexible, resourceful, interpersonally

successful

• Maladjusted overcontrolling: too uptight, denies self pleasure

needlessly, difficult interpersonally

• Maladjusted undercontrolling: too impulsive, prone to crime

and unsafe sex

• Types do not predict behavior or life outcomes beyond what can

be predicted with the trait that define the typology

Typological approach: myers briggs

Very popular

• Taken by millions of people each year in workplaces, schools,

counseling centers, management workshops, etc.

• Items are choices between two options of four opposing

tendencies:

• Extroversion (E) vs. Introversion (I)

• Sensing (S) vs. Intuition (N)

• Thinking (T) vs. Feeling (F)

• Judgment (J) vs. Perception (P)

Reasons for popularity

• Offers seemingly rich and intriguing descriptions of

each personality type

• Seems especially insightful

• All types are explained positively

• People enjoy learning about their type, as they do

with astrological signs

Not useful for selection or predicting life outcomes

• No evidence that different types follow, persist in, or

succeed in different lines of work

• Based on normally distributed scores

• Two people both classified as E could be more

different from each other than two people who are

classified as E and I

• The MBTI is not reliable

• It’s possible that a person who take the test twice,

separated by five weeks, will receive different scores

Personal stability

Rank-order consistency: People tend to maintain the ways in

which they are different from other people of the same age

Evidence for stability:

• r = .60–.90 for 10-year span

• Childhood personality predicts adult behavior and life

outcomes

• Personality disorders are stable

From temperament to personality

Causes of stability

• Temperament is personality in infants, and mostly

determined by genetics

• Heterotypic continuity: The effects of fundamental

temperamental tendencies change with age, but

temperament and personality stay the same

• Basic aspects: Positive emotionality, negative

emotionality, effortful control

physical and environmental factors

Physical and environmental factors

• Physical factors, such as sex, height, and

attractiveness, affect the experiences people have and

are consistent throughout life

• Environmental factors, such as rich versus poor, living

in the city versus the country, and family size, affect

how people feel, think, and behave.

birth order

Birth order

• Based on idea that parents treat the first child differently

from other children, which has mixed research support

• Birth order effects are small, and not all studies support

the predicted effects

• People want to intuitively believe that it matters

early experience

Early adverse experiences can have consequences

that persist for many years

• Especially for children who are sensitive or

vulnerable

• Rejection from parents makes it more difficult to

form relationships

• Growing up in poverty or maltreatment

Many parents are successful at creating environments

for their children that promote good outcomes

• Highly educated parents

• The environments of the children who grew up to feel

good about themselves were characterized by

cognitively stimulating activities

person-environmental transactions

Person-environment transactions: People tend to respond to,

seek out, and create environments that are compatible with,

and may magnify, their personality traits

• Active: People seek out compatible environments and

avoid incompatible ones

• Reactive: People respond differently to the same

situation

• Evocative: People change the situation

cumulative continuity and maturity

• Cumulative continuity principle: Personality traits are

relatively stable across the life span, and become more

stable as a person matures

• Psychological maturity contributes to stability, and includes

self-control, interpersonal sensitivity, and emotional

stability

• People around the world are becoming more

psychologically mature and stable

• Environments become more stable with age

personality development

Are older people different, on average, than younger

people?

•Personality development: Change in the mean level of

a personality trait over time

•Development and stability can go together: Rank-

order stability and mean-level change can occur at

the same time

cross-sectional studies

Cross-sectional studies: Surveys people at different ages.

• One study found that people at different ages show

different mean levels of the Big Five personality traits

Between ages 10 and 20, averages scores on agreeableness,

openness, and conscientiousness dip during the transition

from childhood to adolescence, then recover approaching

age 20

Cohort Effects

Cohort effects: People of different ages may differ because they

grew up in different environments

• May contribute to age differences in cross-sectional studies

• Aspects of personality can be affected by the historical period in

which one lives

• A survey of Americans who grew up during the Great

Depression of the 1930s found that they developed

attitudes toward work and financial security that were

noticeably different from the outlooks of those who grew up

earlier or later

longitudinal studies

Longitudinal studies: The same people are repeatedly

measured over the years from childhood through

adulthood

• People become more socially dominant,

agreeable, conscientious, emotionally stable

• Honesty/humility, self-esteem (up to age 50),

and ego development increase

• Risk-taking decreases

• There might be a limit to the maturity principle

• Traits associated with performing typical adult roles

become less important

• Not everybody relaxes when retirement age arrives

• May be related to conscientiousness

• Findings many change in late old age

causes of personality development

• Some of the causes of personality change over time

involve physical development

• Increases in intelligence and linguistic abilities

• Hormone-level changes

• Changing social roles at different stages of life

• Conscientiousness also changes over time

social clock

The social clock places pressure on people to accomplish certain

things by certain ages.

