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Summary Personality Theory VU notes 2022/2023
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Personality Theory VU notes 2022/2023
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Lecture 1What do personality psychologists study?
1. Human nature (universal approach)
2. Individual and group variation (nomothetic approach)
3. Individual uniqueness (idiographic approach)
● Neoclassical economic model
○ Individuals are rational and self-interested
○ Individuals have identical preferences and abilities
○ Individuals have the same information and same goals
■ All individuals make decisions in the same way
Level 1: human nature (universal approach)
Classical behaviorism
○ People are born as a ‘tabula rasa’ meaning that they do not have any built in
content
○ This is the theory that individuals are born without built in mental content and we
learn everything through (stimulus-response) conditioning
■ All individuals react in a similar way to this
● Classical evolutionary psychology
○ Non-optimal behaviors are weeded out through the survival of the fittest, so if you
have a characteristic that is not very beneficial to have and will not help you in
surviving then this is weeded out
○ All individuals also approximately similarly adapt to the environment
Level 2: individual and group variation (nomothetic approach) → how people are like some
other people
Level 3: how people are like no other people (individual uniqueness)
Personality traits and inventories
Definition: a personality trait refers to differences among individuals in a typical tendency to
behave, think or feel in some conceptually related ways, across a variety of relevant situations
and across some fairly long periods of time
● There are 5 main aspects to personality
● Personality….
○ 1. Refers to differences among individuals
1
, ○ 2. In a typical tendency to behave, think or feel
○ 3. In some conceptually related ways
○ 4. Across a variety of relevant situations
○ 5. Across some fairly long period of time
What is personality?
● Physical (attractiveness, height)
● Psychological (intellectual: knowledge, mental abilities, skills)
○ Non-intellectual (emotions, feelings)
Does personality exist?
● Behavior = a function of personality B = f(P)
● Behavior = a function of the situation B = f(S)
● Behavior = a function of the interaction between personality and situation B= f (P x S)
Does personality exist?
2
, Lecture 2
● The four humors (it was a very popular theory until the Middle Ages)
● People then got interested in body types and how the can be connected to personalities
● There are 3 somatoform types
Myers Briggs theory
● There are 16 types
Popular typologies
● Dominant (red)
● Yellow (influencing)
● Blue (cautious)
● Green (steady)
● People get color coded based on their personality
Animal types
● Active vs passive animals due to back test
● In the electric shock experiment, some animals simply avoid the shock and others do
something against it
● 1 dimension = 2 types = active and passive
The lexical approach
Goldberg
1. Individual differences that are important in human interaction
Francis Galton
● Tried to gain an idea of the main characteristics of human
● He started to count in a dictionary the words that have to do with personality
● To him it seemed like a hopeless task and he gave up
● What kind of words would you use to describe personality?
● Nouns: clown, dictator, liar, critic
● Adjectives: funny, dictatorial, lying, critical
● Verbs: to laugh, to dictate, to lie, to criticize
● You can use all the words but psychologists have tend to used adjectives
when describing personalities “he is a funny guy”
First selection adjectives
3
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