Psychology of Personality

Psychological Triad

The three essential topics of psychology: how people think, how they feel, and how they behave.

Personality

An individuals characteristic patterns of thought, emotion, and behavior, together with the psychological mechanisms behind those patterns.

• Affect (and emotion)

• Behavior

• Cognition (or thought)

• Desire (motivation)

• ABCDs

basic approach to personality

A theoretical view of personality that focuses on some phenomena and ignores others. The basic approaches are trait, biological, psychoanalytic, phenomenological, learning and cognitive.

trait approach

The theoretical view of personality that focuses on individual differences in personality and behavior, and the psychological processes behind them.

Trait: characteristic patterning of affect, behavior, cognition over time and situation

• Focus is on individual differences

• No absolute “zero point” on trait scales; they focus on degrees (e.g. more or less extroverted)

biological approach

The view of personality that focuses on the way behavior and personality are influenced by neuroanatomy, biochemistry, genetics, and evolution.

psychoanalytic approach

The theoretical view of personality, based on writings of Sigmund Freud, that emphasizes the unconscious processes of the mind.

phenomenological approach

The theoretical view of personality that emphasizes experience, free will, and the meaning of life; closely related to humanistic psychology and existentialism.focuses on people’s conscious experience of the world

humanistic psychology

The approach to psychology that emphasizes aspects of psychology that are distinctly human; closely related to the phenomenological approach and existentialism.

Conscious awareness produces uniquely human attributes

• Existential anxiety, creativity, free will

• Understand meaning and basis of happiness

learning

in behaviorism: a change in behavior as a result of experience.

personality processes

The mental activities of personality, including perception, thought, motivation, and emotion.

Funder’s First law

Great strengths are usually great weaknesses, and surprisingly often the opposite is true as well.

S- Data

A person’s evaluation of their own personality

• High face validity

– The degree to which an assessment instrument appears to measure what it is intended to measure (I.e if you want to measure extraversion and you ask questions about how talkative someone is. even though something appears to be “face valid” doesn’t mean that it actually is)

Advantages of S Data

Large amount of information

•You are always with yourself

2. Access to thoughts, feelings, and intention

3. Definitional truth

•The data are true by definition if one is assessing what people think about themselves

4. Simple and easy

•Cost-effective

Disadvantages of S-Data

1. Bias

• People have distorted images of themselves

• People may not want to admit certain things about

themselves

2. Error

• Fish-and-water effect: People do not notice their most obvious characteristics (but they are aware of it) because they are always that way.

• Lack of self-insight (e.g., narcissism, personality pathology)

• Active distortion (repression)

3. Too simple and easy

• S-data can be so inexpensive and easy to collect that they are

probably overused

I-Data

Judgments by informants

• E.g., Friends, acquaintances, coworkers, clinical

psychologists

• No training or expertise needed

• May be more accurate than self-judgments for

extremely desirable or undesirable characteristics

• Used frequently in daily life

• Letters of recommendation, gossip

Advantages of I-Data

1. Can involve a large amount of information

• Many behaviors in many situations

• (e.g., roommate)

• Judgments from multiple informants are possible

2. Real-world observation

• Not from contrived tests or constructed and

controlled environments

• Reputation may be more relevant to real-world

outcomes than self-concept

3. Definitional truth

• For some characteristics (charm, likability)

Disadvantages of I-Data

1. Limited behavioral information

• Informant sees target in relatively few contexts

• E.g., Returning home after 1st semester at college

2. Lack of access to private experience

3. Error

• More likely to remember behaviors that are extreme or

unusual

• but consistent behaviors are most informative

4. Bias

• Letter of recommendation effect

• The informant could be racist, sexist, etc.

L-Data

verifiable, concrete, real-life facts that may hold

psychological significance

• Can be obtained from archival records

• School records, police records, bank statements, medical

files, the internet

• Physical spaces

• Virtual spaces

• From Facebook, X, etc.

