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  3. University Of South Africa (Unisa)
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  5. Personality Theories (PYC2601)

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PYC2601 Summary
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Meticulously crafted study notes tailored to chapters 1, 2, 3, 10, 11 and 17 of the prescribed textbook. Dive deep into the chapters with a comprehensive summary to help you understand crucial concepts. With these concise yet comprehensive study notes, you'll master the material with ease, paving t...

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  • June 3, 2024
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  • 2023/2024
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CHAPTER 1

personology: focuses on the study of the individual’s characteristics and of differences between people.

*Our ability to judge people depends mainly on 4 sources of information:

- cultural tradition
- direct communications from others
- observation of others’ behaviour
- self-observation

everyday knowledge of human nature: ability to judge, understand, explain, and predict behaviour of human beings.

*Personologists aim at improving everyday knowledge about people by basing their theories on scientific methods.
Personology may be described as the formal scientific counterpart of our informal knowledge of human nature.

personality theory: outcome of a purposeful, sustained effort to develop a logically consistent conceptual system for
describing, explaining and/or predicting human behaviour.
The conceptual handling of human functioning varies from theory to theory but typically includes several aspects.
• an underlying view of the person

• certain proposals about the structure of personality and about how this structure functions

• ideas about what motivates human behaviour

• a description of human development and propositions about ideal human development

• reflections on the nature and causes of behavioural problems or psychopathology

• an explanation of how human behaviour might be controlled and possibly changed

• ideas about how to study, measure and predict behaviour.

Most personality theories have been developed by psychotherapists. a personality theory can provide a better and
more complete explanation of human behaviour than common sense can.

Why are there so many personality theories?

Over 30 theories, it suggests that there is still a lack of a 'correct' explanation. There are also other reasons for the
great diversity of theories:

➢ The complexity of humans and their behaviour
• Human behaviour is influenced by various interdependent factors including biological, environmental,
social, social milieu, culture, psychological, and spiritual factors.
• A comprehensive explanation of behaviour requires a comprehensive understanding of these factors and
their interaction.
• Human functioning is likened to a multi-faceted diamond, with each personality theory highlighting a
specific aspect.
• Each theory contributes to a better understanding of human functioning, but cannot provide the whole
truth.
➢ Practical and ethical problems in research
• Investigating and manipulating large groups of people and their environments over time.
• Investigating controversies of personology: whether people are motivated by sexual and aggressive drives
(Freud) or the will to find meaning in life (Frankl).
• Experimentation: subjecting people to severe conditions like hunger, thirst, sexual abstinence, and
prolonged isolation to observe reactions.
• Practical and ethical considerations: Research is limited to random studies due to practical and ethical
constraints.
• Controlled research studies: subject to limitations such as sample size, representativeness, study duration,
and variety of behavioural phenomena.

, ➢ The large variety of assumptions concerning the person and scientific research.
• Numerous personality theories stem from pre-scientific beliefs about human nature and science.
• These theories are based on different assumptions about these concepts. (Assumptions are not
scientifically proven, making them challenging to change).
• Understanding these assumptions is crucial to identify areas of agreement and disagreement among
theories.


Definitions of key concepts

✓ Person
- The word person originally referred to the mask that actors wore in Roman times. (‘Personare’ means to ‘sound
through’ and refers to the voice of the actor emerging from behind the mask.)
- a legal person: refers to an individual or a group of individuals, such as a corporation or a society, which can
function independently.
- Person: an individual human being who can act independently.
- This definition implies an acknowledgement of the capacity for free decision-making. A non-deterministic view
of the person is not shared by all Personologists, Personologists like Skinner avoided using the word ‘person’
and described people as ‘organisms’.

✓ Personality
- personality: the physical, psychological, and spiritual characteristics of the individual that determine their
behaviour.
- personality is used to describe the individual’s social dimension.
- personality used in colloquial language refers to someone’s general behaviour patterns/ nature. Predictions
are sometimes made about someone’s behaviour off their personality.
- In personology, ‘personality’ refers to whatever it is that makes people who they are, that allows us to make
predictions about a person’s behaviour.
- Behaviourists wouldn’t acknowledge spiritual attributes as being determinants of behaviour. (Skinner avoids
the use of the word ‘personality’).

