PSYC220 - Personality and Individual Differences Notes

PSYC220 - Personality and Individual Differences

Administration Content

• 12 weekly lectures (approximately 2 hours each)
• 12 weekly tutorials (1 hour each)

Support

• 1 hour per week for support
• Forums (asynchronous)

Non-Contact Hours (114 hours over 12 weeks)

• Assigned reading
• Learning management (e.g., forums)
• Assessment preparation

Course Breakdown

• Lectures: 16%
• Tutorials: 8%
• Non-contact hours: 76%

Lecture 1: Introduction to Individual Differences

• Assigned Reading: Twenge & Campbell, 2019, Chapters 1 & 2
• Topics:
  • What are individual differences?
  • Personality
  • A brief history of personality psychology
  • Other individual differences
  • Scientific approach to studying individual differences

Learning Objectives

1. Define personality and describe its history and scope.
2. Describe the person-situation debate, its resolution, and conditions for personality's predictive power.
3. Explain personality assessment using self-report questionnaires.
4. Describe alternatives to self-report and their strengths/weaknesses.
5. Understand key issues affecting the meaningfulness of personality measures.

Individual Differences: What Makes You Unique?

• Identifying unique characteristics
• Recognizing similarities with others
• Understanding the shared aspects of humanity, culture, family, and individual uniqueness

Defining Personality

• Predispositions leading to tendencies in behaviors, feelings, and thoughts.
• Influenced by genetics, parents, peers, birth order, and culture.
• Traits or factors are inherent, informative, and stable.
• Think - Feel - Behave

Personality and Related Concepts

• Individual differences
• Personality
• Values
• Motives
• Attitudes
• Orientations

Personality in History (I)

• Hippocrates (460 BC): Proposed 4 temperaments.
• Galen of Pergamum (AD 130-200): Expanded to the Four Humours resulting from excesses of:
  • Phlegmatic - phlegm
  • Choleric - yellow bile
  • Sanguine - blood
  • Melancholic - black bile

Personality in History (II)

• Emmanuel Kant: Dimensions, not types.

Personality in History (III)

• Wilhelm Wundt: Dimensions and profiles

Personality in History (IV)

• Francis Galton’s (1884) Lexical hypothesis: Meaningful characteristics are captured in language.

Central Theme of Models

• Who you are is:
  • Fixed/stable unchanging
  • Detectable (from your behaviour)
• Therefore:
  • It is meaningful and predictive

Where Can We See Personality?

• Consistent patterns (e.g., preferences, behaviours).
  • Social interaction
  • Facebook use
  • Choice of product brand and features
  • Offices and bedrooms
  • Physical appearance and mannerisms
• Psychology of personality and individual differences are topics of psychological interest
  • Observation of the relevant behaviours
  • Definition of constructs
  • Measurement of constructs (including reliability and validity issues)
  • Identification of causes
  • Identification of consequences
  • Specification of moderators, limits etc.

Definitions of Personality from Theory

• Smither (1998): "Personality is an individual’s characteristic way of thinking, feeling and acting across a broad range of settings."
• Pervin (1980): "…those characteristics of the person or of those people generally that account for consistent patterns of response to situations."
• Larsen & Buss (2012): "…the set of psychological traits and mechanisms within the individual that are organized and relatively enduring and that influence his or her interactions with, and adaptations to, the intrapsychic, physical and social environment."

Person or Situation

• Personality theories focus on the impact and influence of characteristics on people’s “outputs”.
• Other factors can affect what we do
• The person-in-situation debate
  • Meaningfulness of personality depends on its causal or consequential relationship to things of interest
  • Limited value if personality isn’t stable or the cause of observable “outputs.”
  • Consistency may arise from consistent situations.

How the Person and the Situation Can Work Together to Influence Behavior

Approaches to the Study of Personality

Idiographic

• Focus: Individuals
• Goal: Depth of understanding
• Method: Qualitative, multiple sources (e.g., diaries, letters)
• Disadvantages: No ability to generalize

Nomothetic

• Focus: Groups of individuals
• Goal: Breadth, comprehensive theory
• Method: Quantitative (valid and reliable surveys)
• Disadvantage: Limited insight about an individual

Sources of Information on Personality

Report (Self or Other)

• Questionnaires
• Rating scales
• Adjective checklists

Observation

• Frequency
• Settings (e.g., dorm rooms)
• Diaries/ letters etc.

Other

• Projective (e.g., Rorschach)
• Implicit measures (e.g., IAT)

The Role Construct Repertory Test (Rep Grid)

Initial steps:

1. Role Title List

   • Names of specific people who fill various roles in their life (e.g., mother, father, a liked teacher, sister)

2. Elicitation of constructs

   • Three figures from list selected

Ratings:

• Test-taker indicates how two of these people are alike and are different from the third
• Two share one characteristic and the other typifies the contrast
• E.g., “shy–outgoing”
• Repeat for many (pre-determined) comparisons

Thematic Apperception Task (TAT: Murray, 1938)

• Apperception is the process of projecting fantasy imaginary onto objective (often ambiguous) stimuli.
  • Current situation – what is happening?
  • Thoughts and feelings of the characters – what are the characters are feeling?
  • Preceding events – what has led to the even in the picture.
  • Outcome – what was the outcome?
• Interpreters were highly trained, and scoring is at least as involved for the TAT as it is for the Rorschach.

What is Your Personality?

• The “Dr Charles Vine - Personality Test”
• Answers are for who you are now…not who you were in the past
• This is a real test given by the Human Relations Dept in the US at many of the major corporations today.
• Published in Cleo magazine, 1978

Any issues with this test of Personality?

• Incorrectly attributed to Dr Phil?
• Validity evidence – does this test examine what it proports to?
• Reliability data – is this test stable over time?

Scale Validity

• A scale measures what it is supposed to measure with consideration of scope and representativeness.
  • Face validity
    • The items appear to measure what they are supposed to measure
  • Predictive validity
    • The measure is related to a concrete behavior or outcome
  • Convergent validity
    • The scale correlates with similar scales
  • Discriminant validity
    • The scale doesn’t correlate with unrelated scales

Scale Reliability

• Is about the consistent measurement (indicated by the outcome) of a stable construct
  • Internal reliability
    • When all items on scale measure the same concept
    • Often reported using Cronbach’s alpha statistic
    • Average of the correlation between items
    • Personality scales should have an alpha of at least .60
  • Test-retest reliability
    • Taking test at two different times produces similar results
    • Correlation should be at least .70 to show scale produces same results over time
  • Intercoder reliability
    • Used when assessment involves writing samples or behaviors
    • Indicates correlation between coders’ ratings

Key questions in personality (and individual differences)

• What defines the individual difference?
  • Universality
  • Consistency/Stability
  • Source
• What is its structure?
  • Conscious and unconscious aspects
  • Number and size of factors
  • Properties of factors (e.g., latent, orthogonal etc.)
• How does it interact with or affect people’s thoughts feelings and behaviour?
  • Informative (tells us something about them)
  • Predictive (tells us what they will think/feel/do)

Key features of personality theories

• Nature vs nurture
• Stability/consistency vs instability
• Uniqueness vs universality
• Equilibrium vs growth
• Optimism vs pessimism (free will vs. determination)

Evaluating theories of personality (and individual differences)

• Assumptions (e.g., types?)
• Structure (number and relationships between factors)
• Determinants (e.g., genes, environment)
• Development (simple to complex?)
• Applications and consequences
• Evidence!!!!!!!

Notices

• Tutorials begin TODAY!!
• Check your timetable and attend