PY 101 CH 11

11.1 Conceptualizing and Measuring Personality

Learning Objective11.1

Explain how psychologists use factor analysis to identify personality traits; evaluate Allport’s contrasting viewpoint; and identify the differences between self-report inventories and projective personality tests.

It’s not necessary to have a complete understanding of personality to identify and measure differences among people. In fact, we need some formal way of classifying individual differences before we can know exactly what needs to be explained. Trait theories are systems for assessing how people differ, particularly how people differ in their tendencies to act consistently across situations. As a general rule, trait theories use a psychometric approach—that is, they seek to identify stable individual differences by analyzing the performances of large groups of people on rating tests or questionnaires.

Try coming up with a set of trait words to describe this individual. What are the chances that your words will apply in all situations?

iStockPhoto/fizkes

If you open any dictionary, you’ll find thousands of words that fit the everyday definition of a personality trait. In fact, it’s been estimated that approximately 1 out of every 22 words in the English language is a trait-related term (Allport & Odbert, 1936). One goal of the trait theorist is to reduce these thousands of descriptive terms to a smaller set of more basic terms—to find a kind of common denominator among groups of terms. For example, when you describe someone with words such as kind, trusting, and warm, you might really be describing a more general characteristic of the person, such as agreeableness or pleasantness. The researcher attempts to identify basic traits from among the thousands of personality descriptors that are common in the language. How can this be accomplished?

The Factor Analytic Approach

One solution is to use the statistical technique of factor analysis. As we discussed in Chapter 10, factor analysis is a mathematical procedure that’s used to analyze correlations among test responses. The goal is to identify a set of factors that collectively predict test performance. To see how this works in the case of personality, imagine asking a large group of people to rate themselves on a variety of personality characteristics. For example: “On a scale of 1 (not at all) to 7 (extremely), how well do you think the term brooding is characteristic of you?” When we look at the results, we’ll undoubtedly see many individual differences. Some people will see themselves as brooders, and others won’t; some people will score high on aggressiveness and competitiveness, while others will classify themselves as passive and shy.

However, researchers are really interested in how the trait ratings correlate with one another. Do people who rate themselves as, say, “kind” also tend to rate themselves as “warm” and “trusting”? More specifically, can we predict people’s rating on one trait given that we know their rating on some other trait? If we can, then it’s reasonable to assume that some general personality characteristic, such as pleasantness, is being measured by the more specific personality descriptors. This is the logic behind factor analysis—discover the common denominators for personality by noting which terms cluster statistically in a group.

Source Traits and Superfactors

Psychologists frequently apply factor analysis to personality data. For practical reasons, it’s common to rely on ratings of personality descriptors, such as “kind” or “warm,” which people give about themselves or others. Psychologist Raymond Cattell was able to use rating data of this sort to identify 16 basic personality factors from a set of traits that originally numbered in the thousands (Cattell et al., 1970). Cattell’s 16 factors, which he called source traits, are listed in Figure 11.1. Notice that each factor is shown as a dimension marked by an opposing pole: reserved–outgoing, trusting–suspicious, relaxed–tense, and so on. Any particular individual will have a unique personality profile, reflecting the person’s standing on each of the dimensions. So, you might be closer to “reserved” than “outgoing,” be more “controlled” than “uncontrolled,” and have a tendency to be “tough-minded” rather than “sensitive.”

Figure 11.1 A Personality Profile

This is a sample personality profile as measured by Cattell’s 16 personality factors. Notice that our personalities are defined by our standing on each of the 16 trait dimensions.

Source: Reprinted with permission from R. B. Cattell, “A 16PF Profile,” in Psychology Today. pp. 40–46. Copyright© 1973 Sussex Publishers, Inc.

FIGURE 11.1 DESCRIPTION

However, the factors that are discovered depend partly on how the mathematical technique of factor analysis is interpreted. Whereas Cattell reported 16 primary factors (along with some additional secondary or second-order factors), Hans Eysenck proposed only three superfactors: (1) extroversion, which refers roughly to how outgoing and sociable you are; (2) neuroticism, which captures your degree of anxiety, worry, or moodiness; and (3) psychoticism, which represents your tendencies to be insensitive, uncaring, or cruel toward others (Eysenck, 1970, 1991). Specific personality descriptors, such as “touchy” or “lively,” are presumed to reflect some combination of each of the three primary dimensions.

The Big Five

Psychologists continue to argue about the number of factors that best describe personality, but the field has largely settled on a more intermediate solution: It is now widely accepted that the best solution to the factoring problem is to propose five basic personality dimensions (McCrae & Costa, 1985, 2003). The aptly named Big Five personality dimensions include extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness. Each is listed in Figure 11.2 along with some of the descriptors that identify each trait. So, for example, people who score highly on the extroversion dimension tend to see themselves as talkative, sociable, fun loving, and affectionate. People who are low on extroversion would show the opposite tendencies: untalkative, retiring, sober, and reserved.

Figure 11.2 The Big Five

Many psychologists believe that personality is best analyzed in terms of five fundamental personality dimensions.

Illustrated by Sarah Yeh

FIGURE 11.2 DESCRIPTION

Notice that extroversion and neuroticism are two of the three primary dimensions suggested by Eysenck. In fact, Eysenck (1991) argued that psychoticism, his remaining dimension, simply reflects a combination of the Big Five’s agreeableness, conscientiousness, and (perhaps) openness (see also Scholte & De Bruyn, 2004). The debate continues, but the consensus today favors the Big Five. Studies have analyzed trait ratings collected from around the world, and evidence for a Big Five emerges quite consistently across most cultures (Heine & Buchtel, 2009; but see Gurven et al., 2013). In addition to supporting the Big Five, the data suggest that the basic structure of personality is universal rather than dependent on cultural background (Allik et al., 2013).

