This document includes full notes of the important parts of the chapter 1.1 Approaches to personality from the Oxford textbook - Investigating Psychology by Nicola Brace and Jovan Byford.
The notes are colour coded, definitions marked in pink, and important research names and dates in yellow.
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A very important factor in human behaviour is personality.
Personality def: refers to a set of stable and enduring individual characteristics or
inner dispositions that lead people to behave in a steady way or over time and maintain
a consistent orientation to other people and the world around them.
People tend attribute causes of someone’s behaviour to their personality.
- Example: If you see someone fall, you may just think that they are clumsy, rather
than that maybe the floor is slippery.
This is called fundamental attribution error.
Fundamental attribution error def: the tendency to explain the causes of other
people’s behaviour as a product of their internal characteristics and dispositions rather
than external situational factors.
Personality is complex and susceptible to individual variation, as no two people can
have identical personalities.
For exactly this, there is a sub-discipline of psychology concerned with the study of
individual di erences.
individual di erences def: any characteristics that are susceptible to variation
between individuals; for example personality or intelligence.
There can be thousands of words to escribe personality characteristics. The question is,
can there be reduced to a smaller and therefore more manageable cluster of
personality traits?
Yes! This is the approach taken by Lewis R. Goldberg. In the 1980s, he devised the “Big
Five” personality factors (Goldberg, 1981).
According to Goldberg, personality can be divided into 5 dimensions namely
Extraversion.
1. Extraversion
2. Agreeableness
3. Conscientiousness - things like orderliness and reliability
4. Emotional stability – things like security, emotionality
5. Intellect – things like imagination, perceptiveness
The assumption here is that each of the 5 factors is a continuum with each person’s
personality being definable in terms of where they are along each of the 5 dimensions.
As well as categorising and defining personality in terms of a smaller number of factors,
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