chapter 10: personality

overview

• personality - unique attitudes, behaviors, and emotions that characterize a person

• some ideas about personality do not fit neatly into one school of thought, such as Type A and Type B personality.

• Type A personality - tend to feel a sense of time pressure, are easily angered, competitive and ambitious, and are at a higher rate for heart disease than the general population

• Type B personality - tends to be relaxed and easygoing

• some people fit into neither type

Freudian theory

• Freud believed that one’s personality was set in early childhood and proposed the psychosexual stage theory of personality

• Freud believed that sexual urges were important in terms of people’s personality development

• in the phallic stage (chapter 9), girls obtain penis envy, which is the desire for a penis, and boys obtain castration anxiety, which is the fear of if they misbehave, they will be castrated (testicles are removed)

• boys fear that their fathers will castrate them, so to protect themselves, they used the mechanism of identification, which is when people attach themselves to an individual who they believe threatens them

• identification serves a dual purpose; it prevents boys from fearing their fathers and encourages boys to break away from their attachment to their mothers and learn to act like men

• during the latency stage, children turn their attention to other issues.

• at puberty, children enter the last of Freud’s states, which is the adult genital stage. people remain in this stage for the rest of their lives and seek sexual pleasure through sexual relationships with others.

• a child who was not fed regularly or who was overly indulged can develop an oral fixation.

• Freud described two kinds of personalities resulting from an anal fixation.

  • anal expulsive personality: messy and disorganized

  • anal retentive personality: neat, hyper-organized, and a little compulsive

• Freud also believed that people’s behavior is controlled by the unconscious, which is where we don’t have access t our thoughts.

• Freud contrasts the unconscious mind with the preconscious and conscious

• the conscious mind contains everything we are thinking about at one moment

• the preconscious mind contains everything that we could potentially summon to conscious awareness with ease

• Freud proposed that the personality consists of three parts, the id, the ego, and the superego, and also believed that two types of instincts exist, Eros (life instincts) and Thanatos (death instincts)

  • id: is controlled by the pleasure principle, which is immediate gratification. this exists in the unconscious mind.

  • ego: follows the reality principle, which is to negotiate between the desires of the id and the limitations of the environment. this is partly in the unconscious mind and in the conscious mind.

  • superego: operators on both the conscious and unconscious, is the sense of conscience and thinking about what is right and wrong.

• Libido - the energy that directs the life instincts

• part of the ego’s job is to protect the conscious mind from threatening thoughts in the unconscious and uses defense mechanisms to protect the conscious mind. some of these defense mechanisms include:

  • repression: blocking thoughts out from conscious awareness

  • denial: not accepting the ego-threatening truth

  • displacement: redirecting one’s feeling toward another person or object. when people displace negative emotions, they would displace them onto people who are less threatening than the source of emotion.

  • projection: believing that the feelings one has toward someone else are actually held by the other person and directed at oneself

  • reaction formation: expressing the opposite of how one truly feels

  • regression: returning to an earlier, comforting form of behavior

  • rationalization: coming up with a beneficial result of an undesirable occurrence

  • intellectualization: undertaking an academic, unemotional study of a topic

  • sublimation: channeling one’s frustration toward a different goal, is viewed as a particularly healthy defense mechanism

criticisms of Freud

• the most common criticism is that there is little evidence to support his theory

• Freudian theory has little predictive power. psychoanalytic theory doesn't allow us to predict what problems an individual will develop over time

• psychoanalytic theory is also criticized for overestimating the importance of early childhood and of sex. more recent research contradicts the idea that personality is set by the age of five and Frued’s focus on sexual motivation led psychologists to attempt to broaden the theory

• lastly, feminists found Freud’s theory to objectify women, such as the concept of penis envy. feminists Karen Horney and Nancy Chodorow stated that if women were truly envious of men, it was because of the advantages men had in society.

• Karen Horney posed that men may suffer from womb envy, which is jealousy of women’s reproductive capabilities.

psychodynamic theories

• two of the more well-known psychodynamic theorists are Carl Jung and Alfred Adler.

• Jung proposed that the unconscious consists of two different parts: the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious

• personal unconscious - contains the painful or threatening memories and thoughts the person does not wish to confront (called complexes)

• collective unconscious - passed down through the species and explains certain similarities we see between cultures, contains archetypes

• archetypes - universal concepts we all share as part of the human species

  • example: the shadow represents the evil side of personality and the persona is people’s creation of a public image

• Adler was an ego psychologist because he downplayed the importance of the unconscious and focused on the conscious role of the ego

• he believed that people were motivated by the fear of failure, which he called inferiority, and the desire to achieve, which he called superiority

trait theories

• some trait theorists believe that the same basic set of traits can be used to describe all people’s personalities, which is called the nomothetic approach

  • Hans Eyesenck believed that by classifying all people along an introversion-extroversion scale and a stable-unstable scale, we could describe their personalities

  • Raymond Cattell developed the 16 personality factor test to measure what e believed were the 16 basic traits in all people

• Paul Costa and Robert McCrae proposed that personality can be described using the big five personality traits:

  • extraversion: refers to how outgoing or shy someone is

  • agreeableness: how easy to get along with someone is

  • conscientiousness: people high on this scale tend to be hardworking, responsible, and organized

  • openness to new experiences: related to one’s creativity, curiosity, and willingness to try new things

  • emotional stability: how consistent one’s mood is

• psychologists reduced the vast number of different terms we use to describe people with the factor analysis technique

• factor analysis - allows researchers to use correlations between traits in order to see which traits cluster together as factors.

