Personality Psychology

What is personality?

• Personality as the true self, separate from social roles.

• Linked to rise of Western individualism.

• Personality as ‘psychological individuality’.

What are 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.

• Stereotypes.

How does personality and social communication relate?

• 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.

What is person perception?

Person perception is judging other people’s personalities.

• ‘Dispositional inference’ and the ‘correspondence bias’.

• Rapid personality judgements.

What are stereotypes?

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

What is personality psychology’s place in the field?

• Aims to understand 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 to social psychology, the person versus the situation).

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.

• Biological taxonomy, psychiatric…

What are 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.

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’?

What is Muhammad Ali’s theory of how traits are organised?

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).

What is 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 captured by single words.

Allport & Odbert (1936):

• Searched a dictionary for words to describe how people differ.

• 18,000 out of 550,000.

• These were filtered to remove physical attributes, cognitive, transient states and evaluative terms.

• 4,504 terms remained.

Raymond Cattell:

• 4,504 trait words is still too many.

• Many were synonyms.

• Cattell distilled 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.

Still to many factors?

• Cattell’s 16 factors were still correlated.

• Different factors might both reflect a single underlying “super-factor”.

Five basic factors?

• 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.

What is the “Big Five”?

Openness to Experience

Conscientiousness

Extraversion

Agreeableness

Neuroticism

Extraversion:

High:

• Sociable, energetic, enthusiastic, assertive.

Low:

• Shy, reserved, quiet, retiring.

Agreeableness:

High:

• Warm, modest, kind, trusting, helpful.

Low:

• Cold, unfriendly, quarrelsome.

Conscientiousness:

High:

• Efficient, organised, thorough, self-controlled.

Low:

• Careless, irresponsible, frivolous.

Neuroticism:

High:

• Tense, irritable, moody, nervous, high-strung.

Low:

• Stable, calm, contented, unemotional.

Openness to Experience:

High:

• Imaginative, original, sophisticated.

Low:

• Simple, shallow, conventional, narrow.

What are the facets of the “Big Five”?

Each factor has low-level facets.

What are the facets of Neuroticism?

Anxiety, depression, hostility, self-consciousness, impulsiveness, vulnerability.

What are the facets of Conscientiousness?

Order, dutifulness, competence, achievement striving, self-discipline, deliberation.

What is the value of the “Big Five”?

Knowing there are five fundamental dimensions of personality guides…

• Assessment of personality.

• Investigation of personality correlates.

• Explanation of the causes of personality.

• Provides a framework for mapping specific traits.

• E.g. shyness is a combination of (low) Extraversion and (high) Neuroticism.

What are the 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.

What is the other evidence for the “Big Five”?

• Big Five-like factors have been found in studies of many languages.

• Similar personality factors (except Openness & Conscientiousness) appear in other species.

• Piglet extraversion = frequency of snout-touching.

What are the alternatives 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.

Who is Hans Eysenck?

• Major proponent of this method (questionnaire approach).

• Developed a two-factor model:

• Extraversion, neuroticism

• Later proposed a third factor:

• Psychoticism.

• Proposed biological foundations for these factors.

What are the 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.

• The situation is the main determinant of behaviour.

• Traits are weak predictors of behaviour.

• So personality tests must lack validity.

What are the responses to Mischel’s critique?

• ‘Weak’ correlations still matter (a .3 correlation reduces uncertainty by 30%).

• Consistency is greater for behaviour patterns than for single behaviours, and we usually care more about these patterns.

• Situational influences are just as weak as dispositional influences.

• We need an interactionist view that recognises traits, situations & their combined effects.

How to think about inconsistency:

• We can all behave in a versatile, context-sensitive way.

• Each person has a distribution of behaviours along a trait dimension from low to high.

• People high on a trait just engage in trait-related behaviours more often than others.

2. Is the structure of personality universal?

Trait models like the Big 5 purport to be about (universal) human nature, but might they be artefacts of language or culture.

What is the evidence for (moderate) universality?

• One way to assess consistency of personality structure across cultures is to translate English language personality tests.

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

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

What are Indigenous personality systems?

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

• Among several European languages, strong congruence for most Big Five factors, except Openness.

• Occasionally apparent culture-specific factors emerge.

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.

• Common in popular psychology.

• Extraversion - Introversion.

• Sensation - Intuition.

• Perception - Judgement.

• Thinking - Feeling.

What is the research on personality types?

• Statistical methods exist for comparing typological and dimensional models of psychological variables.

• There is no persuasive evidence for any personality types, including Jung’s.

• We can therefore assume that traits are dimensional.

4. Are traits sufficient?

• Traits are behavioural dispositions.

• Other aspects of personality might not be reducible to such behavioural tendencies - values, interests, character strengths.

What are values?

• Values are concepts or beliefs about desirable end states or behaviours that transcend specific situations and guide selection or evaluation of behaviour and events.

• That is, they are cognitive, linked to motives & desires, intrinsically desirable, and learned.

• Schwartz developed a model of 10 value types, replicated in ~60 countries.

What are character strengths?

• ‘Positive psychology’ aims to study and promote human character strengths.

• Created in opposition to traditional focus on abnormality and conflict.

• The VIA taxonomy aims to classify character strengths that…

• Are environmentally shaped, contribute to fulfilment in life, are valued in their own right, do not diminish anyone in society when exercised.

What is 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.

What is personality description?

• There are many alternative units for describing personality beyond traits.

• Motives, needs, goals.

• Schemas, personal constructs, interests.

• Traits are not all there is to the description of personality, but they are a simple place to start.

• Traits and the ‘psychology of the stranger’.

What are the levels of personality?

1. Dispositional traits.

2. Characteristic adaptations.

3. Life stories.

1. Dispositional traits.

Example:

• Traits.

Nature:

• General.

Depth:

• Low.

Time to perceive:

Short.

2. Characteristic adaptations.

Example:

• Goals, values, constructs.

Nature:

• Contextual.

Depth:

• Medium.

Time to Perceive:

• Medium.

3. Life stories.

Example:

• Identities, self-narratives.

Nature:

• Temporal & unique.

Depth:

• High.

Time to Perceive:

• Long.

What are the biological approaches to personality?

Explanations of the biological basis of personality operate at several levels, from “distal” to proximal:

• Genetics.

• Brain functioning - neural systems, structures, neurochemicals.

• Hormonal factors.

What are the genetics of personality?

Is personality inherited?

DNA as a source of our similarities & differences:

• ~20,000 protein-coding genes.

• ~3,000,000,000 DNA base pairs.

• Most DNA is shared between people: ~99.6% is identical between any two people.

Research designs: Family studies

Examine resemblance between family members as a function of genetic relatedness:

• 50% child, parent, sibling.

• 25%: grandchild, grandparent, half-sibling, uncle, aunt, nephew, niece.

Greater resemblance for closer relations implies genetic contribution gut genetic contributions are confounded with shared environmental contributions.

Research designs: Adoption studies

• Compare resemblance of adopted child to adoptive parents (APs) & biological patterns (BPs).

• APs are 0% related but supply environment, BPs are 50% related.

• Degree of resemblance to APs & BPs shows environmental & genetic contributions.

• Adoption must occur early; problem of selective placement; biological mother provides prenatal environment as well as genes.

How does heritability relate to personality?