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

Further Ideas and Debates in Personality: Personality and Culture

Key Themes

• The Sixth Factor of Personality: Explores the possibility of a sixth factor beyond the Big Five.
• The Big One: Discusses the general factor of personality.
• The HEXACO Model of Personality: Introduces and evaluates the HEXACO model.
• Culture and Personality: Examines the interaction between culture and personality.
• Integrative Model of Personality: Outlines and evaluates the integrative model.
• Self-Determination Theory: Introduces self-determination theory and its mini-theories.

Introduction

• The lecture explores how culture influences and interacts with personality, and vice versa.
• It raises questions about national traits influencing individual behavior and societal issues like binge drinking or suicide rates.

A Sixth Personality Factor?

• Expanding on the Five-Factor Model: The discussion builds upon the existing five-factor model of personality (OCEAN) derived from the lexical approach.
• Lexical Approach: This approach posits that important individual differences are encoded in single-word trait descriptors.
• Cattell's Source Traits: Used the lexical approach to find 16 factors of personality, measured by the 16PF.
• Eysenck's Supertraits: Proposed three supertraits (extraversion, neuroticism, and psychoticism) measured by the EPQ.
• The Big Five (OCEAN): Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism.

The Sixth Factor: Honesty-Humility (HEXACO Model)

• Discovery: Ashton, Lee, and Son (2000) compared lexical studies and found a sixth factor emerging across different languages and cultures.
• Previous Findings: Trustworthiness and Values identified as potential sixth factors in earlier studies.
• Honesty-Humility (H): Consideration of adjectives that load positively (e.g., honest, truthful, sincere) and negatively (e.g., arrogant, greedy, hypocritical) suggests a sixth factor, 'honesty'.
• HEXACO Model: It includes Honesty-Humility (H) alongside Emotionality (E), eXtraversion (X), Agreeableness (A), Conscientiousness (C), and Openness (O).
• Identifiable across 12 different languages (Lee and Ashton, 2008).

Theory of the HEXACO Model

• Biological and Evolutionary Context: Ashton and Lee (2007) explain HEXACO factors within a biological framework:
  • Honesty-Humility, Agreeableness, and Emotionality are explained by reciprocal and kin altruism.
  • Extraversion, Conscientiousness, and Openness relate to biologically driven behaviors.
• Evolutionary Theory Application: Builds on Buss's (1991) evolutionary theory application to the five-factor model.
• Reciprocal Altruism (Trivers, 1971): Altruistic acts are carried out with the understanding of a future return benefit.
  • Conditions: Act benefits the recipient more than it costs the benefactor; expectation of reciprocation.
• Honesty-Humility and Agreeableness in Altruism:
  • Honesty-Humility: Fairness and genuineness to avoid exploitation in cooperative relationships.
  • Agreeableness: Tolerance and understanding, avoiding aggression even when exploited.
  • Both increase reciprocal altruism by maintaining relationships.
• Kin Altruism (Hamilton, 1964a; 1964b): Natural selection influenced by interactions between related individuals.
  • Survival and reproduction ensured through variety, heritability, competition, and adaptation, but influenced by kin selection.
• Emotionality and Kin Altruism: Empathy and attachment are crucial for kinship, ensuring support and protection for family members.

Extraversion, Conscientiousness, and Openness in HEXACO

• Engagement and Behavior: Three dimensions represent the ability to engage in different areas of behavior linked to biological and evolutionary goals of reproductive success, adaptation, and survival.
  • Extraversion: Engagement in social behaviors, promoting social gains (friends, mates).
  • Conscientiousness: Engagement in tasks, leading to material/economic gains.
  • Openness: Engagement in learning and imagination, promoting gains through new discoveries.

Gains and Losses in HEXACO Factors

• Additional Perspective: Theoretical framework considers not only the gains but also the potential costs of high levels of each trait.
• Potential Losses:
  • Honesty-Humility: Loss of potential gains from exploiting others.
  • Agreeableness: Being exploited by others.
  • Emotionality: Investing too much in others, risking personal gains.
  • Extraversion, Conscientiousness, and Openness: Energy expenditure and environmental risks.

