Exam 2 - Personality Theories

Biochemistry (Week 7)

Study of how our bodies (bio-) produce and are influenced by fluids (-chemistry)

Biochemistry and Personality (Week 7)

Study of how sensitivity to and production of chemicals changes long-term behavior patterns

Two major classes of chemicals:

• Hormones

• Neurotransmitters

Hormones (Week 7)

Chemical signals made in one area of the body that influence a different area of the body

Often involve “activating” or “turning off” processes or systems in other organs

Key Hormones for personality:

• Testosterone

• Oxytocin

• Cortisol

Testosterone (Week 7)

Hormone produced in gonads (testes and ovaries) that develops secondary sexual characteristics

• Present in much larger amounts in cis men than cis women, but levels also change over lifespan

• Effects are easiest to observe when artificially elevated

Consuming testosterone as a drug (anabolic steroids)

• Increase muscle mass, especially ins arms and torso

• Increases physical aggression

• Increases impulsive and reckless behavior

• Decreases sexual appetite and performance

‘Roid Rage (Week 7)

Testosterone Results (Week 7)

Being successful in a physical fight or sports match increases testosterone from before to after

Becoming physically larger results in more testosterone production

Appears to ready behaviors associated with social dominance

• Aggression

• Talkativeness

• High-energy action

Facets of Extraversion (Week 7)

Like all Big 5, extraversion divided into two major facets

• Dominance

• Influenced by testosterone

• “I usually take charge in groups”

• “I like public speaking”

• “I’m bold and outgoing”

• Sociability

• Influenced by oxytocin

• “I love talking to people”

• It’s easy to make friends”

• “Being alone bums me out”

Oxytocin (Week 7)

• People who have higher dispositional levels experience easier bonds, especially with new offspring

• Levels increase from baseline during pregnancy and remain elevated for the first several months after childbirth

When injected artificially, lowers fear response

• Especially true for fear of strangers

• Appears to ready formation of new connections

Cortisol (Week 7)

Stress hormone

• Works in concert with epinephrine (adrenaline)

• Floods body during times of perceived threat, readying responses to the threat

Direct resources away from “non-essential” systems (immune system, digestion) toward “essential” ones (respiration, circulation)

Cortisol: Good for Tigers, Bad for Math Tests (Week 7)

Tigers:

• Type of threat common for most of human history, with immediate physical danger presented by outside force

• Readies anti-tiger responses:

  • Fight

  • Flight

  • Freeze

  • Fawn

Math Tests:

• Type of threat common in contemporary U.S., with long-term abstract stressor giving gradual pressure over weeks or months

Cortisol Pt.2 (Week 7)

Dispositional levels associated with neuroticism, especially negative emotionality facet of neuroticism

• “I often worry about the future”

• “I sometimes avoid new experiences”

• “I lack confidence”

Neurotransmitters (Week 7)

Chemical signals that travel from cell to cell within the brain and spinal cord

Make patterns of emotion and behavior more or less likely

Two studied most for impact on personality and behavior

• Dopamine

  • Sometimes called “want” neurotransmitter

  • Notices potential rewards in environment

  • Motivates seeking of rewarding stimuli

  • Increases energy for movement towards rewards

• Serotonin

  • Sometimes called “chill” neurotransmitter

  • Balances goals against one another

  • Helps with focus, ignoring distractions, and regulating negative emotions

Dopamine (Week 7)

Associated with motivation, physical motion, learning, and reward-seeking

• “Want” neurotransmitter because underpins curiosity and other forms of seeking behavior

Behavioral Activation System

• Dopamine pathway that creates and promotes motivation to seek out rewarding experiences

• Influenced by genetics (how many receptors)

• Influenced by lifetime of experience with being rewarded for risk-taking or novelty-seeking

Plasticity

• Broad tendency to seek out new experiences and to find novelty rewarding rather than frightening

• Intellectual curiosity → Openness

• Social curiosity → Extraversion

Serotonin (Week 7)

Associated with stability, self-control, perspective-taking, and ability to resist temptation