• Women who followed either the feminine or masculine social

clock reported higher contentment and satisfaction than women

who followed neither

• Women who did not manage to follow either agenda reported

feeling depressed, alienated, and bitter when they entered their

forties

development of narrative identity

Narrative identity: The story that you tell about your life. We

develop how we see ourselves and our sense of who we are over

time

• Actor: Social skills, traits, and roles that one needs to take a

place in society

• Agent: A person guided by goals and values; plan for the

future to align with desired outcomes

• Author: To be able to tell your life story

desire for change

• According to one study, almost everyone would like to change

their traits (Hudson & Roberts, 2014)

• Desire for change is typical and usually in the socially

desirable direction.

• Reason for wanting change: Make life better

psychotherapy

• Can produce long-term behavior change in emotional

stability and extraversion

• Might have a downside

• Often combined with psychiatric drugs

• In addition to treating depression fluoxetine (Prozac)

makes people them more extraverted and less anxious

• Psilocybin (when taken in a medically controlled

setting) can lead to increases in openness to experience

that last a year or more

• Alcohol will make you more extraverted

general interventions

General interventions aren’t aimed at changing

personality

• Aimed at completing education, lessening criminal

behavior, and improving prospects for employment.

• Evidence of success for intensive programs for high-

risk preschool students

targeted inerventions

Targeted interventions: Address certain personality traits for change

• Openness: Increased in older adults with practice of inductive reasoning and

working on word puzzles; increased across ages with going to the opera and

museums

• Tolerance for stress and defensiveness: Improved with writing self-

affirmations about important values

• Neuroticism: Parents were taught about anxiety and techniques for

managing behavior, thinking about anxiety-provoking topics in less-

threatening ways, and not being overprotective

• Narcissism: Decreased when told to take the other person’s perspective

• Self-control: Increased with meditation, relaxation, and learning to think

differently about temptations and frustrations

Targeted interventions: Address certain personality traits for

change

• Systematic desensitization: Clients are induced to perform

the feared behavior through small, incremental steps

• Helps with phobias, such as the fear of snakes

• Sociogenomic trait intervention model: Identify specific

thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that the person wants to

change

• People are challenged to act out what they want to

change

• Family members need to be encouraging

behaviros and life experiences

Long-term personality change: Positive effects

• Exercise: Physical activity in midlife predicts a more stable

personality in old age (less of the typical decrease in

conscientiousness, extraversion, openness, and agreeableness)

• Starting college: Self-esteem decreases, but it rebounds quickly and

even increases

• Travel: Increases in confidence, social skills, self-esteem, openness,

agreeableness, creativity; decreased neuroticism

• Military Training: Increases in agreeableness

• Starting a job or a serious relationship: Increases in

conscientiousness

Long-term personality change: Negative effects

• Marriage

• Associated with declines in agreeableness for both

men and women

• Becoming unemployed

• Decrease in agreeableness, conscientiousness, and

openness, but rebounded when a new job was found

• Helping a spouse with cancer

• After death, interpersonal orientation, sociability, and

favorable attitudes toward other people increases

Personality can also affect life events

• Person-environment transactions

• Health crises, losing a job or having other problems at

work, educational difficulties, financial setbacks, and

relationship problems all lead to higher scores on

neuroticism

overcoming obstacles to change

Obstacles to change

• Most people like their personalities

• Resistance to change can be especially strong in people

such as narcissists

• People tend to blame negative experiences on external forces

• People generally like their lives to be consistent and predictable

• People have long-standing and stable views about the world

Obstacles can be overcome with effort

• Believe that change is possible

• Begin changing relevant behaviors

• Ideal outcome: Conscientiousness has

stabilized at a higher level

principles of personality and continuity and change

The principles of personality change serve as a guide for future

research

• Cumulative continuity and maturity: Personality becomes more stable

as people get older

• Plasticity: Personality can change at any time

• Role continuity: Taking on roles consistent with one’s personality can

lead to stability

• Identity development: People get a sense of who they are and then try

to be consistent with it

• Social investment: Connections to social structures and institutions,

which changes with age, can influence psychological development

• Corresponsive: Life experiences can magnify traits that already exist.

is personality change good or bad

Personality change has both a downside and an upside

• Downside:

• A disorganized, unsteady personality leads to

inconsistency

• If personality is constantly changing, it’s difficult to

choose consistent goals to pursue over the long term

• Rapid changes in personality are associated with poor

mental and physical health

• Upside:

• Neuroticism tends to decrease over the life span

• Conscientiousness tends to increase