Criticisms of Honesty-Humility and HEXACO Model

• Independence of Factors: Saucier (2002) questions whether HEXACO's honesty factor is truly independent from agreeableness.
• Alternative Sixth Factors: Suggests other constructs (e.g., spirituality, religiosity, or sexuality) could be added as the sixth factor, potentially being more independent of the Big Five.

The Big One? The General Factor of Personality

• Single Underlying Factor: Musek (2007) found a single factor explaining much of the variance in Big Five scores, suggesting a deeper trait.
• Stability and Plasticity: Five-factor model combines into two factors: stability (conformity) and plasticity (non-conformity), then further reduces to a single general factor.
• Evolutionary Perspective: Rushton and Irwing (2008; 2009; 2011) link the Big One to evolutionary, genetic, and neurological accounts and may represent the selection of desirable traits during evolution.
• Criticisms: Ferguson et al. (2011) question the interpretation of the general factor as evolutionary adaptations, suggesting it may be an artifact of social desirability in self-report questionnaires.
• Links to Evolutionary Adaptations: Very little evidence links the general factor of personality to behaviors reflecting evolutionary adaptations; single aspects of personality such as conscientiousness (longevity) and extraversion (reproductive success) are more strongly associated with these adaptions.

Culture and Personality

• Focus: Study of culture and personality explores the development of personality as part of the surrounding social world.

Psychological Anthropology

• Origins: Emerged in the early 20th century from psychology (Freud) and anthropology.
• Freud's Influence: Freud used his theory to explain cultural aspects in society, suggesting that civilization evolved through traumatic stages.
• Approaches: Configurationalist approach, basic and modal personality approaches, national characteristic approach, and Hofstede's work.

Configurationalist Approach

• Key Figures: Edward Sapir, Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead.
• Core Idea: Culture takes on the character of its members' personalities, sharing similar characteristics and a 'culture type.'
• Methodology: Understanding individuals reveals society as a whole (microcosm).
• Benedict's Studies: Benedict categorized Pueblo Indians (Apollonian) and Dobuans (paranoid) based on individual personalities.

Basic and Modal Personality Structure Approach

• Key Figures: Abram Kardiner and Ralph Linton.
• Basic Personality Structure: Comparing traits of individuals within a society to achieve a basic personality for each culture.
• Three Steps:
  • Analyze primary institutions (e.g., family).
  • Look for basic personality characteristics.
  • See how characteristics translate to secondary institutions (e.g., religions, rituals).
• Modal Personality Theory (Cora DuBois): Focuses on characteristics of groups most frequently encountered within a society.

National Character

• Focus: Analyzing the 'national character' of complex societies.
• Motivations: Rose during World War II, which highlighted the differences between nations which led anthropologists to describe and explain specific nations
• Benedict’s Studies (Japan): Contradiction between militarism and aestheticism.
• Fromm's Analysis of Germany: Authoritarian personality as obedient to superiors and cruel to subordinates.
• Methodological Criticisms: Ethnographic approach insufficient for modern societies.
• McCrae and Terracciano's Study: Explored whether perceptions of national character fit the personality of individuals within the nation using the five-factor model of personality using the National Character Survery for individuals to make judgements about a 'typical' member of a culture.
• National Character Survey & NEO-PI-R Comparison: Individual personality profiles generally do not resemble profiles for what they believe to be typical culture members.
• National Character: Reliability vs. Validity: Individuals are consistent in identifying a national character for their own country (i.e., they are reliable); however, these national characters bear no relation to the actual personality types of individuals within these countries (they are not valid).

Hofstede's Dimensions of National Culture

• Hofstede's Dimensions:
  • Low vs. high power distance.
  • Individualism vs. collectivism.
  • Masculinity vs. femininity.
  • Uncertainty avoidance.
  • Long-term vs. short-term orientation.
• VSM 08: Is used to measure these orientations.
• Criticisms: Conceptualizes cultures as static, culturally insensitive, samples not representative, reliance on questionnaires and attitudes.