• Sometimes called “chill” neurotransmitter because underpins ability to set aside worries and distractions

Behavioral Inhibition System

• Serotonin pathway that involved ability to take long-term view of behavior and plan out actions

• Influenced by genetics (how many receptors)

• Influenced by lifetime of experience with risk and regret

SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors)

• Medicines that treat mental illness, including clinical depression and anxiety disorders

• Associated with decrease in worry and regret, but no change in positive emotions or curiosity

Stability

• Broad tendency to modulate one’s behavior based on long-term goals and situational demands

• Social modulation → Agreeableness

• Emotional modulation → Neuroticism

• Goal modulation → Conscientiousness

Evolutionary Psychology (Week 8)

Evolution: study of how match or mismatch between individual adaptations and the environment influences probability of gene survival

Evolutionary Psychology: study of how patterns we observe in contemporary humans may have helped our ancestors survive and/or reproduce

Fit: degree to which any given feature of an organism matches well or poorly to the demands of the environment

Evolution of Self-Esteem (Week 8)

Self-Esteem

• Extent to which one views oneself as competent, likeable, capable, and morally good

Feels fundamentally important to us, to point of being an entire industry built around its measurement and improvement

Sociometer Theory

• Self-esteem evolved as a sense of how well we are doing at being liked by other people

• Important for our survival because humans rely one another for almost all of our needs, and being shunned by the group will lead to death

Socio meter Theory (Week 8)

Socio = social

Meter = measure

Sociometer theory of self-esteem

• Self-esteem acts as an approximate measure of how well we are doing at being likeable to other people

Fit (Week 8)

NOT “fitness” in the sense of being physically strong

NOT an organizing unit from “best” to “worst” or “strongest” to “weakest”

Degree of match between organism and demands of that organism’s environment

• As environment demands change, so best-fitting characteristics will change

• Many possible ways to achieve fit for one environment

High Agreeableness

• Causes easy relationship-formation when people are around you are mostly honest

• Makes you easy to cheat or use if there are dishonest people in the area

High Impulsivity

• Causes you to take advantage of opportunities in fast-changing environment

• Can sabotage long-term goals in a stable environment

• Ex. Tide Pods

Altruism and Aggression (Week 8)

Aggression: behaviors meant to hurt a person who doesn’t want to be hurt

Chimpanzees

• Humans’ closest living relatives

• Strict social hierarchies, enforced through violence

• Known to engage in systemic violence, described as “war”

• Show sophisticated tool use

Altruism: behaviors meant to help a person with no potential for self-gain

Bonobos

• As related to humans as chimpanzees are

• Resolve conflicts through grooming, recreational sex

• Rarely engage in violence

• Show complex social behaviors

Kronk - angel and devil on shoulders

Altruism and Aggression Pt.2 (Week 8)

Aggression likely helped many humans ancestors win fights and get stuff from other groups

• Now can be a major disadvantage — mostly has a poor fit to contemporary environment

Altruism (sacrifice to help other) also likely helped human ancestors get along well in groups and protect those who needed protecting (human saving dog/cat)

Are humans inherently selfless or inherently selfish?

• Both

• Which one gets expressed probably depends on the circumstances one has experienced in the past.

Criticisms of Evolutionary Psychology (Week 8)

Controversial sub-field of personality

Has been subject to over-applications

C: “Just-So Stories” (Week 8)

Explain the world as “it’s just so” - pure speculation, not evidence-based

• Most hypotheses are difficult to test directly

  • Cannot observe humans for 400 million years in a lab

• Makes it hard to know degree of evidence basis behind most claims

• Ex. elephant having along trunk by being pulled by an alligator

C: Naturalism Fallacy (Week 8)

False assumption that something being “natural” means it is healthy, good, or as things should be

• Cyanide, lead, and anthrax are 100% natural and organic — all of which kill on contact

• Brushing one’s teeth is fundamentally unnatural — estimated to have added 25+ years to average human life expectancy

Nature is filled with imperfect solutions

• Funder’s First Law!

