Week 10 Lecture 1 - Personality Psychology

Personality psychology

Is the study of psychological diversity

The history of “personality”

• Personality as personhood

• Personality as persona

• Personality as character

Theophratus (319 BC)

Greeks are educated alike, it has befallen us to have characters so variously constituted

• Ironical

• Flatterer

• Boor

• Grumbler

• Reckless

• Chatty

• Gross

• Surly

• Stupid

• Superstitious

• Gossip

• Shameless

• Arrogant

• Patron of rascals

“The obnoxious man”

Behaviour of a horrible person, deliberately going out of their way to be annoying

What is personality?

Personality as what is ‘beneath’ the mask’

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

• Linked to rise of Western individualism

• Personality as ‘psychological individuality’

• Not physical attributes

• Not intellectual-related attributes

• Not transient attributes

• Not context-specific attributes

NOT Physical attributes

Things such as:

• Tall

• Unfit

• Obese

• Sickly

• Blonde

NOT Intellect related

Things such as:

• Clever

• Slow-witted

• Good vocabulary

• Intelligent

• Stupid

NOT Transient state

Things such as:

• Angry

• Sad

• Jealous

• Ecstatic

• Worried

NOT Context specific / narrow

Thing such as:

• Greens-voter

• Smoker

• Jazz lover

• Anti-vaxxer

• Eats junk-food

What’s left is personality

• Shy

• Impulsive

• Adventurous

• Neurotic

• Friendly

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

Personality & self-concept

“Describe yourself”

• Likes, beliefs, values 33%

• Personality traits 25%

• Behaviours 9%

• Interpersonal attributes 9%

• Demographic attributes 9%

• Physical characteristics 8%

• Abilities/aptitudes 6%

Personality & social communication

Human intelligence evolved to handle the complexities of group life

Much of our social communication aims to learn what others are like: their personalities

Person perception

Person perception is judging other people’s personalities

• ‘Dispositional inference’ and the ‘correspondence bias’

• Rapid personality judgements

Dispositional inference

Psychological process of attributing a person’s behaviour to their internal characteristics, such as personality traits, motives, or beliefs, rather than to external situational factors

Eg. You see someone helping an elderly person cross the road → you think “they’re kind”

Correspondence bias

Correspondence bias is the tendency to form assumptions about a person’s character based on their behaviour.

Eg. Someone cuts you off in traffic analogy→ “they’re rude”, even though the real reason might be that they’re rushing to the hospital

Stereotypes

Largely made up of personality traits believes (rightly or wrongly) to be associated with social groups

Personality psychology’s place in the field

• Dedicate to understanding 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 with social psychology

  • The person versus the situation

Personality psychology’s triple focus:

Every person is…

Human nature - like all other people

Systematic variation - like some other people

Personal uniqueness - like no other person

Psychiatric taxonomy

Refers to the system of classifying and categorising mental disorders — basically, how psychology and psychiatry organise different kinds of mental illnesses into groups based on symptoms, causes and patterns

Eg. DSM-5

Mood disorders: (include depressive disorder (low mood) and bipolar disorders (mood swings between highs and lows))

Depressive disorder → major depression disorder (MDD), Persistent Depressive Disorder (Dysthymia)

Bipolar disorders → bipolar I (at least one manic episode), bipolar II (at least one hypomanic episode and one major depressive episode, no full manic episode), cyclothymia (chronic mood fluctuations with milder symptoms of depression and hypomania lasting 2 years or more)

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

Hierarchy of traits: an example

High-level trait: extroversion

Mid-level trait: sociability, sensation-seeking

Low-level trait: physical sensation-seeking, sexual sensation-seeking

Illustrative behaviour: sky-diving, raunchy dating app profile

How are traits organised?

• One theory: “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)” Muhammad Ali

Trait Universe - Allport & Odbert

1936 attempt to survey the ‘trait universe’

4,504 terms remained after filtering out physical attributes, cognitive abilities and talents, transient states, evaluative terms

Cattell’s 16 factors

Reserved - Outgoing

Stable - Neurotic

Expedient - Conscientious

Shy - Venturesome

Tough-minded - tender-minded

Trusting - Suspicious

Practical - Imaginative

Forthright - Shrewd

Less intelligent - More intelligent

Humble - Assertive

Sober - Happy-go-lucky

Placid - Apprehensive

Conservative - Experimenting

Conforming - Independent

Undisciplined - Controlled

Relaxed - Tense

The “Big Five”

Cattell’s 16 factors were reduced by factor analysis to 5

O - Openness to Experience

C - Conscientiousness

E - Extraversion

A - Agreeableness

N - Neuroticism