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Summary Psychology of Personality Notes
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This is a summary for the first-year psychology subject 'Psychology of Personality'. I used these notes for the exam and passed with a 7. Good luck! :)
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Personality Psychology NotesModule 1
Chapter 1: Personality Traits
● Personality traits imply consistency and stability → people have a set of basic trait
dimensions that persist over time and across situations
● Most widely used system: The Big 5 / the Five Factor Model
○ OCEAN: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and
neuroticism
● Criticism → people don’t act consistently across situations because people are
influenced a lot by situations
● Important feature of personality traits → they reflect continuous distributions rather
than distinct personality types
○ Introverts vs. extraverts → not really two distinct types of people, but people
who score relatively low or relatively high along a continuous distribution
● There are 3 criteria that characterize personality traits
○ 1: consistency
■ individuals must be somewhat consistent in their personality across
different situations (example: if someone is very talkative at home,
they also tend to be talkative at work)
○ 2: stability
■ individuals with a certain trait are somewhat stable over time in their
behaviors (example: if someone is very talkative at age 30, they also
tend to be talkative at age 40)
○ 3: individual differences
■ for example, people differ in how frequently they talk and how active
they are → that’s why personality traits like talkativeness and activity
level exist
● Allport & Odbert (1936) → the lexical hypothesis
○ All important personality characteristics should be reflected in the language
we use to describe others
, ○ Allport & Odbert went through the dictionary and started combining words to
describe certain personality traits (for example: friendly was combined with
sociable because they go together in personality traits)
● Walter Mischel: Personality and Assessment (1968)
○ Mischel suggested that personality actually isn’t that consistent
○ Debate after Mischel published his book → the person-situation debate
■ The power of personality vs. the power of situational factors
○ Mischel thought that psychologists should focus on people’s distinctive
reactions to specific situations
○ Research shows that on average, the effect of the situation is about as large as
the effect of someone’s personality traits
Module 2
Chapter 2: Personality Assessment
What makes a good assessment?
● Validity: How well the measure captures the trait (and not something else)
○ Construct validity → does it fit the theory?
■ Example of low construct validity → no good theoretical foundation +
a heavy focus on a “dominant trait” and no information on other traits
○ Face validity → does it look like it’s measuring what it should to participants?
○ Predictive validity → does it predict associated behaviors / life outcomes?
■ Behaviors: helps other people, is always on time, keeps promises, etc
■ Life outcomes: job performance, income, relationship satisfaction, etc
■ Example of low predictive validity: personality types are weak at
predicting relevant outcomes
○ Convergent validity → does it correlate with other assessments of the trait?
○ Discriminant validity → does it not correlate with other assessments of
different traits?
● Reliability: How precise the measure is in measuring the trait
○ Test-retest reliability → Do I get the same score if I use the measure again in
a week?
, ■ Example of low test-retest reliability: your personality type can easily
change across measurement occasions
○ Internal consistency → Do items of the same trait correlate with each other?
○ Inter-rater reliability → Do multiple interviewers administering the same
measure arrive at the same conclusion?
Other relevant criteria
● Generalizability/Fairness: Can the measure be applied to different genders, ages,
languages, cultures, educational levels? Is the test fair or does it discriminate against
certain groups?
● Scaling/norms/standardization: Does the test have good comparison samples and
standardized scores to compare test takers?
● Fakeability: Is the test safe against the possibility to “fake” better scores?
● Efficiency: Is the test cheap and fast to administer?
● Useability: Is the physical/cognitive/mental burden on participants reasonably low?
Different theoretical models have generated strategies for measuring characteristics:
● Humanistically oriented theories argue that people have clear, well-defined goals and
actively strive to achieve those → it would make sense to directly ask them about
themselves and their goals
● Psychodynamically oriented theories propose that people lack insight into their
feelings and motives → their behavior is influenced by processes that operate outside
of their awareness → people are unaware of these processes, so it wouldn’t make
sense to ask them
Objective Tests
● Objective tests involve giving people a standard set of questions with a limited set of
response options (disagree, neutral, agree, etc)
● The term ‘objective’ refers to the method used to score responses, not the responses
themselves
○ The responses themselves might be highly subjective and can be influenced by
a number of different rating biases
, Self-report measures
● Advantages
○ The biggest source of information is the person filling out the survey about
themselves (because who knows more about you than you yourself? → you
have direct access to your feelings, thoughts, motives)
○ Asking people to describe themselves is the simplest and most cost-effective
approach to assessing personality
○ Self-report personality tests have high validity → example: self-ratings of
conscientiousness are significant predictors of both overall academic
performance and job performance
● Disadvantages
○ Participants might present themselves in a socially desirable way → especially
when test scores are used for a job application, for example
○ Personality ratings reflect a self-enhancement bias → people are motivated to
downplay their less desirable characteristics and instead focus more on
positive characteristics
○ The reference group effect → when we base our self perceptions on how we
compare to others in our sociocultural reference group (example: if you work
harder than most of your friends you think you score high on
conscientiousness but that doesn’t mean it’s actually the case)
○ Acquiescence: agreeing to statements in general → can be addressed by using
reverse coded items
○ Extreme response style or middle response style
Situational Judgment Test
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