  • Ex: big brains help humans with social coordination… and cause 1000s of death during childbirth each year

  • Ex: humans’ upright stance makes tool use easier… and causes chronic lower back problems for >30% of adults

C: We don’t just exist to make babies (Week 8)

Over half of adults in U.S. currently choose not to have children — which flies in the face of “reproduction at all costs”

• Some principles that hold at population level don’t hold at individual level

C: Humans are flexible (Week 8)

Humans’ single greatest unique skill is learning

Means there are many many many MANY things about us that can’t be explained by inheritance

C: Widespread doesn’t mean biological (Week 8)

Studies have mistaken social norm-determined behaviors for being innate (biological)

“Women prefer richer and more powerful partners; men prefer younger and more beautiful partners”

• …only replicates in societies where women need male partners in order to be financially stable

Behavioral Genetics: Nature and nurture influence each other (Week 8)

• Twin Studies

• Adoption studies

• Twin adoption studies

Nature shaped nurture (Week 8)

Evocative forces

• Ways our genetics shape the way other see us

• Bidirectional relationships

Active forces

• Ways our genetics cause us to choose environments and influences

• We chase rewards and avoid punishments

Nurture is needed to express nature (Week 8)

Without necessary environments (culture, parenting, socioeconomic status, etc.), genetic tendencies won’t be expressed

Genes influence behavior (Week 8)

• … in ways that are not necessarily linear

• … in ways that are not strictly passed from parent to child

• … in ways that get interpreted as well as learned

Nature vs. Nurture? (Week 8)

“Both. Always.”

• Funder quoting Watson

Nurture is needed to express nature (Week 8)

Cohort effects

• Generation Z are, on average, better at reading and writing than Baby Boomers

• Baby Boomers are, on average, better at navigation and survival than Gen Z

Flynn Effect

• Average IQ has increased over time

Epigenetics (Week 8)

Changes to gene structure due to life events

Life experiences (nurture) of parents influence genes (nature) of their children

Sibling Effects (Week 8)

In S date [self-reports], personalities of one’s biological siblings do not predict one’s own personality

• Birth order does not account for effect

• Does not reflect lack of influence of genetics or parenting

In B data, L data, and especially I data, siblings do resemble each other

• Biological siblings resemble each other more than adopted or step-siblings

• Siblings resemble each other more than friends do

Siblings Effects Explanations (Week 8)

1. We understand ourselves through comparing ourselves to other people in the vicinity — and nowhere is that comparison more obvious than with siblings

• “The golden child”

• “The rebel”

• “The responsible one”

• “The brat”

2. Siblings can share 50% of their genes and be raised by the same parents — and still have extremely different upbringings and life experiences

Ex. Anna and Elsa

Heritability (Week 8)

Measure of the extent to which variability in a trait is shared between individuals who share genes

Used to approximate how much influence genes have on that trait

For most major traits, r = 0.4

Aggregation (combining more measures) increases scores

Using more-precise measures can decrease estimates

Heritability Pt.2 (Week 8)

Becomes stronger if the environment is more supportive

• If child is given no education, poor nutrition, high stress: IQ will be bounded at an upper limit

• If child is given good enough environment: IQ free to vary to as high or low as genes make possible

  • Accounts for recent reversal in IQ variability and gender

  • Boys used to have more variable IQs (gone now in U.S.)

Good Enough Environments (Week 8)

Don’t have to be perfect or privileged

Instead

• Enough food not have serious health problems

• Enough love and support not to suffer neglect or trauma

• Enough opportunities not to end up stunted

Will increase the overall variability (and thus heritability) in a trait

Psychoanalytic Theory (Week 9)

View that each human is driven by inner conflicts between parts of their mind that are often unconscious, or outside of self-awareness

Developed by Sigmund Freud

• Physician interested in mental energy, or drive for life (libido)

Talking Cure (Week 9)

Discovery that talking over one’s problems with a sympathetic but uninvolved other person often causes those problems to resolve

Foundation for all modern talk therapies

• As effective, or more so, than drugs for treating most forms of depressive and anxious disorders

• Helps client understand sources of problems, put them in an ordered narrative, and develop solutions

Doctrine of Opposites (Week 9)

Any major concept implies the existence of its opposite in order to have meaning

• Life needs death to have meaning

• Bounty needs deprivation to have meaning

• Happiness needs unhappiness, etc.

