personality and social psych

social psychology

the scientific study of the effects of social and cognitive processes on the way people perceive, influence, and relate to others

others → real and imagined, present or not

personality vs. social psychology

• both concerned with explaining human thoughts, feelings, and actions

  • generally, personality psychology forcuses on the person as the locus of explanation across situations

    • how do stable individual differences influence thoughts, feelings, and actions?

  • social psychology forcuses on the situation as the locus of explanation

    • how does the social context influence thoughts, feelings, or actions?

• cross-situational stability vs. situational contingency

e.g. in conflict

• personality psychology

  • cross-situational stability

  • agreeableness pertainst to cooperative, empathetic and altruistic tendencies

  • people with low agreeableness are more prone to conflict

    • regardless of context or situation

• social psychology

  • situational contingency

  • when goals are misaligned, other people’s goals may obstruct our own

  • people will be more prone to conflict when their goals are misaligned with others’

    • regardless of personality

person x situation interactions

• interactionism

  • x = f(P, S)

    • where x is some behaviour, thought, emotion

    • P = person, S = situation

  • people with low agreeableness will be prone to conflict when their goals are not aligned with other parties

• almost all personality and social psychologists consider thoughts, feelings, and actions to be a product of the interaction between persons and situations

  • both grounded in empirical research

  • broad disciplines with fuzzy boundaries

    • blend into other disciplines and into each other

core themes of social psych

people construct their own reality (within limits)

social infuence is pervasive

people have central and core motivations

people construct their own reality (within limits)

social influence is pervasive

people have central and core motivations

• striving for mastery, control, and certainty of their environment

  • seeking to understand and predict events in the social world and in order to obtain rewards

  • understanding

  • control

  • seeking meaning

• seeking connectedness

  • belonging

  • relatedness

  • trust

• valuing me and mine

  • self-enhancement

  • positive esteem

processing principles

• conservatism → existing beliefs and opinions are slow to change

• accessibility → accessible information has the most impact on thoughts, feelings, and actions

  • mind as associative network

  • some network elements are more active than others

  • these influence ongoing thought, feeling, and action

• processing depth

  • systems 1 and 2 thinking

organising framework

scientific method

• systematic observation combined with inductive and deductive reasoning to support theories

  • aim: to provide causal, mechanistic explanations of phenomena

    • stated in theories

      • generalising statements couched in terms of causal relationships between well-defined abstract constructs

construct validity

• extent to which manifpulations and measures correspond to theoretical costructs

• achieve via selecting appropriate measures and using multiple measures

internal validity

• extent to which causal inference IV → DV is justified

• achieved via: manipulation and random assignment

external validity

• generalisability

• achieve via appropriate sampling and research design (dependent on type of generalisation sought)

personality

• regularities in affect, behaviour, and cognition

• an individual’s unique variation on the general evolutionar design for human nature, expressed as a developing pattern of

three levels

• dispositional traits

  • probabilistic descriptions of regularities in affect, behaviour, and cognition

  • arising in response to very broad (relatively decontextualised) classes of stimuli and situations

    • e.g. provocation, frustration, threat

• characteristic adaptations

  • concerns an individual’s particular life circumstances

  • highly contextualised

  • descriptions of what people are trying to do in their life

• self-defining life narratives

  • the biographical account we have constructed about who we are

  • highly contextualised and individualised

  • attempts to capture a person’s story or lived experience

conceptual definition

what is the concept or construct?

e.g. quality of life, athletic ability, gender equality

operational definition

how do we know the construct when we see it? how do we observe/measure/quantify it?

• e.g. rating on a ‘life satisfaction,’ scale

• e.g. running speed/time

• e.g. gender pay gap or % gender representation

• for personality traits: most operational definitions are based on verbal descriptions of a person

the characters of theophastrus

allport and odbert (1936)

• collected an exhaustive list of about 18000 lexical terms that describe what people are like (e.g. sociable, aggressive, patient, orderly)

• perhaps useful for rating personality?

• the lexical hypothesis: crucial features of personality will, over human history, be coded into language

• problem:

  • unwieldy, more a laundry list than a system

• led to people asking: what is the number and nature of basic trait dimensions required to describe the structure of personality?

factor analysis

cattel (1945)

problems with cattell’s 16 traits

• subjectivity

  • different people reach a different reduced set of allport and odbert’s descriptors

• poor replicability/reproducibility

  • using cattell’s 171 personaloty descriptors, many people failed to obtain the same 16 factors

• redundancy

  • correlations among many of the 16 factors were very high, suggesting they might not be distinct

if personality was a deck of cards

subsequent research in the 1950s-80s

• most replicable factor structures suggesteed 3-6 traits

• particular factors seemed to reliably emerge

• goldberg and colleagues argued for a ‘big five,’ model

parallel to this lexical tradition was the questionnaire tradition

• began with (factor) analysis of clinical questionnaires and symptom checklists (1940s-60s)