Psychologists have been keenly interested in the measurement of personality traits, especially the extent to which traits such as the Big Five predict behavior (Fleeson & Gallagher, 2009). For example, do certain personality traits correlate strongly with academic achievement or work performance? The answer appears to be “Yes,” particularly conscientiousness as measured by the Big Five (Poropat, 2009). Overall, Big Five traits have been linked to dozens of life outcomes, everything from subjective well-being, to religious beliefs, to humor, to the degree of satisfaction in our romantic and sexual relationships (M. S. Allen & Walter, 2018). In addition, psychologists have discovered links between personality traits and mental health. Studies have found significant correlations between Big Five personality traits and anxiety, depression, and substance use/abuse disorders (Kotov et al., 2010). Moreover, importantly, many of these trait–outcome relationships have been replicated in large-scale studies involving thousands of participants (Soto, 2019).

At the same time, the fact that five (or three) factors can be used to categorize people doesn’t tell us anything about the internal processes that determine a personality profile (Hampson, 2012). Some psychologists have also questioned whether all aspects of personality can be captured by any small set of personality dimensions (see Livesley et al., 2003). To understand personality completely, the critics argue, you need to understand the ability of people to change as well as to stay the same across situations. We’ll discuss how the environment affects the consistency of behavior later in the chapter.

Allport’s Trait Theory

Like the factor analysts, psychologist Gordon Allport (1897–1967) was convinced that people have personality traits, or “predispositions to respond.” But he wasn’t convinced that the building blocks of personality could be understood from massive statistical analyses of group responses. Allport believed that personality is a measure of one’s uniqueness as an individual. So the proper focus should be on individuals, he argued, not on groups. His approach, which he called idiographic (which means “relating to the individual”), was to study particular individuals in great detail. An advantage of this kind of case study approach is that consistencies in behavior can be recorded across an entire lifetime rather than just in a limited setting (Barenbaum, 1997).

Cardinal traits are ruling passions that dominate a person’s life, such as a compelling need to help others at the expense of personal comfort.

Jake Lyell/ Alamy Stock Photo

One of Allport’s main contributions was his general classification scheme for identifying personality traits (Allport, 1937). Allport believed some people show cardinal personality traits. Cardinal traits are the ruling passions that dominate an individual’s life. If you spend your life in a mountain monastery, rejecting all worldly possessions, your passion “to serve god” would likely satisfy Allport’s description of a cardinal trait. Perhaps you know someone whose every thought or action revolves around the pursuit of wealth, fame, or power. People with cardinal traits do not represent the average—these people are driven and highly focused; every action is motivated by a particular goal. We can’t really capture a cardinal trait by applying a technique such as factor analysis, however, because cardinal traits are uniquely defined by the individual rather than by the group.

Allport believed cardinal traits are rare. Most people have personalities that are controlled by several lasting characteristics, which he labeled central traits. Central traits are the 5 to 10 descriptive terms you would use to describe someone you know. Rowena? She’s outgoing and friendly, very trustworthy, sentimental, and honest to the core. In addition to central traits, Allport suggested that everyone has secondary traits, which are less obvious because they may not always appear in behavior; the particular situation, or context, matters. For example, Rowena might also have a secondary trait of “testiness” that shows up only when she goes on an extended diet. Personality characteristics, therefore, can appropriately be described in terms of levels ranging from dominant (cardinal) to representative (central) to occasional (secondary).

Personality Tests

There are practical reasons to measure personality traits. Suppose you’re the personnel director at a large nuclear power plant. You need to hire responsible people to run the plant, people who have the right stuff to handle potentially dangerous materials in an emergency. You wouldn’t want to hire someone like Liam, with his tendency to lie and act compulsively under pressure. How do you decide for a given individual? You can choose from two main categories of personality tests, self-report inventories and projective tests.

Self-Report Inventories

The most popular personality tests are self-report inventories, which use a questionnaire format to identify personality characteristics. People are asked to answer questions about how they typically think, act, and feel. Their responses, or self-reports, are compared to test averages compiled from thousands of other test takers. As a general rule, self-report inventories are easy to administer, and they paint a reliable picture of how someone differs from the average. Liam, for instance, would probably raise red flags on a number of measures; his answers are likely to show some disregard for social customs (compared to the average) and a marked tendency toward impulsiveness. If you were the personnel director, you could easily make your hiring—or, more accurately, no-hire—decision based partly on the test results.

Professionals use many kinds of self-report inventories. Some tests are based on popular trait theories. For example, to assess normal personality traits, you can administer the Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire (16PF), which is a 187-item inventory designed to measure the 16 primary personality factors identified by Cattell (Cattell et al., 1970). Alternatively, there is the Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI-R), which measures your standing on the Big Five personality traits identified in Figure 11.2. One widely used self-report inventory is the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI). The MMPI contains hundreds of true–false questions that people answer about themselves (e.g., “I never get angry”); it’s now available in several revised forms (e.g., Sellbom, 2019). The responses are expressed in a personality profile that describes a person’s scores on various subscales (see Figure 11.3).

Figure 11.3 MMPI Profiles

Psychologists often use the MMPI to help diagnose psychological disorders. A client’s scores on the various clinical scales can be compared to average scores from people who are not suffering from psychological problems, as well as from people who have been diagnosed with specific problems, such as depression or schizophrenia.

Source: Adapted from Weiten, 1995.

FIGURE 11.3 DESCRIPTION

In addition to measuring personality characteristics, the MMPI is often used as a technique for diagnosing psychological disorders. A person’s responses are compared to those of average test takers but also to the responses of individuals with known psychological problems. There are records, for example, of how people who suffer from such disorders as paranoia (irrational beliefs of persecution) are likely to answer certain questions. The test responses of someone like Liam can then be compared with the average “paranoia” personality profile to see if he fits the bill. Comparisons of this sort are useful in diagnosing problems and in making judgments about how appropriate an individual might be for a high-risk form of employment.

The main advantage of self-report inventories is that they are objective tests—they’re standardized, everyone takes the same test, and they can easily be scored by a computer. There have been literally thousands of studies conducted testing the reliability and validity of these measures, especially the MMPI (Ben-Porath, 2003). The fact that the MMPI is one of the most widely applied measures in clinical assessment is one testament to its usefulness. At the same time, self-report inventories depend on the accuracy of the information provided by the test taker. If people choose to be deceptive on the test, or try to make themselves look good in some way, the results can be of little value (Nichols & Greene, 1997).

