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Summary - Personality Psychology
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Chapter 1: Introduction to Personality PsychologyA short history
Theophrastus (327 BC - 287 BC)
- student of Plato
- collection of personality sketches: “Characters” --> personality types
- “primitive descriptions” of personality traits/types
renewed interest in the 19th century
- Galton (1822-1911, cousin of Darwin) and Cattell (1860-1944, first psychology
professor): sensorimotor tasks
- Binet (1857-1911): individual differences in higher order processes are stronger than
those on elementary sensorimotor tasks; first IQ-Test —> Stanford-Binet test
- James (1890) and Freud (1923): WW I —> recruitment, detection of “combat stress”
(PTSS)
- 1932: first psychology journal: „Character and Personality“
- 1937: real starting point
‣ Gordon Allport author of the first personality of psychology textbook -
„Personality a Psychological Interpretation“
‣ Henry Murray: Personology —> need, press
Personality
implications: organizations, corporations; school/education; clinical psychology: ordinary
traits, psychopathology; social psychology; Neuro-/Biological Psychology
personality: set of psychological traits and mechanisms within the individual that are
organized and relatively enduring and that influences his or her interactions with and
adaptations to the intrapsychic, physical, and social environments; stable over time and
consistent over situations
‣ within the Individual: personality is something a person carries with him or
herself over time and from one situation to the next
‣ organized and relatively enduring: no random set of traits or mechanisms,
linked in a coherent fashion, consistent over time and situations
- psychological traits: characteristics describing ways people differ from or are similar to
each other, they describe the average tendencies of a person; they describe people and
help in explaining their behavior but also predicting it for future situations; forces that
influence how we think, act and feel
- psychological mechanisms: the processes of personality; information-processing
procedures involving the cognition, refers to the processes of personality
‣ three key ingredients: input —> decision rules (if then) —> output
- person-environment interaction: connections between personalities of people and the
environments they inhabit
‣ includes: perceptions, selections, evocations (reactions produced in
others) and manipulations (intentional attempt to influence others behavior,
thoughts and feelings)
‣ adaption: a central feature of personality for accomplishing goals, coping,
adjusting and dealing with challenges and problems; through functional
properties (e.g. worrying which seems maladaptive at first) rewarding
characteristics may result (e.g. social support)
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, ‣ environment: the physical environment often poses challenges for people;
threats to survival evoke behaviors that help us avoid or safety interact with
these environmental threats to survival, e.g. shivering in the cold or fears of
heights or spiders; the social environment also poses adaptive challenges,
e.g. job search, desired emotional closeness etc.; the intrapsychic
environment (‚within the mind‘) consisting of memories, dreams, desires,
fantasies
➡ all of them provide a critical context for understanding human personality
our personality determines in part:
- behavior, feelings, perception, thoughts, selection of environment
Personality Psychology: psychology of differences between people
[General Psychology (e.g. Biological Psychology, Social Psychology): general laws of
behavior]
trait-descriptive adjectives: adjectives that can be used to describe characteristics of
people, they refer to several different aspects of people; e.g. „domineering” to signify
person’s position, “creative” to describe the quality of mind and nature of the products we
produce etc.
