Personality Theories

Hot Air Balloon Adventure and Personality

• Richard Branson's near-death experience crossing the Atlantic Ocean in a hot-air balloon highlighted his adventurous and daring personality.

• Despite the risks, Branson attempted to cross the Pacific three years later and planned to circumnavigate the world in a balloon.

Defining Personality

• Personality refers to an individual’s unique set of consistent behavioural traits.

• Personality is characterized by traits like adventurousness, bravery, impulsiveness, and recklessness.

• Richard Branson's personality is as well-known as his wealth.

• Personality aims to explain why people behave differently.

• Factors, such as genetics and upbringing, influence personality.

Personality Traits Defined

• A personality trait is a durable disposition to behave in specific way across various situations.

• Gordon Allport identified over 4,500 personality traits in an unabridged dictionary.

• Factor analysis a statistical method depended on by theorists used to analyse correlations among many variables to identify closely related cluster variables.

• Some traits are more basic and fundamental than others.

Five-Factor Model of Personality

• Based on the factor analyses Robert McCrae and Paul Costa

• The "Big Five" traits include:

  • Extraversion: Outgoing, sociable, upbeat, and friendly. They are more motivated to pursue social contact

  • Neuroticism: Anxious, hostile, insecure, impulsive and vulnerable. They tend to experience emotional instability and are more likely to respond negatively to stress.

  • Openness to Experience: Curious, flexible, and imaginative. They tend to be more tolerant of ambiguity.

  • Agreeableness: Warm, sympathetic, trusting, compassionate and helping behaviour.

  • Conscientiousness: Diligent, well-organized, punctual, and dependable. Associated with strong self-discipline and the ability to regulate oneself efffectively.

• Modest gender differences exist: females score slightly higher on agreeableness and neuroticism.

Correlations Between Big Five Traits and Life Outcomes

• Higher conscientiousness is linked to higher university marks.

• Openness to experience may promote creative achievement in the arts.

• Extraversion and conscientiousness predict occupational achievement, whereas neuroticism is a negative predictor.

• Agreeableness is negatively associated with income, especially among men.

• Personality traits can predict the likelihood of divorce.

• Agreeableness predicts prosocial behaviour.

• Neuroticism is associated with physical and mental disorders and increased mortality, while conscientiousness and agreeableness are correlated with less illness and increased longevity.

• Study of 22 countries found neuroticism and conscientiousness were associated with hoarding of toilet paper during COVID-19 pandemic.

Race and the Big Five Traits

• A South African university study found no significant differences in Big Five traits among different races, but some discrepancies in individual factors.

• The greatest difference was in Openness to Feelings, with white race subgroup scoring high, black race subgroup scoring low, and Indian race subgroup in the intermediate range.

• These differences are speculated to be due to social, cultural, and economic differences among the race groups.

• Recent study supported the trait models, showing that traits are strong predictors of behaviour, though culture may shape beliefs about behaviour.

Psychodynamic Perspectives

• Psychodynamic theories are derived from Sigmund Freud's work.

• They focus on unconscious mental forces.

• Some followers refined Freud's theory, while others moved in new directions.

• The psychodynamic umbrella covers a wide range of loosely related theories.

Personality Theories

• Personality theories are divided into:

  • Psychodynamic perspectives.

  • Behavioral perspectives.

  • Humanistic perspectives.

  • Biological perspectives.

Freud's Psychoanalytic Theory

• Sigmund Freud developed psychoanalytic theory through interactions with patients.

• It explains personality by focusing on early childhood experiences, unconscious conflicts, and sexual urges.

Criticisms of Freud's Theory

• Freud's contemporaries had three main issues with his theory:

  • It suggested individuals are not masters of their minds because behavior is governed by unconscious factors.

  • It suggested that people are not in charge of their destinies because personalities are shaped by childhood experiences.

  • Emphasized how people cope with their sexual urges, offending conservative (Victorian) values.

Structure of Personality According to Freud

• Freud divides personality structure into id, ego, and superego.

• Behavior is the outcome of interactions among these components.

• Id: Primitive, instinctive component of personality that operates according to the pleasure principle, which demands immediate gratification of its urges, engages in primary-process of thinking.

• Ego: Decision-making component of personality that operates according to the reality principle, mediates between id and external world, engages in secondary-process thinking.

• Superego: Moral component of personality that incorporates social standards about right and wrong, emerges around 3-5 years of age.

Levels of Awareness

• Freud proposed three levels of awareness:

  • Conscious: Consists of what one is aware of at a particular point in time.

  • Preconscious: Contains material just beneath the surface of awareness that can easily be retrieved.

  • Unconscious: Contains thoughts, memories, and desires that are well below the surface of conscious awareness but still influence behaviour.

Conflict and the Importance of Sex and Aggression in Freud's Theory

• Freud believed that behaviour is the outcome of ongoing internal conflicts among the id, ego, and superego.

• Conflicts centring on sexual and aggressive impulses are especially consequential.

• These impulses are often frustrated by social norms.

Anxiety and Defence Mechanisms in Freud's Theory

• Anxiety arises from prolonged internal conflicts, often played out in the unconscious.

• Defence mechanisms are largely unconscious reactions that protect a person from unpleasant emotions like anxiety and guilt.

• Rationalization: Creating false excuses to justify unacceptable behavior.

• Repression: Keeping distressing thoughts and feelings buried in the unconscious.

• Projection: Attributing one's own thoughts, feelings, or motives to another.

• Displacement: Diverting emotional feelings from their original source to a substitute target.