Projective Personality Tests

In a projective personality test, you’re asked to interpret an unstructured or ambiguous stimulus. The assumption is that you’ll “project” your thoughts and true feelings into the stimulus interpretation, thereby revealing elements of your personality. For example, take a look at the inkblot shown in Figure 11.4, which is similar to the kind of unstructured stimulus used on the Rorschach test. Clearly, you argue, the inkblot exemplifies the fundamental decay of human society. The image symbolizes the need for aggressive action on the part of all responsible people—we must rise up and defeat the tyranny that, like an out-of-control cancer, is eating away at the virtue and values of common folk. Right? Well … Can you see how people’s interpretation of such a stimulus might provide insight into their personality? If Liam always sees snakes and decaying dragons in the images, whereas Rowena sees butterflies and flowers, it’s not too difficult to infer that they have quite different personalities.

Figure 11.4 Projective Tests

In projective personality tests, we are asked to interpret unstructured or ambiguous stimuli. Our answers are presumed to provide insight into our personalities. What do you see hidden in this inkblot—the fundamental decay of human society?

Carolina Hrejsa/Body Scientific Intl.

Another popular projective personality test is the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT). Instead of an inkblot, you’re shown an ambiguous picture and asked to make up a story. Think of the Mona Lisa; what is she thinking and feeling? Again, the idea is that you’ll reveal aspects of yourself in the stories you tell. Both the TAT and the Rorschach test use a standardized set of stimuli, so your responses can be compared to those of other people who’ve interpreted the same picture. Some psychologists prefer to use tests such as the TAT or the Rorschach, rather than self-report inventories, because projective tests help clients open up and talk about themselves and their problems (Medoff, 2004).

Projective tests allow you to respond freely, in a manner that’s less restrictive than self-report inventories. But this can make the responses hard to interpret: How do we know what your responses truly mean? Psychologists have tried to develop reliable standards for interpreting responses in these kinds of tests. Typically, the researcher or clinician is trained to look for common themes in interpretation (such as a tendency to see death, decay, or aggressiveness) or for qualities such as originality. The clinician might also look for such things as the realistic nature of the interpretation: Does the response really match the perceptual structure of the stimulus? If you claim to see a dragon in an inkblot, your general view of the world may slant toward fantasy rather than reality. The degree to which you seek help in your interpretation may also be instructive. For example, people who constantly seek guidance from the clinician before giving an answer are likely to be classified as dependent.

Again, none of the personality assessment procedures we’ve discussed is perfect, neither self-report inventories nor projective tests. The scoring procedures for projective tests can be somewhat unreliable; it’s not uncommon for administrators to arrive at quite different interpretations of the same subject’s responses (see Beutler & Berren, 1995). At the same time, evidence suggests that projective tests, particularly the Rorschach test, are reasonably valid and reliable, “roughly on par with other commonly used tests” (Society for Personality Assessment, 2005, p. 220). Personality tests of this sort remain reasonably popular and widely used across the world, although there has been a decline in the popularity of these tests in the United States

Identify and evaluate Freud’s tripartite theory of the human mind and personality, and contrast it with humanistic and social–cognitive accounts of personality.

As you’ve just seen, we can describe the personality traits of people like Liam or Rowena—perhaps their standing on the Big Five—and there’s a good chance our measurements will be reasonably accurate and reliable. But description is not the same thing as explanation. We may know Rowena has a sunny disposition, but trait theories don’t tell us much about the origins of those characteristics. Why do Liam and Rowena differ? In this section, we’ll consider three very different approaches to understanding personality development: the psychodynamic theory of Sigmund Freud, humanistic theories, and social–cognitive theories.

The Psychodynamic Approach of Freud

Let’s role-play: You’re a clinician, and your latest patient, 18-year-old Katharina, complains of persistent physical problems. “I’m often overcome with a frightful choking feeling,” she insists. “I have trouble catching my breath, and my head begins to spin. I truly think I must be about to die.” Extensive examinations reveal no physical cause; the attacks appear suddenly without warning and seem unrelated to activity or general health. Katharina herself provides no insight: “There’s nothing in my head when the attacks begin; my mind is a blank.” The only additional information you have about Katharina is that she’s reluctant to involve herself with members of the opposite sex, and she has a persistent dream in which she appears as a young child pursued from room to room by a shadowy figure.

Think about this case study for a moment. Can you draw any general conclusions about Katharina’s personality from an analysis of her symptoms? The case itself is typical of the clinical problems Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) encountered in the late 19th century. Remember, Freud was a medical doctor by training. He established a private practice in Vienna, where he specialized in a branch of medicine concerned with disorders of the nervous system. Freud routinely saw patients like Katharina, who seemed to have physical problems without physical causes. He used these cases (known in that time as hysterics) as the basis for his highly influential psychodynamic theory of personality and mind, as well as for his method of treatment known as psychoanalysis.

The Structure of the Mind

Freud believed the human mind can be divided into three major parts: the conscious, the preconscious, and the unconscious. The conscious mind contains one’s current awareness—those things that occupy the focus of your attention at the moment. The preconscious mind contains inactive but accessible thoughts and memories—those things that you can easily recall, if desired, but are simply not thinking about at the moment. Finally, the unconscious mind houses all the memories, urges, and conflicts that are beyond awareness. Freud believed that the content of the unconscious mind exerts powerful and long-lasting influences on behavior, despite the fact that it’s hidden and unavailable to consciousness.

From Freud’s perspective, Katharina’s panicky behavior is likely to be caused by forces originating in her unconscious mind. Consider her dream of being chased by a shadowy figure. She can remember the details—her appearance as a young child, perhaps the color and shapes of the rooms—but her conscious memory of the dream, according to Freud, is unreliable. The parts of the dream she remembers, its manifest content, are merely symbolic of the dream’s true unconscious meaning, or latent content. As we discussed in Chapter 6, Freud believed that dreams represent wish fulfillment; dreams are simply one way of gratifying desires or dealing with forbidden conflicts that are normally stored in the unconscious. In Katharina’s case, the shadowy figure may well have arisen from a traumatic childhood experience—perhaps an unwelcome sexual advance by a relative—or even from her own unconscious desire for a sexual experience. Freud relied heavily on dream interpretation as a technique for mapping out the contents of the unconscious mind. Dreams, Freud argued, represent a “royal road” to the unconscious (Freud, 1900/1913).

