Psych Chapter 14

Personality psychology

Focuses on the stable mental characteristics underlying our behavior across social contexts.

Social psych

Examines how the presence/influence of others affect our thinking, emotions, or behavior.

Personality

Refers to our style of interacting with the world and other people, and is interested in individual differences for social and clinical purposes.

What is personality?

Personality is defined as distinctive and relatively enduring ways of thinking, feeling, and acting that determine our behavior and are influenced by internal moods/feelings and non-physical differences between people.

Judging personality

We can gather a lot of information about a person's personality quickly through "thin-slice" judgments, where we make quick assessments based on limited information.

The Big Five

The Big Five is a model of personality that includes five major dimensions:openness to new experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.

OCEAN or CANOE

OCEAN or CANOE is an acronym used to remember the five dimensions of the Big Five model:openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.

Personality pitfall

The Barnum effect refers to the tendency of people to believe vague and general feedback about their personality, leading to the belief that it accurately describes them.

Studying personality

There are two major approaches to studying personality:the nomothetic approach, which aims to understand general laws that govern behavior, and the idiographic approach, which focuses on understanding the unique characteristics of an individual.

Behavior-genetic approach

The behavior-genetic approach studies the influence of genetics, shared environmental factors, and non-shared environmental factors on personality by comparing monozygotic and dizygotic twins.

Psychoanalytic approach

The psychoanalytic approach views personality as the product of conflict between three unconscious forces in the mind:the id, ego, and superego.

Defense mechanisms

Defense mechanisms are strategies used by the ego to deal with anxiety caused by the conflict between the id and superego. Examples include repression, denial, displacement, projection, regression, reaction formation, and sublimation.

Projective tests

Projective tests, such as the Thematic Apperception Test, aim to evaluate someone's psychological problems by having them respond to ambiguous stimuli, which are then interpreted by an analyst.

Trait approach

The trait approach to personality focuses on identifying and measuring relatively stable predispositions, or traits, that influence behavior. The Big Five model is a popular trait-based approach.

Ingroup bias

Ingroup bias refers to the tendency to favor our own group, or ingroup, over outgroups, which are perceived as different or apart from our ingroup.

Scapegoat theory

Scapegoat theory suggests that prejudice offers an outlet for anger by providing someone to blame for our frustrations.

Aggression

Aggression refers to behavior intended to harm others, either verbally or physically, and is influenced by genetic, neural, and biochemical factors.

Bystander non-intervention

Bystander non-intervention refers to the phenomenon where bystanders fail to help or reach out for help in an emergency situation, often due to pluralistic ignorance and diffusion of responsibility.

Bystander effect

The bystander effect is the tendency for individuals to be less likely to help in an emergency when there are other people present, as they assume someone else will take responsibility.

Interaction between actions and attitudes

Group polarization and groupthink are two phenomena that demonstrate the interaction between actions and attitudes within a group.

Attraction

Attraction refers to the feeling of being drawn to someone or something, and can be influenced by factors such as physical attractiveness, similarity, and proximity.

Love

Love is a complex emotion characterized by feelings of affection, attachment, and intimacy towards another person.

Elements of conflict

Conflict involves a perceived incompatibility of goals, interests, or values between individuals or groups, and can arise from factors such as competition, differences in beliefs, or limited resources.