Further Ideas and Debates in Personality: Personality and Culture - Notes

Further Ideas and Debates in Personality: Personality and Culture

Key Themes

• The sixth factor of personality, often termed "honesty-humility."
• The Big One, referring to a general factor of personality.
• The HEXACO model of personality, an alternative to the five-factor model.
• Culture and personality, exploring their interaction.
• The integrative model of personality aiming to unify different perspectives.
• Self-determination theory, focusing on motivation and personality development in a social context.

Learning Outcomes

• Present an overview of the HEXACO model and its differences from the five-factor model.
• Evaluate the HEXACO model, describing the biological and evolutionary theory behind it.
• Outline and critique main approaches to studying culture and personality, including psychological anthropology and the narrative approach.
• Outline and evaluate the integrative model of personality.
• Outline the self-determination theory and its four mini-theories.

Introduction

• National Traits:
  • Journalist John Kelly humorously suggests binge drinking in Britain reflects national enthusiasm.
  • Examples include binge shopping and binge culture at festivals.
• National Character and Suicide in Japan:
  • Justin McCurry reports on Japan's high suicide rate, attributing it to depression, illness, and debt.
  • Yuzo Kato notes Japan's cultural tendency to hide pain and avoid burdening others.
• Gun Crime in Finland:
  • Jukka Huusko speculates on violence in Finland, linking it to alcohol, family issues, isolation, competition, and communication problems rooted in Finnish national character.
• The Interplay of Self, Social World, and Culture:
  • Psychological theories emphasize self-development and interaction with external influences.
  • The discussion explores how culture influences and interacts with personality, and vice versa.

A Sixth Personality Factor?

• Trait Approaches and the Lexical Approach:
  • Trait approaches use the lexical approach, assuming important individual differences are encoded in single-word trait descriptors.
  • Factor analysis statistically analyzes trait lists to find an underlying structure.
• Cattell and Eysenck:
  • Cattell used the lexical approach to identify 16 source traits, measured by the 16PF.
  • Eysenck identified three supertraits: extraversion, neuroticism, and psychoticism, measured by the EPQ.
• The Five-Factor Model (OCEAN):
  • A consensus emerged that five supertraits constitute the basic personality structure: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.
    • Openness: perceptive, sophisticated, knowledgeable, cultured, artistic, curious, analytical, liberal traits.
    • Conscientiousness: practical, cautious, serious, reliable, organised, careful, dependable, hardworking, ambitious traits.
    • Extraversion: sociable, talkative, active, spontaneous, adventurous, enthusiastic, person-oriented, assertive traits.
    • Agreeableness: warm, trustful, courteous, agreeable, cooperative traits.
    • Neuroticism: emotional, anxious, depressive, self-conscious, worrying traits.
• Emergence of a Sixth Factor:
  • Recent research suggests an additional factor to the five-factor model.

The Sixth Factor: Honesty-Humility and the HEXACO Model

• Discovery:
  • Ashton, Lee, and Son compared lexical studies and found a sixth factor emerging across different countries.
  • Examples include 'trustworthiness' in Italian studies and 'values' in the USA.
• Adjectives:
  • Adjectives positively associated include: truthful, honest, fair, sincere, faithful, loyal, natural, trustworthy, humane.
  • Adjectives negatively associated include: untruthful, dishonest, arrogant, conceited, pompous, greedy, sly, corrupt, hypocritical.
• The HEXACO Model:
  • Lee and Ashton developed the HEXACO model with six factors: Honesty-Humility (H), Emotionality (E), eXtraversion (X), Agreeableness (A), Conscientiousness (C), and Openness (O).
  • These factors are identifiable across 12 languages.

Theory of the HEXACO Model

• Theoretical Framework:
  • Ashton and Lee explain honesty-humility, agreeableness, and emotionality using the biological theory of reciprocal and kin altruism.
  • They link extraversion, conscientiousness, and openness to biologically driven concepts related to behavior.
• Evolutionary Theory:
  • Buss used the five-factor model to apply evolutionary theory to personality, understanding major human goals and problems.
• Reciprocal Altruism:
  • Trivers proposed reciprocal altruism: an act benefiting the recipient more than it costs the benefactor, with the expectation of a future return.
  • Honesty-humility reflects fairness, while agreeableness reflects tolerance in reciprocal altruism.
    Reciprocal Altruism
    Reciprocal\ Altruism \approx fairness + genuine
• Kin Altruism:
  • Hamilton argued natural selection is influenced by kin selection, where related individuals help each other to ensure species survival.
  • Emotionality relates to kin altruism, with empathy and attachment important for kinship.