The Structure of Personality

Freud believed that human personality consists of three parts: the id, ego, and superego (see Figure 11.5). As a student of biology, Freud was committed to the idea that behavior is influenced by biological forces. He was convinced that each of us is born with powerful instinctual drives, particularly related to sex and aggression, which motivate and control our actions. Freud used the term id to represent the portion of personality that is governed by these forces (translated from the Latin, id means “it”). As a component of personality, the id seeks immediate satisfaction of natural urges, without concern for the morals and customs of society. It obeys what Freud called the pleasure principle—the pursuit of pleasure through the satisfaction of animalistic urges. Ironically, from an adaptive standpoint, it’s this dark side of personality—the seeker of pleasure—that guarantees survival of the species by motivating a desire for sexual intercourse.

Figure 11.5 Freud’s View of Personality

Freud believed that our personalities are influenced by three forces. The id is the unconscious and unrepentant seeker of pleasure; the superego is the moral seeker of ideal behavior; and the ego is the executive that acts in accordance with reality. Just as most of an iceberg lies beneath the water, much of personality operates at an unconscious level.

Monica Wierzbicki/Body Scientific Intl.

At the same time, Freud understood that we’re more than just irrational sex machines. He suggested that the forces of the id are balanced by a moral arm of personality called the superego. The superego is the part of our personality that encourages us to act in an ideal fashion—to act in accordance with the moral customs defined by parents and culture. The superego is shaped by experience, and it acts, in part, as a conscience; it makes us feel good when we act the way we should and feel guilty when our behavior strays from accepted standards. Like the id, the superego is essentially irrational—it seeks only moral perfection. Left to its own devices, the superego would undercut or block the more basic urges, even though those urges may help us satisfy fundamental survival needs. The superego follows an idealistic principle: Always act in a proper and ideal fashion as defined by parents and culture.

Sitting between the forces of the id and superego, and acting as a mediator, is the third component of personality—the ego. The ego, which comes from the Latin word for “I,” serves an executive role in Freud’s conception of personality. The ego encourages you to act with reason and deliberation and helps you conform to the requirements of the external world. Freud suggested that the ego obeys a reality principle; it monitors the real world looking for appropriate outlets for the id’s needs, but it also listens intently to the moralistic preaching of the superego. The ego’s goal is compromise among three demanding masters: the external world, the id, and the superego.

Defense Mechanisms: The Ego’s Arsenal

As noted previously, Freud believed we’re unaware of the conflicts that regularly rage among the id, ego, and superego. We consciously experience only the side effects of these battles. For example, Freud believed the experience of anxiety (an unpleasant feeling of dread) often results from confrontations between the ego and the id. But the ego does not enter the battlefield unarmed. Freud proposed that the ego uses a variety of defense mechanisms, which are unconscious processes that can ward off the anxiety that comes from confrontation with the id.

Freud believed that people sometimes deal with unacceptable feelings by attributing them to others through a process called projection. Freud might argue that the man on the left is “projecting” anger from some deeper conflict onto the woman on the right.

iStockPhoto/StockPlanets

The most important weapon in the ego’s arsenal is repression, a process that keeps anxiety-producing thoughts and feelings buried in the unconscious. When a primitive urge from the id rears its ugly head, the ego actively represses the thought or feeling. The urge is blocked, jammed down into the dark recesses of the unconscious. Freud was convinced that we’re particularly likely to repress sexual thoughts or experiences. Unrestricted sexual activity is typically discouraged by parents and society—this was particularly true in Freud’s time—so sexual thoughts and feelings must be actively blocked by the reality-driven ego. Repression is a kind of self-deception—the mind deals with the anxiety-producing impulse by acting as if it isn’t there. Similar kinds of self-deception occur with the other defense mechanisms Freud proposed. For a listing of some of these other important defense mechanisms, along with some examples, take a look at Concept Review 11.1.

Concept Review 11.1

Defense Mechanisms

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Psychosexual Development

To Freud, the unconscious mind is a bubbling cauldron of hidden conflicts, repressed memories, and biological urges. In the case of the biological urges, their origin is relatively clear—people are born with instinctual drives for self-preservation and sex. But where do the hidden conflicts come from? Why are people tormented by repressed memories that arise directly from life’s experiences? Freud believed that people travel through stages of psychosexual development in their childhood (Freud, 1905/1962). How children deal with their emerging sexuality importantly affects the way they think and feel when they reach adulthood.

Each developmental stage is associated with a sensitive region of pleasure, which Freud called an erogenous zone. In roughly the first year of life—during the oral stage—pleasure is derived primarily from sucking and from placing things in the mouth (such as the mother’s breast). In the second year of life, the focus of pleasure shifts to the anus. During this anal stage, pleasure arises from the process of defecation, the passing of feces. From ages 3 through 5, in the phallic stage, the genital regions of the body receive the focus of attention. The child obtains intense gratification from self-stimulation of the sexual organs.

Freud believed we move through these stages for primarily biological reasons. All organisms, including humans, need to learn how to gain nourishment, control the elimination of waste, and satisfy the sexual drive. Unfortunately, it’s possible to become stalled, or fixated, at a particular stage, which, in turn, can have long-lasting effects on personality. By fixation, Freud meant that a person will continue to act in ways that are appropriate for a particular stage, seeking pleasure in stage-dependent ways, even after one has physically matured. There are two primary ways in which the fixation process can occur: Either the child gains excess gratification from a stage, or the child becomes excessively frustrated. It’s the second of these two situations that has received the most attention.

Notice the oral and anal stages are associated with the potentially traumatic experiences of weaning and toilet training. Freud emphasized these experiences because a child can become easily frustrated during either process. People who are fixated in the oral stage, Freud believed, continue to derive pleasure from oral activities into adulthood. They become excessive smokers, or overeaters, or people who bite their nails. Fixation at the anal stage might lead to excessive neatness or messiness. The pleasure-seeking activities in these instances are symbolic, of course; compulsive room cleaning might be a symbolic attempt at the pleasure a child sometimes receives from the retention of feces.

