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Chapter 1 - Introduction to Personality Psychology

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Course
Personality Psychology

Institution
University Of British Columbia (UBC )

Gain a comprehensive overview of the field, including its historical background, key theories, and research approaches. Delve into the study of individual differences, personality traits, and their influence on behaviour and cognition. Explore the major perspectives and concepts that shape our unde...

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Uploaded on May 11, 2023
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Professor(s) Patrick dubois
Contains Introduction to personality psychology

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PSYC 305
Chapter 1 – Introduction to Personality Psychology
Introduction
- Features of personality make people different from one another and often take the form of adjectives
 John is lazy, Lina is optimistic, and Samir is anxious.
 Trait-descriptive adjectives: adjectives that can be used to describe characteristics of people are
called trait-descriptive adjectives.
o Nearly 20,000 such trait-descriptive adjectives in the English language.
 Adjectives describing personality refer to several very different aspects of people.
o Thoughtful  refers to inner qualities of the mind.
o Charming and humorous  refer to the effects a person has on other people.
o Domineering  relational and signify a person’s position/stance toward others.
o Ambitious  refers to the intensity of desire to reach our goals.
o Creative  refers both to a quality of mind and the nature of things we produce.
o Deceitful  may refer to strategies used to attain one’s goals (problematic).

Personality Defined
- Personality: the set of psychological traits and mechanisms within the individual that are organized and
relatively enduring and that influence the individual’s interactions with, and adaptation to, their
intrapsychic, physical, and social environments.
- Establishing a definition for something as complex as human personality is difficult.
- Comprehensively including inner features, social effects, qualities of the mind, qualities of the body,
relations to others, and inner goals are hard
 Some texts on personality omit a formal definition entirely.
- People are different from each other in many ways.
 The science of personality psychology provides an understanding of the psychological ways that
people differ from one another.

Psychological Traits
- Psychological traits: characteristics that describe ways in which people are different from each other.
 Saying someone is shy to mentions one way that person differs from others who are outgoing.
 Traits also define ways in which people are similar to some others.
o E.g., people who are shy are similar to each other  they are anxious in social
situations, particularly when there is an audience watching them.
- Personality vs Trait
 Personality  collection of characteristic thoughts, feelings, & behaviors associated to a person.
 Traits  characteristic behaviors and feelings that are consistent and long lasting.
- Trait of talkativeness
 Characteristic can be meaningfully applied to people and describe a dimension of difference
 A talkative person is that way from day to day, from week to week, and from year to year, but
can have quiet moments, quiet days, or even quiet weeks.
 Over time, those with the trait of talkativeness tend to emit verbal behaviour with greater
frequency than those who are low on talkativeness.
- Traits describe the average tendencies of a person.
 Average tendencies: propensity to display a certain psychological trait with regularity.
o E.g., a high-talkative person will start more conversations than a low- talkative person
 explains why the principle of aggregation works when measuring personality.
o Aggregation: adding up or averaging several single observations, resulting in a better
(i.e., more reliable) measure of a personality trait than a single observation of behaviour.

,  Approach implies that personality traits refer to average tendencies in
behaviour, how people behave on average.
 On average, a high-talkative person starts more conversations than a low-talkative person.
- Research on personality traits asks four kinds of questions:
1. How many traits are there?
o Are there dozens or hundreds of traits, or merely a few?
2. How are traits organized?
o E.g., how is talkativeness related to other traits, such as impulsivity and extraversion?
3. What are the origins of traits?
o Where do they come from?
o Is talkativeness hereditary?
4. What are the correlates and consequences of traits?
o How do traits affect life experiences?
o Do talkative people have more friends? Are they considered annoying?
- Psychological traits are useful for three reasons.
1. Help describe people and help understand the dimensions of difference among people.
2. Help explain behaviour.
o Reasons people act may be partly a function of their personality traits.
3. Help predict future behaviour
o Deciding sorts of careers individuals will find satisfying
o Who tolerates stress better
o Who is likely to get along well with others.
- Personality is useful in describing, explaining, and predicting differences among individuals.

Psychological Mechanism
- Psychological mechanism: like traits, except mechanisms refers more to the processes of personality.
 E.g., most psychological mechanisms involve an information-processing activity.
 Someone who is extraverted may look for and notice opportunities to interact with other people.
 An extraverted person is prepared to notice and act on certain kinds of social information.
- Most psychological mechanisms have three key parts: inputs, decision rules, and outputs.
 People may be more sensitive to certain kinds of information from the environment (input),
more likely to think about specific options (decision rules), and guide their behaviour towards
certain categories of action (outputs).
- Personalities contain many psychological mechanisms of this sort  information-processing procedures
that have the key elements of inputs, decision rules, and outputs
 Input  Decision (If then)  Output
1) Dangerous situation  If courageous (run towards)  confront source of danger
2) Dangerous situation  If cowardly (run away)  run from source of danger
- Not all traits and psychological mechanisms are activated at all times  only a few are activated at points
 Courageousness  only activated under particular conditions (e.g., serious dangers and threats)

Within the Individual
- Within the individual: important sources of personality reside within the individual and people carry
sources of their personality inside themselves
 Stable over time and consistent over situations.
 Personality is carried by a person over time and through various situation to the next.
 Today we feel we are the same people we were last week, last month, and last year.
 Influenced by environments and significant others in our lives
- Definition of personality stresses the important sources of personality reside within the individual

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