• converged on 2-5 factors

• costa and mccrae argued for a five-factor model

the big five

• probabilistic descriptions of

  • affect

    • e.g. extraversion: feelings of positive affect and energy

    • e.g. openness: feelings of interest, awe, and introspection

  • behaviour

    • e.g. extraversion: bold, assertive, talkative

    • e.g. conscientiousness: industrious, organised

  • cognitions

    • e.g. conscientiousness: resisting distraction, maintaining focus

    • e.g. neuroticism: worrying about what might go wrong

    • e.g. openness: exploring ideas, trying new things

hierarchical structure of traits

• meta-traits (very broad/high bandwidth/parsimony)

  • stability vs plasticity

• domains

  • OCEAN (big five)

• aspects

  • e.g. assertiveness, enthusiasm

• facets

  • e.g. energy levels, positive emotions, talkativeness

• nuances (very narrow/fidelity/comprehensive)

  • e.g. liking parties

the big five inventory version 2 reflects the heirarchical structure of traits

measuring traits

scoring sheets (assigning rating numbers)

questionnaires with terms and elaborations of them

the scope and limits of traits

• can you get a complete picture of someone’s personality from their traits? is there more to personality?

  • McAdams (1995) → traits provide an initial ‘sketch,’ of a person → the psychology of the stranger

• traits are fairly generic descriptors, and relatively decontextualised

• but much of our individual personalities are highly contextualised

level 2: characteristic adaptations

• the different ways we might adapt to our circumstances in terms of time, place, and/or social role

  • sometimes called personal concerns

    • what a person is working on in their life with respect to

      • time → stages of life (e.g. vocational interests)

      • place → environmental niches (e.g. study strategies, leadership styles)

      • role → social niches in a particular social context (sibling dynamics, parenting styles)

• concern’s an individual’s particular life circumstances

• highly contextualised

• descriptions of what people are trying to do in their life

constructs that might qualify as CAs:

another conceptualisation:

level 3: life narratives

• the biographical account we have constructed about who we are

• highly/completely contextualised and individualised

• attempts to capture a person’s story or lived experience

• people think about who they are in terms of a, ‘story,’

  • narrative identity: the internal, dynamic life story that an individual constructs to make sense of his or her life

• stories provide our lives with an overarching unity and purpose

  • who am i?

  • why am i the way i am?

  • where am i going?

generally described in two ways:

themes

structure/form

themes

• defining pre-occupations and concerns

• what the story is about; the moral of the story

• some prominent themes:

  • agency (autonomy and self-direction) and communion (interpersonal connection)

  • redemption sequences and contamination sequences

    • contamination = things have gone bad, can’t go back

  • affective tone (optimistic, pessimistic, etc.)

structure/form

• how the details are organised and put together

• the coherence of the story, how detailed aspects of the story are, how they unfold

• some prominent aspects of structure/form

  • slow and linear, the ‘growth story,’

  • turbulent, changing, or with many highs and lows

  • fragmented, uncertain, problems unresolved, questions unanswered

studying life narratives:

findings from studies of life narratives

• recipients of awards for bravery or caring

  • life narratives had salient themes of both agency and communion

  • life’s challenges described as a redemption sequence

• highly generative adults (people who actively promote the wellbeing and growth of future generations)

  • five salient themes:

    • early advantage in life

    • sensitivity to others’ suffering

    • development of a moral framework

    • redemption sequences

    • prosocial goal setting

correlation coefficients

degree

cohen’s rule of thumb

extreme scores

variance

covariance

example covariance calculation

null hypothesis significance testing

+ degrees of freedom

correlation estimates do x as sample size increases

spearman’s rho correlation

spearman’s rho and outliers

from correlation to regression

perfect/imperfect correlation

the least squares parameter estimates

how o minimise total squared error

regression diagnostics

homoscedasticity

variance explained

null hypothesis significance testing for the regression model

t tests

summary research questions

using regression

reliability and validity

cronbach’s alpha

validity

Erik Erikson

our personality continually develops across the lifespan

the UP series

mischel et al., (1972, 2011) → marshmallow study

• 4 yo participants complete a ‘delay of gratification,’ protocol

• wait times predict

  • during adolescence (~10 years later)

    • higher SAT scores, coping skills

    • lower agression

  • during adulthood (~30 years later)

    • educational achievement

    • lower drug use

    • health

temperament

mary rothbart’s model

the ‘little six,’ (soto, 2016)

rank-order stability

four insights from this literature

proposed explanations:

what does the evidence say?

mean-level change

a lot of evidence supporting this

meta analysis by roberts et al., (2006)

mean-level change seems to be broadly, ‘positive,’ toward, ‘psychosocial maturity,’

proposed explanations

genetic influences

environmental effects

cohort effects

genetic influences

environmental influences

cohort effects

cross-cultural comparisons

different trajectories across cultures?

cross-species comparisons

individual change

transition to work

neuroticism and financial insecurity

life events on personality

effects of travel and temporary migration

impact of clinical interventions

do changes in personality occur after a significant life effect, or do they precede that event?

can we choose to change?

how did they change?

summary

the song remains the same

the lexical hypothesis

recall week 3 (regression and predictive validity)

history of prediction

achievement