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PersonolgyChapter 1:
1.3 Personology and everyday knowledge of human nature
o Personology regraded as extension of our everyday knowledge about
human nature.
o Those who are considered good judges of people have only limited
abilities. They understand certain people, or they knowledge is limited
to specific types of situations.
o Our ability to judge people depends mainly on four sources of
information:
1. Cultural tradition- rich source of information. Novels, dramas,
songs, expressions, and idioms contain much information and
wisdom about nature of people.
2. Direct communication with others- when one talks to people
about how they see others and themselves, one cannot be sure how
reliable they are.
3. Observations of others behavior- our observations are also
incomplete, unsystematic, and often inaccurate, especially as they
are heavily colored by our own subjective judgement and bias.
4. Self-observation
Personology- branch of psychology that focuses on the study of individuals
characteristics and of differences between people. covers essentially the same
ground as everyday knowledge of human nature, namely those abilities that
enable us to say that we know someone well.
o Personologists aim at improving such everyday knowledge about people
by basing their theories on scientific methods.
o Personology described as the formal scientific counterpart of our informal
knowledge of human nature.
o Comprehensive elements of personology are in personality theories.
Personality theory- outcome of a purposeful, sustained effort to develop a logically
consistent conceptual system for describing, explaining and or predicting human
behaviour.
The particular nature and purpose of this conceptual handling of human
functioning differs from theory to theory, but it usually includes several of:
An underlying view of the person
Certain proposals about the structure of personality and about how this
structure functions
Ideas about what motivates human behaviour
, A description of human development and propositions about ideal
human development
Reflections on the nature and causes of behavioural problems or
psychopathology
An explanation of how human behaviour might be controlled and
possibly changed
Ideas about how to study, measure and predict behaviour.
1.6.1 Personality, situation, and behaviour
o There are differences of opinions as to exactly what role is played by
each of these aspects.
o Some psychologists emphasize the role of the person, others
accentuate the situation and a third group focuses on the interaction
between the two.
o These three viewpoints: personism, situationalism and
interactionalism
Personism
o Behaviour is influenced chiefly by the individual’s personality.
o Individuals have certain fixed characteristics or behavioral tendencies
that distinguish them from each other.
o Some theorists come close to this extreme overemphasis of the role of
personality compared with that of the situation.
o Eg. Freuds position when he asserts that all behaviour, including slips
of the tongue and other maladaptive behaviours, are caused by
unconscious dirves. Freuds viewpoint also known as psychic
determinism.
o Psychometric testing, to a large extent, tacitly based on the views of
personism- idea that a person’s characteristics can be measured in one
situation (test), and that predictions concerning his or her behaviour in
other situations, can be made on the basis of test results.
Situationalsim
o View that the situation is the only or the most important determinant
of behaviour developed in reaction to the somewhat extreme
personism evident in the theories of Freud and his contemporaries.
o The most extreme form of situationalism- all people in the same
situation would behave in the same way.
o Situationalism is linked to idea that all people are equal (genetic
differences are denied) and that environment that shaped the
individual’s specific attributes = environmental determinism.
o John Watson- father of behaviorism supporter of environmental
determinism and situationalism.
, o Situationalism maintains that different people will behave in similar
ways in the same situation, and their behaviour will vary in similar
ways from one situation to another.
Interactionalism
o Behaviour is the outcome of the interaction between the individual’s
characteristics and the situation in which the behaviour occurs.
o Acknowledges the influence of individual differences as well as that
of the situation.
o These differences in behaviour are seen as the result of both
personality traits and differences in the situation itself.
o Form of interactionalism- transactionalism
Transactionalism: interaction between the person, the situation, and
the behaviour. The person reacts not only to the situation, but also to
the behaviour that he himself or she produces in the situation.
o Interactional viewpoint also appears in other forms, as systems
theory, the ecosystemic approach and the ecological
approach.
o Humans are part of the physical, social and cultural environment,
and their behaviour should be seen as the outcome of this entire
system.
Chapter 2: Historical overview pf psychological thinking
Philosophical assumptions
There are various philosophical assumptions about the relationship between
soul and body that underlie the basic views of the person inherent in the
different personality theories.
o Materialism: example of a monistic point of view that recognizes the
body as the only manifestation of human existence. All objects and
events, including psychological processes such as thinking, willing, and
feeling, are explained solely as observable physiological processes.
Materialistic monism led ultimately to behaviourism and reflexology. At
opposite pole from mentalism.
o Mentalism: also a monistic view, which rests on the philosophical
hypothesis that all psychological phenomena, such as thought, will and
emotions, can be ascribed to higher, non-observable mental processes
and should be distinguished from physiological processes.
o Mechanistic: all physical and/or psychological phenomena can be
explained in terms of laws of cause and effect. The conditioning
paradigm that underlies behavioristic theories is based upon
mechanistic assumptions. Usually associated with determinist
orientation.
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