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1.2C Differences between People Summary Problem 5
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This is a summary of the literature for problem 5 of the course Differences between People.
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1Problem 5
1. How can you categorize personality traits?
2. What type of empirical approaches are there?
3. Traits theories
4. (What is the difficulty in generalizing personality traits?
Traits
Consistent patters in which individuals behave, feel & think
o Endure, almost regardless of time & place
Two connotations:
o Consistency: traits describes regularity in the person’s behaviour
E.g. sociable person always sociable across social settings
o Distinctiveness: characteristics that make a person distinct from others (unique)
Different views of traits
Nomothetic view
o Traits exist in same way in every person
o Uniqueness: unique combination of levels on many trait dimensions
Idiographic view
o Emphasize uniqueness
o Trait may be possessed only by one person (many different traits)
Traits as Internal Causal Properties
Are internal → carry desires from one situation to another
o Causal: desires can be explained by individuals who posses them
o Internal desires influence external behaviour
o E.g. desire for material things → shopping
Traits are not equated (gleichgesetzt) with external behaviour
o E.g. strong desire for pasta → on a diet → therefore just looks at the food longingly, but does
not act on desire
can lie dormant → capaci es are present, but behaviour is not expressed
Traits as Descriptive Summaries
descriptive summaries of attributes → no assump on about internality & causality
o e.g. trait of jealousy → describe expressed behaviour (stalking his girlfriend, etc.) &
summarize trend in his behaviour
o jealousy might be due to social situations (other guys hitting on girlfriend)
Trait theories in general
people differ from each other in the amounts of various characteristics they have
Person behaviour/personality can be explained by traits
Direct correspondence between person’s performance of traits-related actions & his possession of the
corresponding traits (people who act in extraverted manner → correspond to traits of extraversion
Try to establish personality taxonomy
Taxonomy: way of classifying the things being studied
Practical value: make predictions about persons behaviour
o E.g. job application → measures their characteristics personality traits
Predict job performance
Some theories explain behaviour
, 2
o Other just describe & predict (like a map just shows the continents & does not explain why
they are located at their specific place)
Biological perspective:
o Inherited biological factors → primary determinant of individual differences in traits
Lexical approach
Starts with lexical hypothesis: all important individual differences have become encoded within the
natural language
o Difference among people have been noticed & words invented to describe those differences
o E.g. people on artic parts of Sweden, etc. have a word for 300 different qualities of snow
Two criteria for identifying important traits
o Synonym frequency: the more synonyms the attribute has, the greater is the importance of
the attribute to describe individual differences
o Cross-cultural universality: the more important an individual difference is, the more
languages will have a term for it
Statistical approach
Starts with pool of personality items (e.g. adjectives, items, sentences)
Statistical procedure: large number of people rate themselves on the items
o Use factor analysis to identify groups or clusters of items
o Can determine which personality variables have some common property
Theoretical approach
Determines which variables are important to measure
o E.g. Freudian → measure of oral & anal personality are essential
o E.g. theory of sociosexual orientation (Simpson & Gangestad)
Women and men pursue one of two sexual relationship strategies
Single committed relationship with children
Greater degree of promiscuity (less investment of children)
Allport
Traits are the basic units of personality
o Generalizing & personalized determining tendencies
o Consistent & stable models of individual’s adjustment to his environment
Traits can be defined by three properties
o Frequency
o Intensity
o Range of situations
Different kind of traits
o Cardinal trait: persistent, observable disposition
o Central trait: cover secondary dispositions → traits with varying degree of significance &
generality
Functional autonomy of human motives
o In adult life → motive become independent of tension-reducing drives
Criticism
o Limited empirical contributions → did little research (no research on genetic basis)
o Antiscientific → idiosyncratic perspective conflicts with science search for general laws
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