• Use in hiring? Admissions?

Advantages of L Data

Objective and verifiable

• E.g., income, marital status, medical conditions, the number

of online followers

Disadvantages of L Data

L-data can be influenced by much more than personality

• Genetics, parenting, economic conditions

Natural B Data

gathered by observing a person, or by having a person

record themselves

• Barker & Wright (1951) documented one 7-year-old boy’s entire

waking day

• E.g., Handshake

Diary and experience-sampling: type of natural B data where the person

observes themself rather than having a psychologist or observer do so.

• EAR: electronically activated recorder

• Wearable cameras

• Ambulatory assessment: using computer-assisted methods to assess

behavior, thoughts, and feelings during normal daily activities

Laboratory B Data

Observing behavior in the laboratory

Behavioral Experiments

• Make a situation happen and record behavior

• Typical intro psych studies

• Represent real-life contexts that are difficult to observe

directly

• More complex interactions in loosely defined situations

Physiological measures: Give us information on biological

“behavior”

• Blood pressure, galvanic skin response, heart rate,

CT/PET/fMRI scans

Advantages of B Data

1. Large range of contexts in the lab

• No need to wait for naturally occurring situations

2. Appearance of objectivity

• Physical evidence

Disadvantages of B Data

Costly (labor, equipment)

2. Uncertain interpretation

• What behaviors are important? What do they mean?

• Does delay of gratification or obedience explain ability to wait

for a reward?

Classic Behaviorism

Focuses on overt behavior

Social learning

How observation and self-evaluation determine behavior

Cognitive

Focuses on cognitive processes, including perception, memory, and thought

Cross-cultural

The experience of reality might be different accross cultures

Funder’s Second Law

There are no perfect indicators of personality; there are only clues and clues are always ambiguous

Funder’s Third Law

Something beats nothing: two times out of three

self-verification

People try to bring others to see them as they see themselves. If you see yourself as a friendly person, or intelligent, or ethical, you might make an extra effort to come across that way to others.

expectancy effect/ behavioral confirmation

If others expect you to be sociable, aloof, or even intelligent you become just that. People become what others expect them to be.

projective tests

Provide B-data. They are specific, directly observed responses to particular stimuli, whether inkblots, pictures, or instructions to draw somebody. Disadvantages and advantages of B-data apply (I.e expensive, takes time to administer Rorshach test)

Seek insight into personality by interpreting open-ended responses

objective test

A test consisting of Yes/no questions or True/False

test construction: rational method

come up with items that seem directly, obviously, and rationally related to what the test developer wishes to measure

test construction: factor analytic method

identifies groups of things— which can be anything from songs to test items- that seem to have something in common

psycometrics

the quality of the data that’s gathered

Are the data reliable? (consistency) Are the data valid? Are the data generalizable?

Reliability

Techniques to improve reliability

1. Care with research procedure

2. Standardized research protocol

3. Measure something important

4. Aggregation (averaging), taking the average of multiple trials limits the influence of error

Factors that undermine reliability

1. Low precision (factors should be taken as exactly and carefully as possible)

2. State of the participant

3. State of the Experimenter

4. Variation in the environment

Validity

The degree to which a measurement actually measures what it is supposed to. Ex: A sociability score is valid if it really measures sociability

constructs

An idea about a psychological attribute that goes beyond what might be assessed through any particular method of assessment. A construct is something that cannot be directly seen or touched but affects and helps to explain things are visible. (i.e intelligence is a construct that helps explain test scores and achievement)

generalizability

the degree to which a measurement can be found under diverse circumstances, such as time, context, participant population, and so on.

case method

studying a particular phenomenon or individual in depth both to understand the particular case and to discover general lessons or scientific laws

• Focuses on one subject (or a small number of subjects) in great detail

• Uses multiple sources of information: interviews, observations, medical records, tests,

• Often used to study rare, unusual, or complex situations that can’t be replicated easily in experiments