Integrative Model of Personality

• McAdams and Pals (2006): Proposed a comprehensive framework for understanding the whole personality.
• Five Principles:
  • Evolution and human behavior.
  • The dispositional signature.
  • Characteristic adaptations.
  • Life narratives and the challenge of modern identity.
  • The differential role of culture.

Evolution and Human Behavior

• Framework: Suggests that human lives emerge from variations and adaptations of human behavior.
• Application of Evolutionary Theory: Explain why certain personality traits, such as the five-factor model, are advantageous for survival and continuation of the species.

The Dispositional Signature

• Focus: Highlighting individual differences; traits are consistent over time, predict behavior across situations, and are influenced by heritability and biological factors.

Characteristic Adaptations

• Individual Differences: Range of motivation, social-cognitive factors, and developmental experiences that emerge during an individual's life.

Life Narratives and the Challenge of Modern Identity

• Life Narratives: Help individuals understand the past and look to the future, providing purpose and meaning that influences and shapes an individual’s personality.

The Differential Role of Culture

• Influence: Culture influences personality in displays of behavior, characteristic adaptations, and an individual's life story or narrative identity.

Critiques of the Integrative Model of Personality

• Epstein's Criticisms: Over-emphasizes the importance of evolution. His criticisms are that major theories of personality have been tried and tested in different ways, he over-emphasizes the importance of the five-factor model, their descriptions of characteristic adaptations are too vague, and they have potentially over-claimed the importance of narrative constructions.
• Wood and Joseph Criticisms: Question the over-emphasis of evolution, suggest combining of narratives. However, the issue surrounding the individual's nature and personality are very different and cannot be integrated.

Self-Determination Theory

• Focus: Motivation of the individual and personality development within a social world.
  • Human needs, values, and internal motivations.
  • Social learning models of behavior.
  • Cognitive psychology.
  • Social psychology.
• Distinction: Between intrinsic and extrinsic motivations. Intrinsic motivations are the result of internal to the person, extrinsic motivations are the result of internal factors to the person.

The Four Theories of Self-Determination Theory

• Basic Needs Theory: Proposes three main universal, innate, and psychological intrinsic needs.
• Dimensions:
  • Need for competence
  • Need for autonomy
  • Need for relatedness
• Cognitive Evaluation Theory: Describes how individual motivations are affected by social context and specifically influenced by external events.
• Dimensions:
  • An internal perceived locus of causality.
  • An external perceived locus of causality.
• Organismic Integration Theory: Proposes some extrinsic motivations become intrinsic after internalizations.
• Dimensions:
  • External regulation
  • Introjected regulation
  • Identified regulation
  • Integrated regulation
• Causality Orientation Theory: Looks at Individual differences in motivation through experiences shapened through personal and social influence.
• Dimensions:
  • Autonomy
  • Controlled
  • Impersonal

Applications of Self-Determination Theory

• Testing: Found tested application for a number of domains including exercise, work, health, education, well-being and psychotherapeutic practice.
• Other Applications job-searching, therapeutic relationships, and suicide prevention and by measuing general causality.

Considerations of Self-Determination Theory

• Reward Controversy: Whether extrinsic rewards undermine people's intrinsic motivation resulting from disagreement with the school of behaviorism.
• Description: Self-determination description, and empirical validity includes measurements in SDT and different meta-analysis along with applied analysis.
• Comprehensiveness: SDT might lack comprehensiveness
• Parsimony: Having the theory use multiple concepts from different areas of psychology lead to an unparsimonious account of human personality.
• Heuristic Value: Value of the theory with stimulations from interest and research in different areas.

Final Comments

• Summary: The discussion covered the sixth dimension of personality, the HEXACO model, the general factor of personality, approaches to studying culture and personality like psychological anthropology, models integrating various aspects of personality, and self-determination theory in extending existing ideas of personality.