After the age of 5 or 6, boys and girls enter a latency period during which their sexual feelings are largely suppressed.

iStockPhoto/HaiMinhDuong

Freud’s interpretation of the phallic stage of psychosexual development was particularly controversial. He was convinced that small children have intense but unconscious sexual urges that become focused during this stage toward the opposite-sex parent. Boys become erotically attracted to their mother, a condition Freud called the Oedipus complex (after the Greek tragedy of Oedipus, who unknowingly killed his father and married his mother); girls become attracted to their father in what has been called the Electra complex (after the mythical Greek Electra, who hated and conspired to murder her mother). Desire for the opposite-sex parent creates enormous unconscious conflicts in the developing child. Freud believed that many adult sexual or relationship problems can be traced back to a failure to resolve these conflicts adequately.

After the age of 5 or 6, boys and girls enter a kind of psychosexual lull—called the latency period—during which their sexual feelings are largely suppressed. During this period, children direct their attention to social concerns, such as developing solid friendships. Beginning with the onset of puberty, one enters the genital stage. Here, sexuality reawakens, but in what Freud considered to be a more direct and appropriate fashion. Erotic tendencies now tend to be directed toward members of the opposite sex.

Adler, Jung, and Horney

Freud’s emphasis on the role of sexuality in personality development was received with skepticism by many, even from those who were firmly committed to his general approach. One of the first to split from Freud’s inner circle of disciples was Alfred Adler (1870–1937). Adler disagreed strongly with Freud about the role of early psychosexual experience. He felt the important factor in personality development was not childhood trauma but rather how we come to deal with a basic sense of inferiority. To Adler, personality arises from our attempts to overcome or compensate for fundamental feelings of inadequacy. Adler was responsible for coining the term inferiority complex, a concept, he argued, that motivates a great deal of human behavior. It is our natural drive for superiority that explains motivation, not sexual gratification (Adler, 1927).

Adler was not the only dissenting voice. Other early advocates of Freud’s theory began to break away and offer new and revised forms of the theory. One of the biggest personal blows to Freud was the departure of his disciple Carl Jung (1875–1961), whom Freud had picked as his intellectual heir. Jung, like Adler, was dissatisfied with Freud’s narrow reliance on sexuality as the dominant source of human motivation. Jung believed instead in the idea of a “general life force,” which he adopted from his extensive study of Eastern religions and mythology. This general life force was sexual in part but included other basic sources of motivation as well, such as the need for creativity (Jung, 1923).

Among Jung’s more influential ideas was his concept of the collective unconscious. Jung believed that each person has a shared unconscious, in addition to the personal unconscious described by Freud, that’s filled with mystical symbols and universal images that have accumulated over the lifetime of the human species. These symbols are inherited—passed from one generation to the next—and tend to represent enduring concepts (or archetypes), such as god, mother, earth, and water. Actually, the idea that all humans share certain concepts buried deep in a collective unconscious can also be found in the writings of Freud, but Jung expanded on the idea and assigned it a central focus.

Another blow to Freud was the dissenting voice of Karen Horney (1885–1952), one of the first women to learn and practice psychodynamic theory. Horney agreed with Freud’s basic approach, but she rebelled against what she felt was Freud’s male-dominated views of sexuality. Freud had argued in his writings that women are fundamentally dissatisfied with their sex—they suffer from what he called penis envy—a view that Horney found unsatisfactory in many ways. She boldly confronted Freud, both personally and in her writings, and offered revised forms of psychodynamic theory that treated women in a more balanced way (Horney, 1967). One of her more lasting theoretical contributions was her insistence that a link exists between the irrational beliefs people hold about themselves and their psychological problems (Horney, 1945). As you’ll see in Chapters 14 and 15, this idea continues to be influential in the conceptualization and treatment of psychological disorders.

Karen Horney rebelled against what she felt were Freud’s male-dominated views on sexuality.

Bettmann/Contributor via Getty Images

Evaluating Psychodynamic Theory

Few psychological theories have been as influential as Freud’s. Many of the terms and concepts he introduced—particularly his ideas about the unconscious—have become part of modern language and beliefs. You were probably familiar with such Freudian terms as repression, id, ego, and projection before you opened this psychology text. Moreover, the suggestion that personality is determined in part by how we learn to satisfy basic biological drives, as well as deal effectively with the demands of society and the outside world, is still a very modern and widely accepted idea (R. F. Bornstein, 2003). But psychodynamic theory, as envisioned by Freud, has steadily lost its influence over the years.

Part of the problem is that many of the ideas Freud proposed lack scientific rigor; he never articulated concepts such as the id, superego, and ego with ringing precision. As a result, it’s been difficult, if not impossible, to subject them to proper scientific testing. Consider the concept of repression, which Freud believed to be the bedrock of psychodynamic theory. If repressed memories are hidden behind the veil of the unconscious, expressing themselves only in masked and largely symbolic ways, can we ever be certain that we’ve correctly identified these unconscious influences? Most of the evidence for repression has come from clinical case studies, from individuals who are probably not representative of the general population. It’s not easy to study repression in the laboratory, either because of ethical concerns or because we simply don’t know what conditions need to be met for repression to occur. Many people have undergone traumatic events in their childhood yet remain psychologically healthy (Loftus, 1993). In fairness, there have been attempts over the years to provide more rigorous definitions of the various defense mechanisms that Freud proposed, and to test them empirically (e.g., see Cramer, 2015), but no general consensus has emerged and such mechanisms are rarely a part of modern theories of personality.

Freud was an innovative thinker, and he should be given credit for challenging the ideas of his time. For example, prior to Freud, Western culture remained firmly committed to long-standing ideas about the innocence and purity of childhood. Sexuality, it was widely believed, was absent from personality prior to puberty. Freud recognized that at least some forms of sexual pleasure can occur in childhood and can influence behavior and attachment. But he tied his views of sexuality to particular zones of the body, and to a particular developmental stage–based trajectory, without essentially any scientific evidence. Modern views of cognitive and social development, as we discussed in Chapter 4, bear little resemblance to Freud’s ideas (see Silverman, 2020).