• Provides rich, descriptive data, but has limited generalizability/hard to apply to everyone

experimental method

• Tests cause and effect

• manipulates the IV and measures the DV

• Participants are assigned to random groups

• Researcher controls conditions

• Can determine which variable causes change

• Third variable problem is reduced because of randomization

  Example: Testing whether a new drug improves memory by giving one group the drug and another a placebo

correlational method

• Tests association/ relationship

• Measures variables as they naturally occur

• Low control of variables because they may be influenced by outside factors

• High risk of a third variable explaining a relationship

• Provides evidence of correlation only

  Example: Measuring whether people who exercise more also have better memory

p-level

Measures how likely your results happened by chance

• if p value is low it is unikely because of chance and is statistically significant

• if p value is high it is probably due to chance and statistically unsignifcant

Type I error

Deciding that one variable has an effect on or a relationship with another variable, when really it does not

Type II error

deciding that one variable does not have an effect on or a relationship with another variable, when really it does

effect size

a number that reflects the degree to which one variable affects or is related to another variable

correlation coefficient

A number between (-1,+1).

• Negative correlation means that as x goes up, y goes down

• Positive correlation as x goes up, y goes up

• Coefficient near zero means the two variables are unrelated

confidence interval

an estimate of the range where the true value of a statistic probably lies within

publication bias

the tendency of scientific journals preferentially to publish studies with strong results

questionable research practices (QRPs) / p-hacking

Research practices that can increase the chances of obtaining the result the researcher desires such as…

• deleting unusual responses

• adjusting results to remove the influence of seemingly extraneous factors

• neglecting to report variables or experimental conditions that fail to yield expected results

• P-hacking refers to running various analyses until one finds the necessary p-level to get the finding published

open science

emphasizes transparency, accessibility, and collaboration and making science more inclusive and reproducible

Features include:

open access: research articles and findings are published so anyone can read them without paywalls

open data: raw data sets are shared so others can analyze, replicate or expand the study

open methods: protocols, software, and algorithms are made public to ensure reproducibility

situationism

behavior is driven by the situation, and that personality is relatively unimportant

• situations are more important than personality traits

• personality assessments are a waste of time

constructivism

the philosophical view that reality as a concrete entity does not exist and that only ideas or “constructions” or reality exist

Beliefs: no way to regard someone’s interpretation of reality as accurate or inaccurate because all interpretations are social constructions

critical realism

The philosophical view that, even though we can never know reality with absolute certainty, not all explanations are equally good. Instead, we can use evidence, reasoning, and observation to judge which explanations are more likely to reflect reality.

convergent validation

a way of testing whether a measurement or judgement is accurate by checking if it agrees with other, independent sources of information. If two or more different methods (self-reports, peer-reports, or behavioral observations) point to the same conclusion about a person or trait, that agreement suggests the judgement is valid.

interjudge agreement

This means that two or more people (judges) make the same or very similar evaluations about someone’s personality/behavior. If different observers agree, it suggests the judgement is reliable and likely accurate

behavioral prediction

Using a personality judgement to successfully predict how a person will actually behave in the future. If the prediction becomes true, it shows that the judgement has validity.

predictive validity

when a test, judgment, or measurement can accurately predict future behavior or outcomes

Ex: If an SAT score predicts how well a student will do in their first year of college, then the SAT has predictive validity.

moderator variables

Factors that affect the strength or direction of the relationship between two other variables.

Example: Stress might be linked to poor health, but the effect could be moderated by social support— people with strong support may not get as sick under stress

judgability

the extent to which an individual’s personality can be judged accurately by others.

Person-Situation Debate

• People are inconsistent across situations

  Mischel, Personality and Assessment (1968)

  - Behavior is too inconsistent across situations for individual differences to be characterized by personality traits

• Response to this argument: instead of measuring single actions, measure behaviors/actions across periods of time