Extraversion, Conscientiousness, and Openness

• Three Dimensions of Engagement:
  • Extraversion, conscientiousness, and openness represent engagement in social behaviors, tasks, and learning, respectively.
  • Extraversion promotes social gains, conscientiousness leads to material gains, and openness promotes gains via new discoveries.

Gains and Losses in HEXACO Factors

• Additional Perspective:

  • Ashton and Lee discuss both gains and potential costs of each personality dimension.

• Losses:

  • Honesty-humility: being too honest when exploitation is possible.
  • Agreeableness: being exploited by others.
  • Emotionality: over-investing in others.
  • Extraversion, conscientiousness, and openness: energy expenditure and environmental risks.

• Summary of gains and losses with associated personality traits:

  • Honesty-Humility

    • Theoretical Interpretation: Reciprocal Altruism (fairness)
    • Benefits of high levels: Gains from cooperation
    • Costs of High levels: Loss of potential gains from exploitation of others.

  • Agreeableness

    • Theoretical Interpretation: Reciprocal Altruism (tolerance)
    • Benefits of high levels: Gains from cooperation.
    • Costs of High levels: Losses because of being exploited by others.

  • Emotionality

    • Theoretical Interpretation: Kin Altruism
    • Benefits of high levels: Survival of kin; personal survival.
    • Costs of High levels: Loss of potential gains associated with risks to self and Kin

  • Extraversion

    • Theoretical Interpretation: Engagement in social behavior
    • Benefits of high levels: Social gains (friends, mates)
    • Costs of High levels: Energy and time; risk from environment

  • Conscientiousness

    • Theoretical Interpretation: Engagement in task behavior
    • Benefits of high levels: Material gains
    • Costs of High levels: Energy and time

  • Openness to experience

    • Theoretical Interpretation: Engagement in ideas
    • Benefits of high levels: Material and social gains.
    • Costs of High levels: Energy and time; risks from social and natural environment.

Criticisms of Honesty-Humility and the HEXACO Model

• 'Gone Too Far?' and 'Not Gone Far Enough?'
  • Saucier questions the independence of honesty and agreeableness, noting correlations in French and Korean samples.
  • He argues definitive personality models must provide completely independent factors for their use.
• Alternative Sixth Factors:
  • Saucier questions why honesty is prioritized over other constructs.
    • MacDonald: spirituality and religiosity are unrelated to the Big Five.
    • Schmitt and Buss: sexuality, linked to evolutionary psychology, is a potential factor.
• Sexuality Factors:
  • Schmitt and Buss found seven factors defining sexuality: sexual attractiveness, relationship exclusivity, gender orientation, sexual restraint, erotophilic disposition, emotional investment, and sexual orientation.
  • These dimensions were independent of the five-factor model.
• Other Dimensions:
  • Paunonen and Jackson identified 10 possible dimensions outside the Big Five:
    • Religious, sly, honest, sexy, thrifty, conservative, masculine-feminine, egotistical, humorous, risk-taking.

Limitations of Lexical/Psychometric Approach

• Rapidly increasing number of factors.
• Variations might stem from cultural shifts, contexts, or items used.
• Factors are generally identified from self-report data, requiring external criteria for validation.

The Big One? The General Factor of Personality

• Musek's Findings:

  • Musek found a single factor explaining much variance in Big Five scores among Slovakian adults.
  • He suggested a key trait underlies all measures in factor analysis of the five-factor model of personality.

• Model
  * General factor of personality
  * Stability
  * Low Neuroticism (emotional stability)
  * High conscientiousness (Work ethic, organisation, planning)
  * High agreeableness (tolerance, forgiveness)
  * Plasticity
  * High extraversion
  * High openness.

• The General Factor:

  • Musek suggests it's a blend of valued personality dimensions, encompassing positively valued aspects of stability (conformity) and plasticity (non-conformity).