The extremes of any opinion will be more similar than the moderate middle

(Ex. Swift fans/ haters, protestors against porn, democratic/ republicans)

Suggests that personalities which are moderate are more well-adjusted than those at either extreme

Neo-Freudian Theory (Week 9)

Various theories that have developed more recently, building on Freud’s work in new directions

• Klein: Objects Relations Theory

• Adler: Inferiority Complex

• Jung: Personas and Archetypes

Object Relations Theory (Week 8)

Holds that we are driven to be close to other people

• But we can never know another person’s true self, only the object (version of them that exists in our heads)

• Objects can be more or less accurate

• Mismatch often source of interpersonal conflict

Doctrine of Opposites

• Every important relationship is source of both pleasure and pain, of affection and annoyance

Examines how we grow to (or fail to) see loved ones as not just sources of pleasure or pain, but complex humans in their own right

• No such thing as a percent parent (or kid) - reconciling that is part of becoming a healthy adult

Niffle (Week 9)

In object relations theory, physical object to which a person shows a strong emotional attachment

Common for kids, but can occur for adults too

Notable example of a transitional object

• Helps a child self-soothe when loved one not around

• Exists midway between fantasy and reality

• “Magic” of object usually supported by family

Splitting (Week 9)

Maladaptive tendency to want one’s loved ones to be all good with no room for bad

• Results in desire to destroy everything harmful (or annoying, or imperfect) about a person you love

• Failure to mature enough to understand human complexity

Individual Psychology (Week 9)

Examines how people measure themselves against other, and strive to correct problems in themselves

Social Interest

• Hypothesized to be our deepest motive: to have positive and productive relationships with others (avatar)

Inferiority

• The aspect of a person they perceive to be their greatest weakness, starting in childhood

  • Usually motivates striving to correct that part of oneself

Compensation

• Efforts to overcome or defend against feelings of inferiority as an adult

  • Adaptive: focusing on one’s values

  • Maladaptive: trying to make others feel inferior too

Masculine Protest

• Type of compensation that reflects ways boys are socialized that they must be dominant and powerful, or else they are not “real men”

  • Creates desperation to defend one’s gender identity against perceived femininity

Collective Unconscious Theory (Week 9)

All humans share certain memories, ideas, dreams, images, and motivations

Collective Unconscious

• Hypothesized to be common “pool” of images and concepts that all human minds draw from

  • Filled with fairly universal archetypes (heroic journey)

Archetypes (Week 9)

Symbols that organize how people think about the world, including general ideas about types of people and figures from religions

• Give us sense of how the world is meant to work

• Hypothesized to be the same in slightly different forms across different times and places (Gods)

Persona (Week 9)

The social version of one’s personality that a person “puts on” in public

• Overtime, common to come to identify more with one’s persona than with one’s private self

Psychoanalysis Lacks: Generalizability Problems (Week 9)

Theory assumes that:

• Every person is raised by a mother and father who are married and live together

• Every person wants sex with the other gender

• Sex is a taboo (forbidden) subject

• Sexual desire is a source of shame and fear

Theory does not apply well to

• Times/places where it is acceptable to talk openly about sexual desire

• Non-nuclear families and queer people

PL: Parsimony Problems (Week 9)

Parsimony

• The quality of being simple and clear as possible

• Requires avoiding unnecessary assumptions

Theory is more complex than it needs to be

• Assumes the presence of many structures that cannot be observed directly

  • Id, ego, superego

  • Defense mechanisms

  • Collective unconscious

  • Dream symbolism

  • Preconscious mind

  • Oedipus complex, Electra complex, etc.

