Exam 1 REVIEW Personality Psych

Personality Psychology

Addresses how people feel, think, and behave

Why is Personality Psychology Important

Because it regards puzzles of internal consistency it’s full attention

• Closely connected with clinical psychology. Helps bring together all branches of psychology

Mission

Explain the whole person, but its impossible

• to make the mission possible you must choose to limit what you look at, specific patterns

Personality

An individuals characteristic patterns of thought, emotion, and behavior together with psychological mechanisms

Basic approach/ paradigm

Systematic, self imposed limitation

Trait Approach

Focuses on the ways that people differ psychologically and how these differences might be conceptualized, measured, and followed over time

• Largest and most dynamic approach

Biological Approach

Understand induvial differences in the term of body concentrating on biological mechanisms such as anatomy, physiology, genetics, and evolution

Psychoanalytic Approach

Investigating the unconscious mind and the nature and resolution of internal mental conflict

Phenomenology Approach

Peoples conscious experience of the world

Why use all of these perspectives

Each approach can be useful for handling it’s own key concerns

• Personality psych needs to look at people from all of these directions and utilize all of these approaches because of different issues

Pros and Cons of using all appraoches

Pros:

• Broad mandate to account for the psychology of whole persons and real life concerns

• Various approaches is good at addressing certain topic

Cons:

• Can have to overly broad or unfocused research

• Each approach ignores what it is not good at explaining

The Big 5: OCEAN

• Neurotiasm

• Extraversion

• Openness

• Agreeableness

• Conscientiousness

Psychological Triad

How people think, feel, behave

• When it’s a safety thing everyone does the same thing

Latent Variable

Underlying variable, variables unseen but measurable

• Ex. Anger

• Measured though operationalization of our constructs

Two Kinds:

• Formative: Socially constructed, race, we make it real, we define it

  • Ex. Discrimination, socioeconomic status

• Reflective: Depressions, shown by symptoms

Research:

Emphasizes creative thinking over memorization

Funders 2nd Law

“There are no perfect indicators of personality, there are only clues, and clues are always ambiguous”

• Even gather/ take the bad clues in consideration

Funders 3rd Law:

“Then, is this something beats nothing, two times out of 3”

BLIS:

4 Possibilities while looking at personality’s

S data/ self reports:

Self judgments. Participants usually do a questionnaire whether they are domaint, friendly, or conscientious. Face valid

• Ex. Self rating

Advantages:

• Large amount of information

• Access to thoughts, feelings, intentions

• Some s- data are true by definition

• Casual forces

• Simple and easy, cheap

Disadvantages:

• Bias

• Error

• Too simple, too easy

I data: Informant reports

Judgments by informants that know the participants the best to ask questions on a 9 point scale

• Ex. How dominant, sociable, aggressive, or shy is your acquaintance

Advantages:

• Large amount of info

• Real world-bias

• Common sense and context

• Some I data are true by definition

• Casual force

• Ecologically valid

Disadvantages:

• Limited behavioral information

• Lack of access to private experiences

• Error

• Bias

L- data: Life outcomes

Verifiable, concrete, real life facts that may hold psychological significance

• Ex. Answers facts, age, gender, been married, GPA, etc

Advantages:

• Objective and verifiable

• Intrinsic importance

• Psychological relevance

Disadvantages:

• Multideterminant

• Possible lack of psychological relevance

B data: Behavioral Observation

Observations done in real life or in a labtory produced

• Ex. Can do a diary log and experience-sampling method, EAR, social media

Advantages:

• Wide range of context

• Appearance of objectivity

Disadvantages:

• Difficult and expensive

• Uncertain interpretation

Projective Hypothesis

If you are asked to interpret a meaningless or ambiguous stimulus (such as ink blocks), your answer cannot come from the stimulus itself, because the stimulus doesn’t look or mean anything. The answer must come from your needs, feelings, experiences, thought processes

• Tries to tell you about how you organize things internally through what you see

• TAT (make a story for pictures)

• long and time consuming

Projective Tests

Only provide B data. They are specific, directly observed responses to particular stimuli. Ink blocks, pictures, instructions to draw someone

Objective Tests:

Yes or no questions or True or false, or on a numeric scale. Question making up the test seem ore objective and less open to interptation

Types: Rational method, factor analytic method, empirical method

Commonality

Items that are answered the same by 95% of people. Helps find epople who throw off tests

Rational Method

Comes up with items / questions that seem directly, and rationally related to what the test developer wants to measure

• Ask the number of inductees increase this process becomes impractical

Factor Analytic Method

Statistical method. Identifies groups of things, test items that have things in common= factor

Empirical Method

1. Gather lots of data

2. Sample of participants who are independently divided into groups

3. Comparison groups ex. Sad ppl vs. happy ppl

4. Compare answers

• Objective test, shows/ demonstrates systematic data 

Internal Validity

Predicts what’s going to happen in study, will if affect the outcome

External Validity

Can the results now be generalized to other populations

Falsifying

Creating stuff up

• Defense mechanism can cause the created thing to be true

Science

A self correcting system or creating and falsifying models of the universe, used to overcome the limitations of human perception and memory, emphasizing the importance of evidence

Convergent Validity

Do we find the same thing in different types of ways

(Differen’t types of data)

Reliability

Referring to someone or something that is dependable

Measurement Error

Error variance

Factors that undermine Reliability

• Low precision

• State of participant

• State of experimenter

• Variation in the environment

Techniques to improve Reliability

• Care with research procedure

• Standardized research protocol

• Measure something important

• Aggregation

Enhance Reliablility

• Be careful

• Double check all measurements

• Have someone proofread

• Make sure the procedures for scoring data are clearly understood by everyone

• Aggregation

Validity

Is the degree to which a measurement actually measures what it is suppose to do

Constructs

Made by methodologists Lee Cronbach and Paul Meehl

Says intelligence or sociability is C

• This is something that cannot be directly seen or touched but affects and helps explain things that visible (implication)

Construct Validity

To prove construct, for example sociability, the clients friends answer how social they are, how much they post, how many parties they go to, etc

Generalizability

Does your data apply to other people? Can it be generalized

Case Method

Involves closely studying a particular event or person in order to find out as much as possible

Advantages:

• Describes whole phenomena rather than isolated variables

• Source of ideas

• Sometimes forgotten

Disadvantages:

• Can’t always be generalized

Independent Variable

Imposed by the experimenter and is not affected by any characteristic or behavior of the participants

Dependent Variable

Behavior that is measured

Correlation Coefficient

Reflects just how strong this trend is/ relationship

Advantages:

• Measures x as it actually occurs in nature so its range is realistic

• Demonstrates something that does happen

• all you can do sometimes

Disadvantages:

• Third variable problem

• Can’t tell causation

Experimental Design

Advantages:

• Can establish causality

• Demonstrates something that can happen

Disadvantages:

• Can’t be sure what you manipulated

• Create level of a variable that is impossible in real life

• Can’t determine how much a variable affects the other

• Experiments are simply not possible

• Third variable problem

Null Hypothesis significance testing

The percentage change that we achieved this result if the null was true 

Significant if its very large because it’s unlikely to happen just by chance

• Expressed by p value

• Possibility of zero result

Disadvantage:

• Difficult toP val describe

• Interpretation is sometimes wrong

• P- level addresses only the probability of one kind of error (type one)

P value

Probability that a difference of that size would be found of that actual size of the difference was zero

Type 1 error

Deciding that one variable has an effect on a relationship with another variable when it doesn’t

Type 2 error

Deciding that one variable does not have an effect on a relationship with another variable when it does

Effect size

How big is the relationship small or big? More meaningful than significance level

• Standard deviations score away from the variable

• Ex. Medication effect size on anxiety disorder

Correlation Coefficent

Describe the strength of their correlation or experimental results

Correlation Coefficent / Pearson r

• No correlation number will be near 0

• Positive correlation= greater than 0

• Negative correlation = less than 0

(1) A correlation of .40 represents the true upper limit to which one can predict behavior from personality or see consistency in behavior from one situation to another; and (2) this limit is a small upper limit.