• Reaction formation: Behaving in a way that is exactly the opposite of one's true feelings.

• Regression: A reversion to immature patterns of behavior.

• Identification: Boosting self-esteem by forming an imaginary or real alliance with some person or group.

• Sublimation: Channeling unconscious, unacceptable impulses into socially acceptable behaviors.

• Reliance on defense mechanisms increases during stress and shields individuals from emotional distress.

• Repressors have impoverished memory of events that trigger unpleasant emotions.

Development: Psychosexual Stages of Development

• Freud claimed that the foundation of personality is laid down by age five.

• Psychosexual stages are developmental periods with a characteristic sexual focus that leave a mark on adult personality.

• Each stage has unique developmental challenges.

• Fixation involves failure to move forward from one stage to another, as expected.

• Five psychosexual stages:

  • Oral Stage (0-1 year): Erotic stimulation is the mouth. Biting, sucking and chewing. - Fixation could form the basis for obsessive eating or smoking later in life.

  • Anal Stage (2-3 years): Erotic pleasure from bowel movements.

  • Phallic Stage (3-5 years): Genitals become the focus of erotic energy; Oedipal complex (children manifest erotically tinged desires for their opposite-sex parent, accompanied by feelings of hostility toward their same-sex parent) emerges.

  • Latency Stage (6-puberty): Child's sexuality is largely suppressed.

  • Genital Stage (puberty onward): Sexual urges reappear, focused on peers of the other sex.

Jung's Analytical Psychology

• Carl Jung emphasized unconscious determinants of personality.

• The unconscious consists of two layers: personal unconscious and collective unconscious.

• The collective unconscious is a storehouse of latent memory traces inherited from people's ancestral past.

• Archetypes are emotionally charged images and thought forms that have universal meaning.

Adler's Individual Psychology

• Alfred Adler argued that the foremost source of human motivation is striving for superiority.

• This drive to adapt, improve oneself, and master life's challenges.

• Inferiority feelings motivate to acquire new skills and develop new talents.

• Compensation involves efforts to overcome imagined or real inferiorities by developing one's abilities.

• An inferiority complex involves exaggerated feelings of weakness and inadequacy.

• Overcompensation conceals feelings of inferiority and acquires status, power, and success.

Evaluating Psychodynamic Perspectives

• Psychodynamic theories have been praised for new insights.

• Decades of research have demonstrated that:

  • Unconscious forces can influence behaviour.

  • Internal conflict often plays a key role in generating psychological distress.

  • Early childhood experiences can influence adult personality.

  • People use defence mechanisms to reduce their experience of unpleasant emotions.

• Criticisms:

  • Poor testability.

  • Unrepresentative samples.

  • Overemphasis on case studies.

  • Contradictory evidence.

  • Sexism.

Behavioural Perspectives

• Behaviourism is a theoretical orientation based on the premise that scientific psychology should study only observable behaviour.

• Three behavioural views of personality are examined: those of B. F. Skinner, Albert Bandura, and Walter Mischel.

• Behaviorists explain personality in terms of learning.

Skinner's Ideas Applied to Personality

• Skinner focused on how the external environment molds overt behavior.

• Behavior is fully determined by environmental stimuli.

• Personality is a collection of response tendencies that are tied to various stimulus situations.

• People's characteristic response tendencies are shaped by reinforcers.

• Views personality development as a continuous, lifelong journey.

Bandura's Social Cognitive Theory

• Albert Bandura believes personality is largely shaped through learning.

• People actively seek out and process information about their environment to maximize favourable outcomes.

• Observational learning occurs when an organism's responding is influenced by the observation of others.

• Modeling and imitation shape patterns of behaviour.

• Self-efficacy refers to one's belief about one's ability to perform behaviours that should lead to expected outcomes

• Reciprocal determinism is the idea that internal mental events, external environmental events and overt behaviour all influence one another.

Mischel and the Person-Situation Controversy

• Walter Mischel focused attention on the extent to which situational factors govern behaviour.

• People make responses they think will lead to reinforcement in the situation at hand.

• Personality and situational factors determine behaviour.

• Debate about Relative Importance of Person vs. Situation.

Humanistic Perspective

Humanism is a theoretical orientation that emphasises the unique qualities of humans, especially their freedom and their potential for personal growth.

Contemporary Empirical Approaches to Personality

• Modern personality research is narrower in scope.

• Investigators attempt to describe and measure important personality traits and their relationships to behaviors.

Narcissism

• Narcissism: Inflated sense of importance, need for attention and admiration, sense of entitlement, and tendency to exploit others.
  Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI) assesses narcissism as a normal personality trait.

• Grandiose narcissism, collective narcissism, and social networking have been shown to correlate.

Terror Management Theory

• What saves us is culture.

• Cultural worldviews reduce anxiety by providing answers to universal questions.

• Self-esteem is viewed as a sense of personal worth, reduces the potential for experiencing anxiety, alarm and terror

Culture and Personality

• Cross-cultural comparisons typically surface similar personality traits.

• Terracciano et al. found that People's beliefs about national character, which often drive cultural prejudices, turned out to be profoundly inaccurate stereotypes.
  Markus and Kitayama said in Asian cultures that socialisation practices foster a more interdependent view of the self that emphasizes the fundamental connectedness of people to each other.

Bronfenbrenner's Ecological Theory

• Culture is not a single unified concept.

• Ecological theory takes an individual's context into account.

• Divided into systems of different levels: the microsystem, the mesosystem, the exosystem and the macrosystem.