  • Infant sexuality

• Many competing theories in psychology are much simpler and fit the data better

PL: Open Science Problems

Open Science

• Not possible with case study methods that involve intense discussion with a single therapy client

• Means that there is a major lack of replication evidence for any of these theories

  • Most cannot be reproduced, by definition

• Making a study likely to replicate through

  • Publishing all data you collected

  • Explaining how you reached the conclusions you did

  • Detailing your procedure, including how things went wrong

  • Inviting other scientists to critique you

PL: Validity Problems (Week 9)

The quality of measuring only what one intends to measure, and measuring that in its entirety

In order to be present, you must know exactly what it is you intend to measure

• “Mental energy” — vague concept, not associated with exact units

• Id cannot be directly measured by definition

• Problem persists for most psychoanalytic constructs

PL: Operational Definition Problems (Week 9)

Operational definition:

• The specific, concrete, replicable definition of a construct that gets used for one particular study

• Doesn’t need to be all-encompassing, but must be precise and replicable

Most concepts are not specific and concrete enough to be measured consistently

• “Unconscious” cannot be observed, and is different for every single person

PL: Falsifiability Problems (Week 9)

The quality of being able to be influenced by evidence, such that new evidence being found would force the theory to change

• Ex: Behaviorist theory that humans don’t truly think was falsified by evidence of cognitive dissonance

Psychoanalytic theory can explain anything

• If Joy takes up riding — she sublimated her conflict to herself and redirected it

• If Joy doesn’t take up riding — she is in denial about her own conflicts and regressing

Psychoanalytic theory predicts either is equally likely to happen

Male Default (Week 9)

Freud discussed exclusively sexuality of men

• Regarded women as mutated or deficient men

• Didn’t consider other sexes at all, despite having scientific evidence of them

Objectification of Women (Week 9)

Psychoanalysis views women as inherently (often uncontrollably) sexual and as always desiring sex from all men at all times

• Many dream symbol guides reduce women to breasts and hips alone

Penis Envy (Week 9)

Explains women as longing to have penises, and driven by the inferiority created by lack of penis

• Suggests that women will be forever incomplete

• Reduced all genders to just genitalia

Heteronormativity (Week 9)

Tendency to assume that male-dominated heterosexuality is only form of romance that can or should exist

• Freud’s work hinges on there being exactly 2 genders, each sexually obsessed with the other

• Extremely specific to gender roles of 1850s - 1920s Austria

Denial of Sexual Abuse (Week 9)

Most clients who sought Freud’s help were women in severe emotional distress

• Therefore, high incidence rate of surviving childhood sexual abuse

• Freud came to believe that these were instead sexual fantasies that his clients constructed about their fathers, and that they then lied to him about abuse

“Doctor Knows Best” Paradigm (Week 9)

Psychoanalysis assumes that a therapist knows the client’s mind better than the client themself does

• Explains away client’s attempts to correct doctor as denial or defense mechanisms

• Dismisses any non-doctor as emotional and irrational

Creates an uneven power dynamic

• Therapist is absolute authority

• Client is supposed to listen to everything they say

Now widely recognized this is not a good foundation for a healing relationship

History of Philosophy in Europe (Week 10)

Middle Ages

• ~1300 - 1650: philosophy most determined by Christian moral teachings

Enlightenment Era

• ~1650 - 1930: philosophy most driven by rationalism

Modernism

• ~1930 - present: philosophy most influences by existentialism

Mid-Century Shift (Week 10)

Rationalism assumes world is orderly, predictable, easy to measure, and possible to describe in logic problems that always have a single correct solution

• And then the World Wars happen

Phenomenology (Week 10)

Subjective human experience is more important than any kind of objective or quantifiable measure

• Reactionary to rationalism — chooses to value love, emotion, imagination, and human imperfection

Existentialism (Week 10)

Expansion on phenomenology that says we imbue objects and settings with meaning through the decisions that we make, but meaning is not built in

• …which can be terrifying, because it means our decisions are our primary source of meaning

• We are “condemned to freedom”