In addition to the problems of testability and lack of scientific rigor, Freud’s theory is often criticized for its biases against women. As mentioned earlier, he painted women as individuals unsatisfied with their gender, who need to come to grips with the fact that they lack a penis. Freud was also reluctant to believe women’s testimonials of rape or childhood sexual abuse—he saw these accounts as symbolic expressions of unconscious conflicts rather than as actual events. Many psychologists consider these positions, along with Freud’s general male-oriented approach, to be unrealistic and even distasteful (see Else-Quest & Hyde, 2018).

Humanistic Approaches to Personality

There’s another reason many psychologists don’t like Freud’s psychodynamic approach: It paints a very dark picture of human nature. In describing the origins of personality, Freud often compared the mind to a battlefield, where irrational forces are continuously engaged in a struggle for control. According to Freud, our actions are motivated primarily by the need to satisfy animalistic urges related to sex and aggression; our conscious awareness of why we act is misleading and symbolic, representative of conflicts created during toilet training or as a result of being weaned.

Humanistic psychology is largely a reaction against this pessimistic view of the human spirit. Humanistic psychologists don’t talk about battlefields and conflict; instead, they speak of growth and potential. It’s not animalistic urges that explain personality; it’s the human with our unparalleled capacity for self-awareness, choice, responsibility, and growth. Humanistic psychologists believe each of us can control our own behavioral destiny—we can consciously rise above whatever animalistic urges might be coded in our genes. We’re built and designed for personal growth, to seek our fullest potential, to self-actualize—to become all we are capable of becoming.

To a humanist, there are many ways to explain individual differences in behavior. First, each of us is considered to be naturally unique. We’re more than the sum of a set of predictable parts—everyone is a unique and individual whole. Second, the environment influences the natural growth process. Like plants, people will grow best in fertile and supportive environments; barren environments can’t stop the growth process, but they can prevent us from realizing our own true potential (Rogers, 1963). Third, and perhaps most important, how we act is determined by our unique view of the world—our interpretation of reality. How we view ourselves and the environment guides and motivates our actions. Notice the emphasis here is on conscious mental processes. We’re assumed to be responsible for our own actions, although sometimes our subjective experience of reality is not an accurate reflection of the real world. We’ll consider the views of two prominent humanistic psychologists in this section, Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow.

Carl Rogers and the Self

To humanist Carl Rogers (1902–1987), the essence of personality is wrapped up in the concept of the self or, more specifically, the self-concept. He defined the self-concept as an organized set of perceptions about one’s abilities and characteristics—it amounts to that keen sense of oneself, what it means to be “I” or “me.” Rogers believed that the self-concept comes primarily from social interactions, particularly the interactions we have with our parents, friends, and other significant role models. The people around us mold and shape our self-image through their ongoing evaluations of our actions.

We rely on the judgments of others to tell us who we truly are and what we can hope to become, Rogers argued, because of a basic need for positive regard. We value what others think of us and consistently seek others’ approval, love, and companionship. Unfortunately, in real life, conditions of worth tend to be attached to the approval of others. For instance, let’s suppose you come from a family that values education and intellectual pursuits. You, however, couldn’t care less about such things—your interests are in popular music and athletics. To gain acceptance from your parents, you may deny your true feelings and modify your self-concept to bring it more in line with what your parents believe: “I’m not someone who cares about a trivial activity like sports; I’m someone who cares intensely about the pursuit of knowledge.”

But herein lies a major problem, Rogers argued. The self-concept that you work so hard to form inevitably conflicts with what you truly feel from experience. You may decide to spend the evening reading the philosophical musings of Immanuel Kant, but you’ll probably find your mind drifting and your feelings of self-worth diminishing. Rogers called this condition incongruence, which he defined as a discrepancy between the image you hold of yourself—your self-concept—and your actual day-to-day experiences. Incongruence leads to the experience of anxiety and ultimately forms the basis for psychological problems. True psychological health, Rogers suggested, comes when the self-concept is congruent (agrees) with your true feelings and experiences—that is, when your opinions and beliefs about yourself accurately reflect your everyday experiences. Chapter 15 outlines what Rogers felt was the appropriate therapeutic solution to conditions of incongruence. To anticipate the discussion just a bit, Rogers was convinced that the therapist’s proper role is to be nonjudgmental—to accept the feelings and actions of the client unconditionally. By eliminating the conditions of worth, the client is able to develop a self-concept more congruent with reality.

With respect to personality and its development, Rogers believed that regularities in behavior come largely from the structure of the self-concept. Personality is defined by consistent behavior across situations; people tend to act consistently, he argued, simply because their actions consistently mirror their established self-concept. We act in ways that support our beliefs about ourselves. More often than not, we actively seek to protect our self-image. Given a choice, you might consistently choose to read philosophy rather than watch sports because it’s consistent with your vision of you. If you chose sports, you would need to reconsider who you really are, which is the sort of confrontation that we tend to avoid.

Sometimes we do things that we don't like to preserve our self-concept.

iStockPhoto/SDI Productions

Abraham Maslow and Self-Actualization

Although Carl Rogers was committed to the role played by the self-concept, he also believed strongly in the potential for personal growth. We may act defensively and seek to protect a rigid self-concept, but at our core we’re creative people who have the power to fulfill our personal potential. This idea that everyone has a basic need for self-actualization—the need to move forward toward the realization of potential—also plays a pivotal role in Abraham Maslow’s view of personality.

We will outline Maslow’s views in more detail in Chapter 12 when we discuss motivation. Maslow believed that human motivation is grounded in the satisfaction of need. There are certain things that humans must do—such as obtain food and water and protect themselves from danger—before their potential can be fully realized. One of Maslow’s main contributions was his proposal of the need hierarchy, shown in Figure 11.6, which expresses the order in which needs must be satisfied. Notice that safety and survival needs sit below the need for love and belonging in the need hierarchy. It’s unlikely that you’ll appear to be spiritual or loving if you’re constantly worrying about your next meal. It’s only after the basic needs are satisfied—those related to survival—that the more spiritual side of personality can be developed.