Absolute vs relative consistency: 

Almost everybody will be more talkative at a party than when standing in line at the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV). But the most talkative person at the party will probably also be the most talkative person at the DMV (see Funder & Colvin, 1991). In this way personality manifests relative consistency rather than absolute consistency

confidence intervals:

Tells a statistical assumptions the range of values within the true value of a statistic probably lies

Publication bias

Studies with strong results are more likely to be published than studies with weak results

Questionable research practices or p hacking

Refers to hacking around in ones data, running one analysis after another, until one finds the necessary degree of statistical significance or p level to get published

Purpose of personality testing

For the professional personality testers (data)

Benefits for the tester

Protection of research participants (ethical concerns)

• Deception

• privacy

• uses of psychological research

• representation

• honesty and open science

Error vs error

• measurement error

• there is always error anything not the variable of interest

• states and traits

Spearman Brown

• Error is randomly distributed

• Can’t be valid til reliable

• Formula for predicting test length

Latent variable and constructs

Constructs are measures of latent variable

Construct validation is the process of exploring the accuracy of the latent variable

Gamblers fallacy

Maximum correlation can happen when somebody changes the data range to deceiveRe people

• weakness is that if you test it in one time period and find a correlation, it may not be like that in a differn’t time period

Regression

Shows how much a variable affects the predicts outcome

• apart of correlation

Reliability

• Test - reteast (.9 correlation)

• Alternative forms of the test (.7 correlation)

• Split half reliability

  • Ex. 1 2 3 | 4 5 6

    • Look at correlation of the front half questions and back half questions than them numbers correlation together

Internal Consistency

The average of all the possible split halves

Trait Approach: 

• relies on correlational designs

• focuses exclusively on individual differences

• seeks to measure the degree to which a person might be more or less dominant, sociable, or nervous than someone else. 

• helpful for understanding and assessing how people differ. 

• prone to neglect aspects of psychology common to all people, as well as the ways in which each person is unique

Constructivism

which is widespread throughout modern intellectual life (Stanovich, 1991). Slightly simplified, this philosophy holds that reality, as a concrete entity, does not exist. All that does exist are human ideas, or constructions, of reality.

Critical realism:

This philosophy prescribes that you gather all the information that might help you determine whether or not the judgment is valid and then make the best determination you can. 

• Rejection of post modernism

• better not absolute answers

• Will always be not right, but we can try to get better answers

Convergent validation:

is achieved by assembling diverse pieces of information, such as appearance, walking and swimming style, and quackiness, that “converge” on a common conclusion: Beyond a reasonable doubt, it’s a duck. The more items of diverse information that converge, the more confident the conclusion 

For personality judgments, the two primary converging: 

1. interjudge agreement

The degree to which two or more people making judgments about the same person provide the same description of that person’s personality.

2. behavioral prediction

The degree to which a judgment or measurement can predict the behavior of the person in question.

predictive validity

The degree to which one measure can be used to predict another.

 moderator variables.

 Research has focused on four potential moderator variables that make accurate judgments of personality more or less likely: (1) the judge, (2) the target (the person who is judged), (3) the trait that is judged, and (4) the information on which the judgment is based.

 judgability is

a matter of “what you see is what you get.” The behavior of judgable people is organized coherently; even acquaintances who know them in separate settings describe essentially the same person

THE FOUR STAGES OF RAM

In order to get from an attribute of an individual’s personality to an accurate judgment of that trait, four things must happen (Figure 4.8). First, the person being judged must do something relevant, that is, informative about the trait to be judged. Second, this information must be available to a judge. Third, this judge must detect this information. Fourth and finally, the judge must utilize this information correctly.

 But if the target of judgment encounters a burning building, rushes in, and saves the family inside, then the person has done something relevant. Next, this behavior must occur in a manner and place that make it possible for you, as the judge, to observe it. Someone might be doing something extremely courageous right now, right next door, but if you can’t see it, you may never know and never have a chance to assess accurately that person’s courage. But let’s say you happen by just as the target of judgment rescues the last member of the family from the flames. Now the judgment has passed the availability hurdle. That is still not enough: Perhaps you were distracted, or you are perceptually impaired (you broke your glasses in all the excitement), or for some other reason you failed to notice what happened. But if you did notice, then the judgment has passed the detection hurdle. Finally, you must accurately remember and correctly interpret the relevant, available information that you have detected. If you infer that this rescue means the target person rates high on the trait of courage, then you have passed the utilization stage and achieved, at last, an accurate judgment.