• Freedom creates angst…because it removes all guidelines on our behavior

• Angst:

  • Awareness that to waste one’s life on bad choices is to waste everything, if life is all there is

  • Angst = fear of freedom

Angst (Week 10)

Awareness that

• There is no such thing as a risk0free or perfectly moral choice - even choosing to help someone might neglect someone else

• Choices are your own, and there is no unquestioned set of values that will always guide to the right one

• You often don’t even have enough information to know which of two choices is better

Bad Faith (Week 10)

Refusal to consider questions of meaning, instead focusing on acquiring material goods and not trying to imbue them with any significance

Schedule making

Authentic Existence (Week 10)

Alternative to bad faith

Says that we can have good and meaningful lives through seeking our own sense of meaning

We are lucky enough to be alive and able to experience the world!

So we should use our times to go discover things, make things, appreciate things

Says that you are the only person who can answer the questions

• “Why am i here?”

• “What should i do with my life?”

Which is both empowering and terrifying

Humanism (Week 10)

Only subfield of personality science to acknowledge that human are not

• Subatomic particles

• Rats, mice, guinea pigs

• Meteorological phenomena

They know when they’re being observed

They choose what to tell you

Begins with assumptions of existentialism, adds in assumption that humans are fundamentally good

• Humans want to help each other

• Humans strive to make positive change in the world

Self-actualization

• Proposed need to maximize positive experience in life and create own meaning

• Can only be met if more fundamental needs are met first

Primary contemporary application is in the workplace

• Understanding hierarchy of needs helps to explain employee choices

  • Which job to take

  • When to leave a job

  • When to turn down a promotion

  • How much education to seek

Core virtues identified by positive psychology (Week 10)

Hierarchy of Needs (Week 10)

How much of your decision about which jobs to pursue in the future is determined by…

• Having enough money to live on?

• Having somewhere to live?

• Long-term guarantees of work?

• Passion and interest?

• Prestige?

• Making a positive impact?

Awareness that existentialist ideal of “make your own meaning of life” is not necessarily within reach for those who need all resources just to get to safety

The “Great Resignation” (mass quitting in 2020s) blamed on the growing awareness that passion, belonging, and meaning were being offered as alternative to enough pay or benefits

Money is worth more to those who have less

Humanistic Psychology (Week 10)

Full Functioning

• Ability to live passionately and without self-doubt, seeking positive experiences

• Requires unconditional positive regard

Unconditional Positive Regard (Week 10)

Sense of being a person who has value an dis worthy of love, no matter what

• Does not mean that can behave badly without consequence

• Means that you can trust people might be angry with you but will still love you or respect you as a person

Conditional Positive Regard (Week 10)

Sense of having value and being worthy of love, if…

• …if you’re healthy

• …if you’re prosperous

• …if you’re thin

• …if you’re happy

• …if you’re moral

• …if you’re smart

Conditions of Worth

• Preclude becoming fully functioning because lock individual into trying to get at a particular goal or to maintain a certain standard of worthiness

• Consequences

  • Can cause distorted self-perceptions

    • “If only intelligent people are worthy, then I need to perceive myself as intelligent no matter what”

  • Often closes off the choices one can make in life

    • “If only intelligent people worthy, then I must go to college even if I don’t want to because I must achieve that standard”

Positive Psychology (Week 10)

Builds on humanistic psychology and specifically examines the ways to increase human thriving

• Examines what positive traits are, how to have positive experiences, what makes one a positive being

Virtues

• Traits that increase thriving for oneself and for other

• Mindfulness

• Flow

• Awe

Mindfulness (Week 10)

Originates with Buddhist philosophy

State of being aware of your own experiences in a way that them in without judgement and tries to live them as richly as possible

Possible to learn more mindfulness through training brain to take in more information — growing popularity of meditation classes to help

Flow (Week 10)

In some ways the opposite of mindfulness — involves lack of awareness of one’s surroundings

