Psychology of Personality - Summary, Tilburg University (9)
Samenvatting Persoonlijkheidsleer en -Onderzoek Jaar 1.5 Psychologie
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Chapter 1 Introduction
Trait-descriptive adjectives: adjectives that can be used to describe characteristics of people. They
can refer to several different aspects of people.
Personality: the set of psychological traits and mechanisms within the individual that are organized
and relatively enduring and that influence his or her interactions with, and adoptions to, the
intrapsychic, physical and social environments.
Psychological traits: characteristics that describe ways in which people are different from each
other. They can also define ways people are similar.
Average tendencies: if someone has a trait but doesn’t always act like that.
Any trait can take a quite different form in different individuals, cultures or even across centuries.
Psychological traits are useful for:
1. describing people and helping to understand the dimensions of difference between people.
2. explaining behaviour
3. predicting future behaviours
Psychological mechanisms: like traits, except mechanisms refers more to the processes of
personality. The three essential ingredients are:
1. inputs: it may make people more sensitive to certain kinds of information from the
environment
2. decision rules: it may make people more likely to think about specific options
3. outputs: it may guide people’s behaviour toward certain categories of actions
Personality is:
- Within the individual: personality is something a person carries with him or herself over time
and from one situation to the next.
- Organized: the psychological traits and mechanisms, for a given person, are not simplt a
random collection of elements. Rather, personality is organized because the mechanisms and
traits are linked to one another in a coherent fashion.
- Enduring: and somewhat consistent over situationSome situations may be overpowering and
suppress the expression of psychological traits. Some psychologists have argued the
argument of consistency is weak, but it is maintained that people are overall consistent,
thought not perfectly.
- Influential forces: personality traits and mechanisms can have an effect on people’s lives. It
influences how we act, how we view ourselves, how we think of the world, how we interact
with others, how we feel, how we select our environments, what goals we have and how we
react to our circumstances.
- Person-environment interaction: it includes perceptions (how we interpret), selection (how
we choose situations to enter), evocations (reactions we produce, mostly unintentionally, in
others, and manipulations (ways we intentionally attempt to influence others).
- Adaptations: the notion that a central feature of personality concerns adaptive functioning -
accomplishing goals, coping, adjusting and dealing with the challenges and problems we face
as we go through life.
- The physical environment often poses challenges for people. Some of these are explained by
the need to survive. The ways we cope with our social environment are central to
understanding personality. Besides that the intrapsychic environnement (within the mint) is
very real to each of us and makes up an important part of our psychological reality.
Three levels of personality analysis:
1. Like all others
Human nature: traits and mechanisms of personality that are typical of our species and are
possessed by everyone or nearly everyone. Like being able to speak/learn a language or the
desire to live with others.
2. Like some others
Individual differences: ways in which each person is like some other people
, Group differences: the features that people in one group may have in common, which make
them different from other groups.
Although many traits and mechanisms of humans are common to both sexes, a few are
different from men and women. Like men are usually more physically aggressive. There’s
also differences found in cultural or ethnic groups, like Europeans tend to be more outgoing,
whilst Asians are more introverted.
3. Like no others
Individual uniqueness: no person has the exact same personality, not even identical twins
in the same culture.
Nomothetic: personality studied as individual instances of general characteristics that are
distributed in the population.
Idiographic: personality studied as single, unique cases.
A domain of knowledge: a speciality area of science and scholarship, in which psychologists have
focused on learning about some specific and limited aspects of human nature.
Each theoretical perspective within the domains of personality may be focused on a critically
important part of human psychological functioning, but each perspective by itself does not capture the
whole person.
Six domains of Knowledge of Human Nature
1. Dispositional: the ways in which individuals are disposed to behave, and why these
dispositions differ from another.
2. Biological: humans are collections of biological systems and these systems provide the
building blocks for behaviour, thought and emotion. With the different approaches:
- genetic
- Psychophysiology: what is known about the basis of personality in terms of nervous
system functioning.
- Evolution
3. Intrapsychic: deals with mental mechanisms of personality, many of which operate outside
of conscious awareness. It deals with efforts to understand the role of our unconsciousness.
4. Cognitive experiential: focuses on cognition and subjective experience such as consious
thoughts, feelings, beliefs and desires about oneself and others.
- One important element of our experience entails the self and self-concept.
- A second aspect in this domain is intelligence.
- The third aspect is the goals we strive for.
- The last aspect is subjective experience entails our emotions.
5. Social and cultural: the assumption is that personality is not something that merely resides
within the heads, nervous system and genes of individuals, but is affected by the social and
cultural context. Different cultures or locations may bring out different facets of our personality
in our manifest behaviour. Which one of these capacities we display may depend on what is
acceptable in and encouraged by the culture. Many personal differences will be seen in the
relationships we have. Our gender is also a very important part of our identities.
6. Adjustment: the fact that personality plays a key role in how we cope with, and adapt, and
adjust to the ebb and flow of events in our day-to-day lives. Personality has been linked with
health issues, behaviours and even how long we live. It can also be connected to adjustment
disorders like antisocial personality disorder.