• Evolutionary Perspective:

  • Musek and colleagues argue the Big One represents evolutionary, genetic, and neurological aspects.
  • From an evolutionary viewpoint, the general factor has evolved through the selection of desirable traits that led to successful adaptations. Traits that would allow members of the species to cooperate.

Critiques of the General Factor

• Artefact vs. Substantive Finding:
  • Ferguson et al. suggest that correlations between five-factor domains may be an artefact of self-report questionnaires due to answering based on social desirability rather than reflecting reality.
• Limited Evidence for Evolutionary Adaptations:
  • Lacking evidence links between the general factor and behaviors reflecting evolutionary adaptations like fitness or mating success.

Culture and Personality

• The study of culture and personality aims to understand the development of personality as part of the social world.
  • Two areas that illustrate thinking and findings around this: Psychological Anthropology; Narrative approach to personality.

Psychological Anthropology

• Emergence:
  • Emerged at the beginning of the 20th century from psychology (Freud) and anthropology.
• Freud's Influence:
  • Freud's theory described cultural aspects, suggesting society resembles an individual undergoing traumatic stages, with primitive tribes resembling the Oedipal stage.
  • Freud likened religious practices to obsessional neurosis and described religion as a way societies dealt with aggressive and destructive desires.
• Approaches in Understanding the Relationship between Culture and Personality:
  * Configurationalist Approach.
  * Basic and Modal Personality Approaches.
  * National Characteristic Approach.
  * Work of the Netherlands cultural psychologist and sociologist Gerard Hendrik Hofstede.

Configurationalist Approach

• Development:
  • Developed in the 1920s by anthropologists like Sapir, Benedict, and Mead.
• Core Idea:
  • Culture takes on the character traits of its members' personalities; members share similar traits due to culture and shared beliefs, forming a culture type.
  • Personality is culture, microcosms that show the whole culture.
• Ruth Benedict's Study
  * Identified general culture of tribes based on studying personality of the individuals in those tribes
  * Pueblo Indians as Apollonian: avoid strong emotions cooperate over personal gain
  * Dobuans as Paranoid: concerned with conflict, suspicious of others look to gain advantage over the other's loss

Basic and Modal Personality Structure Approach

• Basic Personality: Abram Kardiner and Ralph Linton believed that the culture types were not adequate. Suggesting instead the model of basic personality structure wich compares individuals from each culture to achieve a basic personality for each culture.
  • Primary Institutions: researchers first look at the primary institutions of a given culture, those that serve basic functions to the culture. Ex: Family
  • Cultural Aspects: the next step is examining aspects of the culture such as family structure or subsidence to try to identify basic personality characteristics for the culture.
  • Secondary Institutions: the final step is to see how these characteristics translated into secondary institutions (social networks) such as rituals or folklore.
• Modal Personality: An American anthropologist, Cora DuBois developed this approach.
  • This approach says it's better to focus on groups that are commonly encountered to have a greater knowledge of traits in the society, traits that do not need to be common in the whole society.

National Character

• Benedict and Mead analyzed more complex societies such as Japan, Germany and the USA to describe and explain each nation in terms of national character.
  • These studies are criticized for their method of achieving conclusions. It is very difficult to produce an ethnographic(detailed descriptive study of human groups) study to represent capitalist, industrialized nations.
• Five-Factor Model Research:
  • McCrae and Terraciano of the National Institute on Aging in Maryland, USA sought to understand if impressions matched personalities
  • They measured perceptions using the National Character Survey, and personalities using the NEO-PI-R.
    • Openness: perceptive, sophisticated, knowledgeable, cultured, artistic, curious, analytical, liberal traits.
    • Conscientiousness: practical, cautious, serious, reliable, organised, careful, dependable, hardworking, ambitious traits.
    • Extraversion: sociable, talkative, active, spontaneous, adventurous, enthusiastic, person-oriented, assertive traits.
    • Agreeableness: warm, trustful, courteous, agreeable, cooperative traits.
    • Neuroticism: emotional, anxious, depressive, self-conscious, worrying traits.

Personality and National Culture: The Work of Hofstede

• Gerard Hendrik Hofstede studied interactions between national and organisational cultures.
• Identified Five Dimensions of National Culture Differences:
  • Low vs. High Power Distance: accepting and expecting distributed unequally.
  • Individualism vs. Collectivism.
  • Masculinity vs. Femininity: quantity(masculine) vs. quality(feminine) of life dimension.
  • Uncertainty Avoidance: level of rules for dealing with the culture.
  • Long-term vs Short-term Orientation
• Hofstede developed a Value Survey module to measure these orientations.
• Criticims of Hofstede's Work:
  • Culture is ever changing; his findings have the potential to quickly become outdated.
  • Samples used are not representative of the wider population.
  • The methodology used is questionnaire-based.