State of being caught up in moderately challenging and enjoyable activity

• Ability to practice a skill one has partially mastered

• Ability to expand one’s skill beyond the current level

Characterized by not being aware of one’s body

• Lack of hunger, thirst, tiredness, or fatigue

• Focus is entirely on the activity, with no self-consciousness or distractability

• Leaves person feeling refreshed, as if after a nap

Gives person sense of control and competence

Associated with a broad variety of activities

• Playing an instrument

• Cleaning one’s house

• Writing essays

• Programming software

• Practicing a sport

• Fixing one’s car

Awe (Week 10)

Related to mindfulness — awareness of oneself as small and fleeting in the face of something much larger, older, or more powerful

Involves encountering an enormous experience that challenges your reality and knocks you out of view of yourself as center of the world

• “Three parts beauty, one part terror.” — Thomas Gray

Constructs (Week 10)

Lenses or frames through which we actively create our view of the world

• Ex: “Wasn’t it silly, that time our car got stuck in the mud? I’m so glad we all worked together to get it out!”

  • - vs. -

• “Wasn’t it terrible, that time there was so much mud our car got stuck? It took all of us so much work just to get it out.”

How one’s cognitive systems form input from the world into a sense of what to expect from the world

Partially determined by past experience

Used to predict the future

Constructive Alternativism (Week 10)

View that construals of the world are not forced on us by past experience, but that we can actively choose between them

• Many different frames we can adopt to explain our own experiences

• Ex: therapy and reframing trauma

Anyone have an example of an experience that felt catastrophic at the time, but feels like no big deal (or even a silly good time) to your present self?

One way to embrace existentialist ideal of seeking out positive experiences through limited time is to adopt satisficing construct for decision-making

Two different constructs for decision making

• Satisficing

• Maximizing

Easiest way to adopt a satisficing as a frame?

• Choose to do so!

Satisficing (Week 10)

Goal is to make a good-enough decision

Working at a decision until a “good enough” or satisfying option occurs

• Involves going with the first reasonably sufficient answer after considering a few answers

Benefit: Spends time, effort, and money strategically

Drawback: has potential to miss a better option

Maximizing (Week 10)

Goal is to make the best possible decision

Putting in all effort necessary to choose best-possible option from all the ones available

• Considers all available information to arrive at most rational decision

Benefit: extremely high-quality decision

Drawback: enormous time, effort, and potential for dissatisfaction

Hedonic Happiness (Week 10)

What tend to think of when we say “happiness”

Involves maximizing pleasure and minimizing negative experiences as a goal in its own right

Good news — and bad news — is that it tends to be fairly stable from day to day and over life events

Can be enjoyable, but will not lead to long-term well-being if

• pursued at the expense of other goals

• leads to impulsively grabbing pleasure now

• requires too much worry about “am I enjoying myself?”

Eudaimonic Happiness (Week 10)

Involves seeking a meaningful life through seeking goals that are valuable in their own right and give one a sense of meaning

Culture (Week 11)

Patterns of belief, habit, ritual, and behavior that shape group identity

• Involves cultural outputs: food, art, language, religion, institutions, etc.

• Usually defined through shared language, shared ethnicity, shared geography, and shred ethics

Hard to define

• Boundaries between cultures are not firm

• Growing number of bicultural or multicultural individuals

Ex: Australians share more language and values with Americans, more food and social norms with Indonesians

Etics (Week 11)

Fairly universal aspects of any given cultural idea

• Ex: kids should work to better themselves to be self-sufficient adults

Emics (Week 11)

Culturally specific aspects of any given etic

• Ex: kids should work to better themselves to be self-sufficient adults

  • …by becoming financially and socially independent (United States)

  • …by becoming able to support their parent in older adulthood (China)

U.S. Values (Week 11)

Based on connotations of phrases as well as literal meanings, what does U.S. culture value?