• This model of accurate personality judgment has several implications. The first and most obvious implication is that accurate personality judgment is difficult.

• The second implication is that the moderators of accuracy discussed earlier in this chapter—namely, good judge, good target, good trait, and good information—must be a result of something that happens at one or more of these four stages. 

• A third implication of this model might be the most important of all. According to RAM, the accuracy of personality judgment can be improved in four ways.

Accurate self knowledge

• First, people who are healthy, secure, and wise enough to see the world as it is, without the need to distort anything, will tend to see themselves more accurately as well. People with higher self-esteem have more accurate internal images of what their faces look like (Maister et al., 2021). Second, a person with accurate self-knowledge is in a better position to make good decisions on important issues ranging from what occupation to pursue to whom to marry

• requires that you perform behaviors and experience feelings that reveal who you are (relevance), that you perceive and become aware of these actions and feelings (availability and detection), and that you interpret them correctly (utilization). 

• In what ways can you improve how well you know yourself? There are three basic routes. First, and perhaps most obviously, you can look into your own mind and try to understand who you are. Second, you can seek feedback from other people who—if they are honest and they trust you not to be offended—can be an important source of information about what you are really like, including aspects of yourself that might be obvious to everybody but you. Third, you can observe your own behavior and try to draw conclusions from those observations much as anyone else, observing the same behaviors, would do

• The most important implications of RAM for self-knowledge lie at the first stage: relevance. As with getting to know another person, you can evaluate yourself only on the basis of what you have observed yourself do, and this is limited by the situations you have experienced and even by restrictions you may have put on yourself. 

• Self-knowledge can also be limited by family or culture rather than by geography. Some families (and some cultural traditions) curb the individual self-expression of young people to a significant degree (see Chapter 12). One’s education, occupation, and even spouse may be chosen by others.

random

We could say that these individuals are stable and well organized, or even that they are psychologically well adjusted (Colvin, 1993; Human et al., 2014).12 Judgable people also tend to be extraverted and agreeable (Ambady et al., 1995), although there are sometimes disadvantages to being extraverted. 

random

it is psychologically healthy to conceal as little as possible from those around you and to manifest the real you, what is sometimes called the “transparent self” (Jourard, 1971). If you exhibit a psychological façade that produces large discrepancies between the person “inside” and the person you display “outside,” you may feel isolated from the people around you, which can lead to unhappiness, hostility, and depression.

random

Common experience suggests that sometimes one can learn a lot about someone very quickly, and one can also “know” someone for a long time and learn very little. It depends on the situation and the information that it yields. For example, it can be far more informative to observe a person in a weak situation, in which different people do different things, than in a strong situation, in which social norms restrict what people do

Predictive Validity

Does it predict it in the future 

Conversion Validity

Testing same thing in different ways to get the same result

Mechanism

The way the thing does the thing

• what mechanism makes people more crazy from the full moon 

Case study 

Good external validity, does not give internal validity or reliability 

Z-Score

How many standard deviations are you away from the mean 

Binomial Effect size displays

Percentage chance of outcomes a way of measuring the effect size of something on binary outcomes

Factor Analysis 

Rational tests

Pulling out variables. The association and commonality between correlations 

Person- situation debate (Melch)

Thinks that situation is more effective than personality

• upper limit on predictive capacity of the personality, .3-.4

• situation, .6-.7

Was inaccurate not true

Person- situation debate (Funder)

• Upper limit of situation, .3-.4

• Personality, .6-.7

Personality judgments in daily life

-Need context

• Opportunities to observe these

How well do we access people

Not well, rarely accurate 

judgment

Need compasisions

Actuarial Judgments: Comparisons 

Clinical Judgments: A professional does the judgment

Structured Clinical judgment: Use both judgments as a baseline us actuarial judgments, then modified by clinical professionals

IIntelligence

Able to grow smarter in a warm, stimulating environment

Criterion of Truth

• Constructivism 

• Social constructivism

• Dodo bird

Everyday ideas is as good as others, truth is the same as others truths