Figure 11.6 Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

Maslow proposed that our observable personality characteristics will indicate where we are positioned in the hierarchy of needs. Someone who must worry constantly about biological or safety needs will behave differently than someone who is seeking to satisfy needs at the highest levels of the pyramid.

Source: From Figure 1 in Kenrick, D. T., Griskevicius, V., Neuberg, S. L., & Schaller, M. (2010).

FIGURE 11.6 DESCRIPTION

Your personality characteristics will reflect where you’re positioned in the hierarchy of needs. Maslow had a very positive view of human nature. A person may consistently act unkind, defensive, or aggressive, he argued, but these personality traits appear only when one fails to satisfy basic needs—they’ll never be fundamental to the human spirit. To support this claim, Maslow pointed to the behavior of individuals who he felt had progressed through the entire hierarchy. The characteristics of human personality, he argued, are highly consistent across individuals at the highest levels of the hierarchy. People who are self-actualizing show none of the darker personality traits exhibited by those locked in at lower levels; they tend to be positive, creative, accepting individuals (Leclerc et al., 1998).

Maslow’s conclusions were based largely on the study of particular individuals, people whom he knew and admired. He also studied the personality traits of people who were very successful, such as Albert Einstein, Abraham Lincoln, and Eleanor Roosevelt. All self-actualizing people, he argued, share certain personality traits. They tend to be accepting of themselves and others, to be self-motivated and problem oriented, and to have a strong ethical sense and hold democratic values. Self-actualizing people also often undergo what Maslow called peak experiences—emotional, often religious, experiences in which one’s place in a unified universe becomes clear and meaningful. Notice these are all positive traits; self-actualizing people tend to be at peace with themselves and with the world.

Evaluating Humanistic Theories

The humanistic approach, with its optimistic emphasis on positive growth, has had considerable influence in psychology. Concepts like the self and the self-concept have received a great deal of attention, and as you’ll see in Chapter 15, humanistic approaches to psychotherapy are popular and widely applied. The humanistic approach provides a nice balance to the pessimism of Freud. Rather than ignoring conscious influences on behavior, humanists champion personal choice and responsibility. Take a trip to your local bookstore and check the shelves devoted to psychology—you’ll find that many of the books emphasize the control you can exert over your own behavior. This is one indication of the humanists’ widespread impact, especially in tapping the general population’s interest in psychology.

But as contributors to scientific psychology, humanistic psychologists are often criticized (see Funder, 2001). Many of the basic concepts we’ve discussed, such as the potential for growth and self-actualization, are vague and difficult to pin down. It’s also not clear where these tendencies come from and under which conditions they’ll fully express themselves. Remember, too, that the humanists place important emphasis on personal, subjective experience. This means that researchers must often rely on self-reports to generate data, and some question whether self-reports produce reliable and accurate representations of internal psychological processes (Bland & DeRobertis, 2020). So, in addition to problems of conceptual vagueness, humanism lacks adequate testability.

The humanistic approach to personality is also criticized for adopting too optimistic and self-centered a view of human nature. The arguments of Rogers and Maslow are partly reactions against the pessimism of Freud. But like Freud, humanistic theorists have adopted a rather extreme view of human nature: People constantly strive for growth, unless constrained in some way by the environment, and are driven to pursue lofty individual goals. Thus, we have the dark view described by Freud (people are driven by unconscious animalistic urges) countered by the extremely optimistic views of the humanists. Many psychologists believe it’s better to adopt a balanced approach: People are neither inherently good nor inherently evil; they sometimes act in self-interested ways that appear animalistic, but these actions are often adaptive and increase one’s likelihood of survival (Kenrick, 2011). At the same time, placing too much emphasis on unconscious biological motives is itself misleading—we undoubtedly exercise considerable conscious control over our behavior.

Social–Cognitive Approaches to Personality

One particularly important characteristic of both the psychodynamic and humanistic conceptions of personality is their emphasis on built-in or natural needs. People are born with animalistic urges that must be satisfied, or they greet the world naturally good with a compelling need for personal growth. The environment plays a critical role in determining final personality, but the role is essentially secondary—personal experiences and cultural norms merely constrain or enhance the full expression of natural needs.

But what about the possibility that people simply learn to act in consistent ways? Isn’t it possible that Liam’s tendency to lie and Rowena’s outgoing and sunny disposition come entirely from experience? Maybe Liam stole candy when he was 4 and was rewarded by not being caught; maybe Rowena learned at an early age that smiles are often met with smiles and that a good deed will be returned in kind. According to social–cognitive theories of personality, human experience, not human nature, is the primary cause of personality growth and development. The social side of the approach emphasizes the role of experience; the cognitive side emphasizes how one’s interpretation of the experience plays a significant role in determining what’s actually learned.

Behaviorist Roots

Social–cognitive theories were originally influenced by the behaviorist tradition in psychology. As discussed in Chapter 1, behaviorists believe that psychologists should look to observable behavior for answers to psychological questions; the research goal is to understand how behavior changes when rewards and punishments are applied. What we call personality, then, could be nothing more than the collective actions we’ve learned to produce in various situations. As with all other animals, if our behavior is rewarded in a particular situation, we’ll be more likely to repeat it the next time we’re in the same situation.

There are three main ways in which people acquire such response tendencies (see Chapter 7). First, through classical conditioning, we learn that certain kinds of events signal other events. Imagine that as a small child Little Albert is frightened in the presence of a white furry rat; he develops a specific fear, or phobia, of small furry animals that continues on into adulthood. His behavior is consistent over time—he panics at the sight of anything small and furry—due in large part to this early childhood experience. Second, through operant conditioning, we learn about the consequences of our behavior. If we’re rewarded in some context for acting aggressively, we’ll tend to act aggressively in the future. If we are repeatedly put down at parties for being outgoing, we’ll learn to be withdrawn and to avoid social situations. Here again it is the environment—one’s past history of rewards and punishments—that is shaping behavior.