Each domain has two key elements:
1. Theories that have been proposed, including basic assumptions
2. Empirical research
A good theory fulfils three purposes in science:
1. provides a guide for researchers: it must inspire scientists to further explore and generate
additional research questions and collect data.
2. organizes known finding
3. maken predictions
,Beliefs: are often personally useful and crucially important to some people, but they are based on
faith, not on reliable facts and systematic behaviours.
Theories: are tested by systematic observations that can be repeated by others and that yield similar
conclusions.
It is suggested that statistical prediction (with a computer) based on facts consistently outperforms
clinical judgement, but that, certainly in the case of rare exceptional circumstances, clinical judgement
can serve as a valuable source as well when making decisions.
5 scientific standards for evaluating personality theories:
1. comprehensiveness: does the theory do a good job of explaining all of the facts and
observations within the domain?
2. heuristic value: does the theory provide a guide to important new discoveries that were not
known before?
3. testability: does the theory render precise enough predictions that personality psychologists
can test them empirically?
4. parsimony: does the theory contain few premises and assumptions (parsimony) or many
premises and assumptions (lack of parsimony)?
5. compatibility and integration across domains and levels
Chapter 2 Personality Assessment, Measurement and Research Designs
Sources of personality data
Self-report data (S-Data): the information a person reveals. It can be obtained through a variety of
means, including interviews, periodic reports, and questionnaires.
An obvious reason to use self-report data is that individuals have access to a wealth of information
about themselves that is inaccessible to anyone else.
Unstructured: open ended questions, like tell me about
Structured: closed ended question, like true or false
- Likert scale: to indicate in numerical form the degree to which each trait term characterizes
them
Personality scale: usually consists of summing the scores on a series of individual rating scales.
For self-report measures to be effective respondents must be both willing and able to answer the
questions put for them, but they are not always honest, especially about unconventional experiences.
Or some people may lack accurate self knowledge.
Experience sampling: people answer some questions everyday for several weeks or longer. Which
can be done with a reminder, but also devices people wear all day. If it’s so unobtrusive people forget
they’re wearing it, participants might share things they don’t want to.
Observer-report Data (O-data): capitalizes on sources of observers for gathering information about a
person’s personality.
Advantages:
1. Observers may have access to information not attainable through other sources, like
impressions
2. Multiple observers can be used for one individual. It allows inter-rater reliability: the level of
agreement among observers.
Two strategies to select observers:
1. Professional personality assessors who do not know the participant in advance.
2. Use individuals who actually know the target participants.
Advantages:
- They are in a better position to observe the natural behaviour.
- Multiple social personalities: we display different sides of ourselves to different
people. You can assess many aspects of an individual’s personality
, Disadvantages:
- Observers may be biased
Two ways to observe:
Naturalistic observation: observers witness and record events that occur in the normal course of the
lives of their participants.
Artificials settings: experiments can instruct participants to perform a task and then observe how
individuals behave in these constructed settings.
Test Data (T-Data): standardized tests with the idea to see if people react differently to an identical
situation.
Key points about laboratory studies:
1. It’s possible to see key indicators to personality
2. It should be sensitive to manifestations of personality that occur in incidental parts of the
experiment (high dominant woman saying the man should take the lead)
3. Interesting links between S-data and T-data
Limitations of T-data:
1. Participants might try to guess what trait is being measured and then alter their responses to
create a specific impression.
2. Difficulty in verifying that the research participants define the testing situation in the same
manner as the experimenter.
3. The situations are inherently interpersonal
T-data is designed to elicit behaviour that would be difficult to observe in everyday life.It allows
investigators to control the context and test specific hypotheses by exerting control over the variables
that are presumed to have causal influence.
Some aspects of personality can be assessed through mechanical recording devices. A technical way
for collection of T-data is an actigraph, which is a modified self-winding watch that can be strapped to
someone and measure their activity.
Advantages:
1. No biases
2. Can obtain in relatively natural circumstances.
The disadvantages though is that very few traits can be assessed by mechanical devices.
Physiological data: using data collected by looking at someone’s body, like brain or eye-movement,
can provide information about a person’s level of arousal, a person’s reactivity to various stimuli, and
the speed at which a person takes in new information.
Functional magnetic imaging (fMRI): technique used to identify the areas of the brain that ‘light up’
when performing certain tasks such as verbal problems. When a certain part of the brain is activated it
draws more oxygen towards it.
Projective techniques: a person is given a standard stimulus and asked what he or she sees. This is
related to what’s on the person’s mind and is directly related to what is on his or her mind. These
measures are useful for getting at wishes, desires, fantasies and conflict that the participant
themselves may be unaware of and could not report on a questionnaire.
Life-outcome Data (L-Data): refers to information that can be gleaned from the events, activities and
outcomes in a person’s life that are available to public scrutiny. Personality characteristics measured
early in life are often linked to important life outcomes several decades later. Psychologists often use
S-data and O-data to predict L-Data.
Issues in personality assessment:
1. How closely findings obtained from one data source correspond to findings from another data
source. Agreement between data sources tend to range from low to moderate with traits that
are more observable being more agreed upon. Lack of strong agreement may indicate that
the different sources are assessing different phenomena or one or more data sources are
fallible or have problems.
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