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Summary Theme 5 Personality Psychology Notes
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These are the notes for Theme 5 of the Personality Psychology course.
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THEME 5• trait-descriptive adjectives = words that describe traits and attributes of a person that
are relatively enduring over time
• traits = dispositions
I. WHAT IS A TRAIT? TWO BASIC FROMULATIONS
1. TRAITS AS INTERNAL CAUSAL PROPERTIES
→ traits are inner/hidden properties of people that cause their behavior (internal 'desires' that
influence us to act in a certain way)
↳ psychologists that see traits as internal dispositions believe that traits are dormant
inside all of us and the capacity to express them is always there, but we can go through life
without encountering a situation in which they will not manifest in any way
!!! It is useful to use this view scientifically because it rules out any other cause for the behavior.
2. TRAITS AS PURELY DESCRIPTIVE SUMMARIES
→ there are no assumptions made about causality, traits are simply descriptive summaries of
behavior that has been consistent over a period of time
↳ no pre-judgement for the cause of someone's behavior
!!! This perspective first identifies individual differences between people then develops theories
to explain them.
• Personality coherence = continuity in a specific trait over time, but the way it is
expressed can change.
• Traits versus states = traits represent typical behavior of a person over prolonged
periods of time and states vary across time and situation and can be regarded as within-
person variations of behavior (generalized behavior versus context specific behavior)
• Persons, behaviors and situations = situational demands have an impact on our
behavior, but correlation with them is low generally.
II. THE ACT FREQUENCY FORMULATION OF TRAITS - AN ILLUSTRATION OF THE
DESCRIPTIVE SUMMARY FORMULATION
Act Frequency Approach → traits are seen as categories of acts which means that a trait is a
descriptive summary of the general trend in a person's behavior (also taking frequency into
account)
It involves 3 key elements:
o Act Nomination = categorizing acts and clustering them together based on the
'trait' they express when they are performed
, o Prototypicality Judgement = creating a hierarchy based on how representative
the behavior is of the trait/which acts are more central/ prototypical of the trait
o Recording of Act Performance = gathering information about the actual
performance of the acts from individuals in their daily life → usually self-reports
are used, but they can be inaccurate often.
!!! Evaluation of the Act Frequency Formulation
- does not specify the context of the trait shown in a relevant act (relations to others, situation
context, options)
- not applicable in situations in which someone fails to act covert acts that can't be observed (ex.
person has a trait, but they don't encounter a situation in which they can show the trait so people
never find out they had it)
+ helpful in making explicit the behavioral phenomena to which most trait terms refer
+ helps in identifying behavioral regularities which must be explained by a comprehensive
personality theory
+ identifies domains which help gain insight into personality
+ can be used to predict outcomes in everyday life (job success, promotion speed etc.)
III. IDENTIFICATION OF THE MOST IMPORTANT TRAITS
The fundamental approaches are 3:
- lexical
- statistical
- theoretical
!!! Researchers usually use a combination of the three when researching.
1. LEXICAL APPROACH = takes all trait-descriptive adjectives or words in the dictionary
and keeps them if they fit two criteria:
o synonym frequency = the more synonyms the adjective has, the higher chances of
it remaining
o cross-cultural universality = the more languages in which it appears, the higher
chances of it remaining
In the end, you are left with the most 'important' ones (trait terms which are important for people
in communication with others).
Lexical hypothesis - when a word is used a lot to describe stuff, it is considered important
(distinguish important form unimportant traits)
Steps: collect traits → reduce number → collect self-report data → analyze response patterns
→ label the factors
It is a good approach sine it capitalizes on collective wisdom of people
2. STATISTICAL APPROACH = you have a large pool of personality factors and traits and a
large number of people rate themselves of the items and scientists use factor analysis to find
clusters and groups
→ factor analysis = statistical procedure used to find groups of items that covary between
themselves, but not with others
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