Integrative Model of Personality

• McAdams and Pals emphasized a comprehensive framework for understanding the whole person.
• Five Principles
  • Evolution and the Human Behavior.
  • The Dispositional Signature.
  • Characteristic Adaptations.
  • Life Narratives and the challenge of Modern Identity.
  • The Differential Role of Culture.

Evolution and Human Behavior

• For McAdams and Pals, grand theories of personality start with assumptions, thus they turn to evolutionary psychology.
• Psychological Mechanisms
  • Human lives are a result of adaptions from the evolution of human behavior.
  • Traits such as the five-factor personality exist because they ensure the survival and continuation of the species by adapting to the environment

The Dispositional Signature

• Traits are consistent over time, are good predictors of behavior and are affected by heritability and biological factors.

Characteristic Adaptations

• Theorists have identified factors, such as personal goals, motives and self-schemas, as influences of personality.
• Examples:
  • Freud: Behavior driven conflicts that crate anxiety, defense mechanisms evolved to deal with the anxiety.
  • Carl Jung: psyche develops over adulthood by continued experiences.
  • Horney emphasized role of cultural and social factors.
  • Bandura: Behavior is a process of active process learning from observation.
  • Kelly: Individuals constantly trying to understand and control the world.
  • Rogers: Innate drive to self-actualize.
  • Maslow: Must meet lower-level needs before higher level needs can come to play.

Life Narratives and the Challenge of Modern Identity

• Although children can talk about themselves early it is adolescence, that a big sense of Self begins to form.
• A life narrative comprises and evolving life story that helps an individual understand and have a good impression of themselves.
• Past stories shape your personality, but new events and relationships help create new feelings of the self.
• Blagov and Singer found self-defining memories an their meaning and the personality adjustment a person showed in the present.

The Differential Role of Culture

• Culture influences personality in 3 areas.
  • Cultre can have a modest affect on individual displays of behavior.
  • Culture can impact on an individual's characteristics adaptaions, for their motivations, personal, goals.
  • Culture can have the most influenced a person's life store or narrative identity.
• The is a generalized difference between individualistic cultures and collective cultures, with emphasis on what they are a part of.
• Memories can look to be associated with how the memories/narratives are associate with personality.

Critiques of the Integrative Model of Personality

• McAdams ad Pals believe to have provided a model that integrates a number of perspectives that helps to develop a personality theory.
• Epstein, outlines with each of the main areas.
  • Over-emphasize the importance of Evolution-Rejection.
  • Over-Emphasize the importance of 5 factor Model.
  • Vague about adaptations and unable.
  • Over claimed the narratives construction suggesting one of the most imp constructs in the integrated personal theory Epsteinalso argues that they all important, that did not mean important than many ideas and personal such as, Learning from Experience, creative thinking.
• Two personality psychologists Wood and Joseph Also wrote. A response to Mc Adams and Pals paper, Like the question,Mc Adams and Pals Arguement they have made much the suggestions of come of Culture, Life narratives also emphasize That those. Grand Theoris.

Self-Determination Theory

• A popular psychological theory focused on the individual and their personality with society.
  • The theory emphasizes many principles used for other personality theories such as:
    • Social Learning.
    • Human needs and values.
    • Cognitive Psychology.
    • Social Psychology.

Theories of Self-Determination Theory

*   Basic Needs Theory.
*   Cognitive Evaluation Theory.
*   Organismic Integration Theory.
*   Causality Orientation Theory.

1. Basic Needs Theory

• Three main and psychological needs which impact the self-determination of all:

  • Competence.
  • Autonomy.
  • Relatedness.

• Both intrinsic (something the person wants to do) and estrinisic ( controlled by an external source of motivation) lead to high motivation individuals but Amotivarions ( because a person is unwilling to do something ) can occur.

2. Cognitive Evaluation Theory

• Cognitive evaluation theory describes how intrinsic motivations are affected by social situations and are specifically by external events.
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