Universal(ish) Values (Week 11)

Concepts that several different cultures all hold to be important

• Differ in the way they are expressed

  • Ex: “duty” in U.S. vs. “duty” in India

• Differ in relative importance

  • Ex: stance on killing some to protect the whole

Values:

• Power

• Achievement

• Stimulation

• Self-direction

• Understanding

• Benevolence

• Tradition

• Conformity

• Security

Universal Values (Week 11)

High Openness to Change

• Self-direction

• Stimulation

• Hedonism

High Conservatism

• Conformity

• Tradition

• Security

High Self-Enhancement

• Hedonism

• Achievement

• Power

High Self-Transcendence

• Universalism

• Benevolence

Theory states that cultures vary in the extent to which they choose to emphasize Conservatism vs. Changes; Self-Transcendence vs. Self-Enhancement

Value Conflict (Week 11)

Lack of understanding between cultures or negative emotions at values that contradict one’s own

• Can lead to misunderstandings and even violence

One reason that role of culture in personality cannot be ignored, even if psychologists have historically overlooked it

• Ex: social clocks are specific to one’s cultural values

Head vs. Heart (Week 11)

Hypothesized difference in types of values within a culture — “warm” vs. “smart” ones

Head Values:

• Artistic excellence

• Self- improvement

• Formal education

• Critical thinking

• Progress and innovation

• Creativity

• Curiosity

Heart Values:

• Mercy and forgiveness

• Religion and spiritualism

• Hope

• Love and compassion

• Gratitude

• Temperance

Reciprocal Causality (Week 11)

• Boston is first U.S. city to have a college

• Boston attracts more people interested in “head” values represented by college

• Boston develops more colleges

• Social influence causes people to become more like neighbors

• Boston encourages “head” type activities with festivals, values, etc.

Individualism (Week 11)

View of self as distinct, consistent, and contained

• Personality comes from private thoughts and feelings

• Self-regard is very important

• Each person is a single self-contained unit

• Views personality as stable, clear, private, and “true”

• Life satisfaction comes primarily from self-esteem

United States

Netherlands

Britain

Germany

Australia

New Zealand

Collectivism (Week 11)

View of self as part of various situations and groups

• Personality comes from interactions with others

• Close relationships are very important

• Each person is a part of several greater wholes

• Views personality as flexible, changeable, and less fixed

• Life satisfaction comes primarily from close others

Japan

China

India

Colombia

Peru

Venezuela

Individualism and Collectivism (Week 11)

Duty…

• …means taking care of your family

  • Collectivism

• …means fighting for what’s yours

  • Individualism

Saying you love your boss while at work and that you hate him while at home…

• …is hypocritical

  • Individualism

• …is just good manners

  • Collectivism

The early bird…

• …gets the worm

  • Individualism

• …draws the hunter’s shot

  • Collectivism

People want to be distinct from others

• For individualistic cultures, best way to do this is through being independent and self-sufficient

• For collectivistic cultures, best way to do this is through attaining leadership and/or caring positions

Culture and Motivation (Week 11)

Personal strivings

• Long-term goals for one’s life

• “Self as agent”

Individualism

• Approach motivation

  • People encouraged to go out and try new things, to break out of comfort zone, to be bold and adventurous

  • Risk of loss is considered worth potential of reward

Collectivism

• Avoidance motivation

  • People encouraged to minimize risk, keep away from bad outcomes, protect and preserve what they have

  • Risk of loss means grabbing for rewards not worth it

Respect (Week 11)

Different cultures have different views of who earns respect, who deserves most respect, and how

Three broad types

• Dignity

• Honor

• Face

Dignity culture

• Common in northern U.S. and other structure capitalist economies

Honor culture

• Common in southern U.S., Mexico, and other areas of variable law enforcement

Face Culture

• Common in Japan, Scandinavia, and other cultures based on cooperative hierarchies

Dignity Cultures (Week 11)

View that individuals have value and deserve respect simply because they are individuals

• Being internally strong and consistent leads to self-respect, which is the only kind anyone needs

• Value in being true to oneself, no matter what others say

Honor Cultures (Week 11)

View that individuals have deserve respect if they can fight to defend it, never letting an insult stand

• Ability to defend one’s property is strength, and strength deserves respect

• Value in fighting for what one is owed by the world