  • example: if a strong correlation is found between punctuality, diligence, and neatness, these traits could represent a common factor called conscientiousness

• idiographic theorists - assert that using the same set of terms to classify all people is impossible and that each person needs to be seen in terms of what few traits best characterize their own unique self

• Gordon Allport - believed that although there were common traits useful in describing all people, a full understanding of someone’s personality was impossible without looking at their personal traits

• Allport differentiated between three types of personal traits: cardinal dispositions, central dispositions, and secondary dispositions

  • cardinal dispositions: influenced by one trait that it plays a pivotal role in virtually everything they do

  • central dispositions: have a larger influence on personality and are more often apparent and describe more significant aspects of personality

  • secondary dispositions: has a smaller influence on personality

• the main criticism of trait theories is that they underestimate the importance of the situation

biological theories

• biological theories of personality view genes, chemicals, and body types as what determine who a person is

• traits are not necessarily inherited, so little evidence exists for the heritability of specific personality traits

• heritability - the measure of the amount of variation in the trait in a given population that is due to genetics

• much evidence also shows that genes play a role in people’s temperaments

• temperaments - people’s emotional style and characteristic way of dealing with the world

• one of the earliest personality theories was biological, proposed by Hippocrates

• he believed that personality was determined by the relative levels of four humors (or fluids) that were in the body: blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm

• another early biological theory of personality was proposed by William Sheldon and his somatotype theory

• he identified three body types: endomorphs (fat), mesomorphs (muscular), and ectomorphs (thin).

• Sheldon argued that certain personality traits were associated with each of the body types

behaviorist theories

• radical behaviors (ie. B.F. Skinner) argued that behavior is personality and that the way most people think of the term personality is meaningless.

• they also believe that personality is determined by the environment and that the reinforcement contingencies to which one is exposed create one’s personality.

• behaviorists believe we can alter our personality

social-cognitive theories

• Albert Bandura suggested that personality is created by an interaction between the person, the environment, and the person’s behavior.

• this was based on the idea of triadic reciprocality or reciprocal determinism, which means that each of the three factors (the person, the environment, and the person’s behavior) influence both of the other two in a loop

• Bandura also proposed that personality is affected by people’s sense of self-efficacy

• people with high self-efficacy are optimistic about their own ability to get things done while people with low self-efficacy feel a sense of powerlessness

• he theorized that people’s sense of self-efficacy had a powerful effect on their actions

• George Kelly proposed the personal-construct theory of personality and argued that people develop their own individual systems of personal constructs in an attempt to understand the world

  • examples: fair-unfair, smart-dumb, exciting-dull

• people use these constructs to understand their worlds

• Kelly believed that people’s behavior is determined by how they interpret the world

• his theory is based on a fundamental postulate, which states that people’s behavior is influenced by their cognitions and that by knowing people have behaved in the past, we can predict they will behave in the future

• a final example is Julian Rotter’s concept of locus of control, and people can be described as having either an internal locus of control or an external locus of control

  • internal locus of control - people with this feel as if they are responsible for what happens to them

  • external locus of control - people with this generally believe that luck and other forces outside of their own control determine their destinies

• a person’s locus of control can have a large effect on how they think and act, impacting their personality

humanistic theories

• many models discussed already are deterministic

• determinism - the belief that what happens is dictated by what happened in the past

• neither the psychoanalytic theory nor the behaviorist theory supports the existence of free will

• free will - an individual’s ability to choose his or her own destiny

• free will is an idea that has been embraced by humanistic psychology

• humanistic psychology is often referred to as the third force because it arose against determinism that was central to psychoanalytic and behaviorist models

• humanistic theories of personality view people as good and able to determine their own destinies through the exercise of free will

• humanistic psychologists stress people’s subjective experiences and feelings and focus on the importance of a person’s self-concept and self-esteem.

• self-concept - a person’s global feeling of themselves and develops through a person’s involvement with others

• someone with a positive self-concept is most likely to have a high self-esteem

• the two most influential humanistic psychologists were Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers, and they believed that people are motivated to reach their full potential or self-actualize.

• Maslow created the hierarchy of needs, and self-actualization is at the top of this hierarchy.

• Rogers created self-theory and believed that although people are good, they require certain things from their interactions with others, most importantly, unconditional positive regard, in order to self-actualize

assessment techniques

• reliability and validity are concerns in personality assessment

• psychologists’ methods of assessing people’s personalities differ depending on their theoretical orientation

• projective tests are used by psychoanalysts and involve asking people to interpret ambiguous stimuli

  • example: the Rorschach inkblot involved showing people a series of inkblots and asking them to describe what they see

• the thematic apperception test (TAT) consists of a number of cards, each of which contains a picture of a person or people in an ambiguous situation, then people are asked to describe what they see.

• psychoanalysts reason that people’s interpretations of what they see from both tests are from their unconscious mind and projecting their thoughts onto the situation

• a simpler and more widespread method of personality assessment is self-report inventories

• these are questionnaires that ask people to provide information about themselves

• many different types of psychologists use this test and are often referred to as objective personality tests since people’s score are determined simply by their answers

• the Minnesota multiphasic personality inventory (MMPI-2) is one of the most widely used self-report instruments, but a disadvantage to these types of tests is that people may not be completely honest when answering these questions

• radical behaviorists would dismiss all of the methods and would argue that the only way to measure someone’s personality is to oversee their behavior

• Barnum effect - people have the tendency to see themselves in vague, stock descriptions of personality