The third way that consistencies in behavior can develop is through observational learning, or modeling. We observe the behavior of others around us—especially role models—and imitate the behavior. As we discussed in Chapter 7, it’s adaptive for organisms to mimic the behavior of others, because in this way they can learn appropriate behavior without directly experiencing the consequences of an inappropriate action. Rhesus monkeys, for example, learn to show fear in the presence of snakes through modeling their parents’ behavior, not from directly experiencing the negative consequences of a bite (Mineka, 1987). Modeling approaches assume that many personality traits come from copying the behavior of others, especially when the behavior of the model regularly leads to positive, reinforcing outcomes and, perhaps, when we are likely to feel empathy with the model (Bandura, 1986; Olsson et al., 2016).

The Role of Internal Beliefs

Very few psychologists believe the environment alone determines your personality. This is because the psychological effect of most experiences—positive or negative—depends crucially on how you interpret the experience. Suppose we ask two groups of people to perform a relatively difficult task, such as predicting sequences of numbers. We tell one of the groups that performance on the task is based on skill; the other group is told that success or failure is due entirely to chance. (Unknown to the participants, we actually rig the procedure so people in both groups will succeed and fail the same number of times.) It turns out that task effort, as well as the amount learned, depends on how much control you think you have over the outcome. People who believe their performance is skill-based work harder and learn more from the task (Rotter et al., 1961).

The important point here is that the groups perform differently even though everyone receives exactly the same number of rewards and punishments. So it’s not only the literal distribution of rewards and punishments that matters; your belief about the origins of those consequences is also important. Some psychologists believe that enduring personality traits are based partly on one’s perceived locus of control—how much control you feel you have over your environment (Rotter, 1966). People who are oriented externally, known as externals, perceive little connection between their own actions and the occurrence of rewards; they tend to see themselves as powerless and generally have low levels of self-esteem (Lefcourt, 1982). Internally oriented people, known as internals, view the world as responsive to their actions; they feel confident they can control when rewards and punishments occur. Internally oriented people display high levels of self-confidence and tend to score higher than externally oriented individuals on a variety of academic and social measures (Ryckman, 2004). People with an internal locus of control also show more persistence when looking for a job and often end up with higher wages (Caliendo et al., 2015).

Interestingly, U.S. college students seem to be trending toward more of an external locus of control. Young Americans increasingly believe they have little direct control over what happens in their lives (Twenge, 2014). For example, one study found that the average college student in 2002 had more of an external locus of control than 80% of the college students in the early 1960s (Twenge et al., 2004; but see Trzesniewski & Donnellan, 2010, for a different result). Why the trend? No one knows for certain, but greater cynicism, increased social isolation, negative social trends (including increased media coverage of negative events), and the tendency to adopt a “victim mentality” have all been suggested as reasons. It’s an unfortunate trend because, again, an external locus of control, and its accompanying feelings of powerlessness, is typically associated with a host of negative consequences.

How we act and feel often depends on how much control we think we have over the environment. Externals, who perceive little connection between their own actions and rewards, tend to see themselves as powerless and to have low levels of self-esteem.

iStockPhoto/AntonioGuillem

Locus of control is related to another psychological concept called self-efficacy (Bandura, 1986, 2001). Whereas locus of control refers to your beliefs about how much control you can exert over the environment, self-efficacy is defined as the beliefs you hold about your own ability. For example, Raymond might be convinced people can control their environment, but feel he personally lacks the skill. In this case, he would be rated as low in self-efficacy, with an internal locus of control. On the other hand, he might be extremely confident in his basic abilities (high self-efficacy) but believe he can do little to control the things around him (external locus of control). Often a person’s degree of self-efficacy is related to particular situations or tasks. You might believe strongly in your ability to excel academically but lack any measure of confidence in your social skills.

Locus of control and self-efficacy are important concepts. They tell us that what we learn from the environment depends on more than the delivery of rewards and punishments. What you expect and believe about the world and your abilities influences the types of tasks you’ll choose to engage in, as well as the effectiveness of rewards and punishments. If you’re convinced you have little or no ability in social settings—your self-efficacy is low—you’ll either avoid going to parties or act nervous and uncomfortable when you do go. If you feel you have no chance of succeeding in your psychology course because the teaching assistant doesn’t like you—that is, you’ve adopted an external locus of control—your motivation to work hard is likely to be low. Note in these cases your internal beliefs end up affecting your overt behavior (avoidance of parties or class), which, in turn, affects the likelihood that you’ll be rewarded. Psychologist Albert Bandura (1986) has referred to this relationship between beliefs, overt behavior, and the environment as one of reciprocal determinism: Beliefs, behavior, and the environment interact to shape what’s learned from experience (see Figure 11.7). Recent work suggests that the concept of reciprocal determinism can be used effectively to explain performance in academic settings across a variety of cultures (T. Williams & Williams, 2010).

Figure 11.7 Reciprocal Determinism

Bandura proposed that personality is shaped by complex interactions among expectations and beliefs, behavior, and the rewards and punishments delivered by the environment. In this case, expecting failure in class (personal/cognitive factors) affects studying (behavior), which in turn affects the likelihood of success on the test (environment). The arrows point both ways, suggesting that these factors all interact.

Illustrated by Sarah Yeh

FIGURE 11.7 DESCRIPTION

Evaluating Social–Cognitive Theories

Most psychologists believe learning plays an important role in personality development. Furthermore, the idea that cognitive factors help determine what’s learned, rather than just rewards and punishments, is also widely accepted. Critics of the social–cognitive approach simply argue that it is insufficient as a general account of personality development (Feist et al., 2018; Ryckman, 2008). Social–cognitive theories, for example, tend to neglect the individual as a whole, choosing instead to concentrate on how people have learned to respond in particular situations.

The approach has been criticized as well for failing to emphasize the role of biological and genetic factors in development. Although biological drives and urges may not completely determine personality, biological ancestry can’t be ignored. By choosing to focus primarily on the environment, the social–cognitive theorists sometimes ignore important motivational factors that are controlled largely by biological processes. For example, there appear to be stable sex differences in personality that exist cross-culturally, suggesting that hormonal differences early in development play a role in personality development (Schmitt et al., 2017). In fairness, social–cognitive theories recognize this limitation and have tried to integrate genetic, biological, and environmental factors into a more general theory of personality development (e.g., Mischel & Shoda, 1998). For a summary of the different views of personality development, see Concept Review 11.2.

Concept Review 11.2

Views of Personality Development

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