TEST BANK -- SUMMARY INTRODUCTION TO PSYCHOLOGY, 8TH EDITION BY PETER O. GRAY (AUTHOR), DAVID BJORKLUND (AUTHOR)PART 1 (PB0014) -- SAMENVATTING INLEIDING TOT DE PSYCHOLOGIE, 8E EDITIE DOOR PETER O. GR...
Introduction to Psychology (Ch.1-16)
Samenvatting Psychology - Introductory Psychology and Brain & Cognition (7201702PXY)
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H14: personality
Personality: the relatively consistent patterns of thought, feeling and behavior that
characterize each person as an unique individual
Personality psychologists make a scientific study about those differences
- using questionnaires and other assessment tools.
They conduct research to measure personality differences and explain their origins.
They try to relate personality to the varying roles and habitats that people occupy in the
social world, and they try to understand the mental processes that underlay the differences.
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In everyday life we use enormous numbers of personality descriptions -> most of them have
varying meanings, many of which overlap the meaning of other terms.
Personality psychologists have long been interested in defusing a more efficient vocabulary
for describing personalities.
Trait theories of personality: endeavor to specify a manageable set of district personality
dimensions that can be used to summarize the fundamental psychological differences
among individuals.
Factor analysis: the statistical technique used to distill all the trit terms of everyday day
language down to a manageable number of meaningful, different dimensions of personality.
-> Lees de uitleg hiervoor op blz. 537
You can see the steps of factor analysis better in the book. But what factor analysis provided
is two different dimensions of personality. For example consienctiousness and
agreeableness that are relatively independent.
Two independent dimensions are useful and efficient
- because they are redundant with each other
- because each caputeres at least part of the essence of a set more specific trait terms
(efficience)
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The first trait theory to be put into practical use was developed by Raymond Catell.
- Began his research by condensing Allport’s 17,953 English adjectives describing
personality down to 170 that he took to be logically different from one another, and
eventually identified 16 basic trait dimensions and a questionnaire called the 16 OF
Questionnaire to measure them - consisting of nearly 200 statements about specific
aspects of behavior.
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Many trait researchers find cattell's 16-factor theory to be overly complex, arguing that some
of its factors are redundant (overbodig).
- now a day it is also easier to provide theories -> factor analysis via computers
Since then a lot of studies with a lot of different subjects from different groups (also adults
and children, people from different cultures) - showed that there were five important factors
in personality -> The big five theory
Big five theory: a person's personality is most efficiently describes in his or her score on
each of five relatively independent global trait dimensions.
- Openness to experience
- Conscientiousness
- Extraversion
- Agreeableness
- Neuroticism
The model posits that each global trait dimension encompasses sic subordinate trait
dimensions referred to as facets of traits
- The facets within any given trait dimension correlate with one another, but the
correlations are far from perfect. Tus, a detailed description of someone's personality
will include not just a score for each of the five global traits but also a score for each
ot=ft he 30 facets.
Other researchers have argued that a 6th trait soul be added -> honesty-humility, producing
the HEXACO model
- Honestly humility
- Emotionality (comparable to neuroticism)
- eXtraversion
- Agreeableness
- Conscientiousness
- Openness
—---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Still other researchers have focused on a subset of these or related that are associated with
a general personality type. Two such sets of traits are grit and the dark triad.
Grit, proposed by researchers as a higher-order personality trait independent of IQ that is
predictive of success in wide range domains, is defined as perseverance and passion for
long term goals.
It consists of two lowered-order factors
, - perseverance of effort: the degree to which people are apt to work hard and
persistently at completing a task without being discouraged by setbacks.
- consistency of interest: the degree to which people are apt to pursue a goal without
being distracted.
Basically, grit reflects the tendency to work hard at achieving important goals. even in the
face of setbacks, and to stick with a particular goal rather than changing goals and interests.
Duckworth provides examples of many successful individuals who doggedly pursued their
goals despite setbacks and achieved success who were equally or more intelligent
individuals may have have failed.
Duclkworth first developed a 12 point scale and later a 8 point scale on which subjects had
to rate from 1 till 5 how much it was like them. 1= not at all 5 = very much like me
- Duckworth at all and various studies later reported that grit was highly associated
with conscientiousness
- Other research after Duckworths initial research has shown that grit is positively
associated with success
Grit, especially the tendency to persist at difficult tasks, seems to be an important addition to
the set of noncognitive personality traits for predicting success on some tasks, but its effects
are apparently not as robust as originally proposed.
- One reason for the mixed results may be because the benefits of grit are limited
to certain tasks (grit may be predictive of success for tasks that are difficult and well
defined, requiring substantial practice for success. Grit may be less predictive of
success on relatively easy tasks or on novel or ill-defined tasks. In fact, persisting
with a difficult task too long may be detrimental if it prevents people from seeking
, help or sticking with a problem when switching to other, more solvable problems
would be more beneficial).
In her research, Duckworth and her colleagues (2007) reported that grit accounted for an
average of 4% of individual differences beyond other factors such as IQ in predicting
success outcomes.
Although Duckworth et al. reported that grit was associated with the personality trait of
conscientiousness as measured in the Big Five model, grit accounted for additional
individual differences in outcomes beyond conscientiousness and IQ. The benefits of
grit on performance may be due to its association with practice, which has been
shown to be important for developing expertise in many domains, as well as success in
spelling bees.
—------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The dark triad of personality traits:
1. Narcissism: extreme selfishness with a grandiose view of one’s own abilities and a
need for admiration.
2. Machiavellism: a personality type in which the person is disposed to manipulate
other people, often through deception.
3. Psychopathy: amoral or antisocial behavior, combined with a lack of empathy and
an inability to form meaningful personal relationships.
At its most extreme, psychopathy is also a personality disorder, but psychopathy can also be
displayed at a preclinical level.
Some researchers have added everyday sadism to the list of the dark triad -> people who
enjoy inflicting physical or verbal harm - producing a dark tetrad.
People with dark personalities often score low on conscientiousness and agreeableness and
often have difficulty getting along with other people. Yet, people with dark personalities
can also be successful in some contexts.
- they are very good at making short term, exploiting mating opportunities (cant really
find mates for the long term)
- narcissism is associated with overconfidence - an inability to learn from one's own
mistakes.
- narcissism is also associated with leadership - and is found in celebrities and political
leaders for example. (study showed that narcissism was associated with better
agenda setting, crisis management, public persuasion and overall greatness. Also
showed that narcissism was associated with unethical behavior).
People with dark personalities - people who often display socially offensive traits outside the
normal range.
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