inner personality: social effects, qualities of the mind, qualities of the body, relations to
other, inner goals
Aim 1: Describing Differences
- (especially) interpersonal/interindividual: difference between people
- intergroup differences: differences between groups; (e.g. gender, culture, age)
- (to a lesser extent) intrapersonal/intraindividual: how does one person vary from
time to time / from situation to situation (about conditions/situations/times);
differences: traits, motives, emotions (positive/negative, duration/fluctuation)
- interindividual differences in intraindividual differences
Aim 2: Explanation of differences
- proximal explanations: factors that co-occur in time with the phenomena you want
to explain - here-and-now approach
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, - distal explanations: factors that are further away in time - in our individual past or
way beyond our own past — evolutionary past
levels of personality
all human beings are in certain respects
1. like all others - human nature level: typical traits and mechanisms of our species are
possessed by (nearly) everyone, e.g. language skills, social interactions (need to belong,
capacity for love)
2. like some others - level of individual and group differences: where common features
exist but individuals differ
3. like no others - individual uniqueness level: every individual has qualities not shared by
another person in the world
- nomothetic: as individual instances of general characteristics that are distributed in
the population, involves statistical comparisons, typically applied to identify universal
characteristics and individual or group differences
- idiographic: “the description of one”, mostly results in case studies or biography of a
single person
domains of knowledge
specialty areas of science, at some point integrating the finding in different areas and fitting
them all together; six distinct domains of knowledge about human nature; can contradict
each other sometimes: e.g. Freud: irrational sexual/aggressive instincts // cognitive
perspective: humans —> rational scientists
dispositional domain: central goal is to identify and measure the most important ways in
which individuals differ from each other; origin of difference, development and maintenance
biological domain: biological systems provide behavior, thought and emotion, general
domains are genetics, psychophysiology (nervous system) and evolution (functional aspects
of personality)
intrapsychic domain: mental mechanisms; most known is Freud’s psychoanalysis; includes
defense mechanisms (repression, denial and projection), conflicts within the person’s own
mind; forces often operate outside of the realm of consciousness
- modern research: power motives, achievement motives, intimacy motives
cognitive-experiential domain: cognition and subjective feelings, important factor is the
self and self-concept, intelligence and the goal-orientation of humans, happens consciously
social and cultural domain: personality affects and is affected by social and cultural
context; a big component of the social context are the gendered positions in the world;
different cultures bring out different facets of our personality
adjustment domain: how we cope, adapt and adjust to the environment; certain personality
features (here disorders) are related to poor adjustment; “normal” personality functioning can
be deepened by examining the disorders of personality
What makes a good (personality) theory?
theory: is tested by systematic observation that can be repeated; three purposes in science:
(1) provide a guide for researchers (2) organizes known findings and (3) makes
predictions
- comprehensiveness: explains most or all known facts well
- heuristic value: guides researchers to important new discoveries
- testability: makes precise predictions that can be empirically tested; e.g. parts of Freud
psychoanalytic theory can’t be tested
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, - parsimony: contains few premises and assumptions (does not mean that simple theories
are always better, simple theories often fail to be comprehensive —> explain so little)
- compatibility and integration across domains and levels: consistent with discoveries in
other domains; rarely used to evaluate the adequacy of personality theories
Is there a Grand Ultimate and True Theory of Personality? - NO, but Freuds
Psychoanalysis provides the most ambitious theory until now. Why is this? - Most
psychologists have focused on specific domains. A unifying theory will have to unify all six
domains. —> comprehensive theory is not there yet
Contemporary Research in Personality
- modern research is not yet a century old
- most address the ways in which individuals and groups differ
- research on cultures shows that one major dimension of difference concerns the
degree to which individuals endorse a collectivistic or an individualistic attitude
Chapter 2: Personality Assessment, Measurement and Research
Design
To evaluate personality several test and research methods are possible: self-report, observer
report, test data and a life history data. Using these test methods in unison will give reliable
information.
sources of personality data
Self-report data (S-Data): most common method, can be obtained through questionnaires
or interviews, individuals report about their feelings, emotions, desires, beliefs and private
experiences
- unstructured questionnaires: open-end questions, short statements; e.g. the
Twenty Statements Test where the question ‘I am….’ was answered 20 times
- structured questionnaires: answers with ‘true’ or ‚false’; e.g. Likert rating scale:
numerical assessment of a characteristic or statement mostly combined with a CPI
California Psychological Inventory or NEO Personality Inventory
- projective tests: person gives responses to ambiguous stimuli; e.g.: thematic
apperception test (TAT) and the word association test
- benefits: some info is only known by the individual, interview allows thorough
exploration, questionnaire is time efficient and allows large samples
- limitations: honesty is unreliable, lack of accurate self-knowledge/introspection,
dependent on motivation of participant, Alexithymia: people can’t assess their
feelings or can’t find words to describe them
‣ biases: social desirability, self-representation, memory biases —> use O-data
Observer-report data (O-Data): outside sources for gathering information about an
individual; e.g. from family, friends, acquaintances
- inter-rater reliability: is high as multiple observers can be used and an average
calculated
- choosing the observers: either observers who know the individual or observers who
don’t know
- choosing the environment
‣ naturalistic observation: observer witnesses and records events that occur
in the normal course of the participants life, info from a realistic context, not
able to control variables
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