✓ Character
- character: those aspects of the personality involving the person’s values.
- Character was a synonym for personality until 1920, later referred to as personality psychology or personology,
was known as characterology.
- 'character' refers to aspects of personality involving a person's values and consistent behaviour.
- Character refers more specifically to the spiritual and moral dimensions of the person.
- When a person's behaviour doesn't fit in with their character, it doesn't align with their ethical standards.
- When a person's behaviour doesn't fit in with their personality, it's congruent with their usual behavioural
patterns.

✓ Temperament and nature
- temperament/nature: emotional aspects of the personality
- The words are used to describe people in expressions such as ‘He has a fiery nature’.
- Temperament focuses on more emotional aspects of a person’s biological and psychological dimensions.
- ‘Temperament’, ‘nature’ refers to the inherited, biological aspects of the person, whereas ‘character’ refers to
elements determined by socialisation and education and, the person’s moral attributes and values.

✓ Self
- used to refer to people’s views of themselves.
- It’s a synonym for personality.
- refers to the core of personality.
- it refers to many other aspects of the personality.

,A Variety of Opinions about personality

❖ Personality, situation, and behaviour

• Personality and situation influence behaviour.
• Personism: Emphasizes the person's role.
• Situationalism: Emphasizes the situation.
• Interactionalism: Focuses on the interaction between the two.
- Personism

personism: behaviour is influenced chiefly by the individual’s personality.
• individuals possess fixed characteristics or behavioural tendencies that distinguish them from each other.
• Freud argues that all behaviour (slips of the tongue/ maladaptive behaviours), is caused by unconscious drives.
• Freud's viewpoint, also known as psychic determinism
• Psychometric testing allows predictions about a person's behaviour based on test results.

e.g. Pat is more aggressive than Joan, who is more aggressive than Zinzi, a personist would expect this rank order to
manifest itself in all situations: Pat would always be the most aggressive

- Situationalism

situationalism: the view that the situation is the most important determinant of behaviour.
• Situationalism emerged as a response to Freud's extreme personism theories.
• It posits that all people in the same situation behave similarly.
• It is linked to the idea of equality, denying genetic differences and focusing on the environment's influence on
individual attributes.- known as environmental determinism
• John Watson, the father of behaviourism, and Skinner also advocated f or situationalism and environmental
determinism.
• Situationalism maintains that different people will behave in similar ways in the same situations
• This implies that both the situation and the person’s characteristics play a role in determining behaviour

e.g. some children have experienced success in the classroom, while others have experienced failure. Therefore,
they associate a classroom with different emotions and expectations.


- Interactionalism

interactionalism: behaviour is the outcome of the interaction between the individual’s characteristics and the situation
in which the behaviour occurs.
• different people react differently even in situations that might look the same to an outsider
• Different reactions are influenced by personality traits and the situation.
• Transactionalism, a form of interactionalism, emphasizes the threefold interaction: person, situation, and
behaviour.
• Other forms of interactionalism include systems theory, the ecosystemic approach, and the ecological approach.
• The interactional approach views humans as part of the physical, social, and cultural environment, and their
behaviour as the outcome of this system.
• This approach emphasizes that the individual cannot be studied in isolation, away from their world.
e.g. Joan might exhibit higher aggression than Zinzi or Pat on the hockey field, while Pat might be more aggressive
than both. In a classroom setting, Joan might be more aggressive than Zinzi or Pat.

transactionalism: behaviour is determined by the transactions between the person, the situation, and the behaviour.

e.g. a nervous employee is sitting in his boss’s office, the behaviour of both is determined by the process of
transactions that take place between them. The boss may say something to the employee and realise that what she
has said is ‘too threatening for this insecure man’. This may result in her changing her behaviour and saying
something that sounds friendlier. Her behaviour is therefore being influenced by her perception of her own actions.

❖ Personality Theories: A Systematic Overview

, - Depth psychological approaches
• Depth Psychologists believe behaviour is influenced by unconscious forces.
• Early theorists emphasized biological nature of psychological forces.
• Modern theorists emphasize social nature and orientation of psychological forces.

- Behavioural and learning theoretical approaches.
• Theorists emphasise the study of observable behaviour and consider learning and environmental influences
to be the most important determinants of behaviour.
• Extreme behaviourists, like Skinner, contend that all behaviour and learning can be explained without any
reference to needs or conscious experiences.
• The more modern group, such as Bandura, acknowledges that learning can take place through the imitation
of others, and that the individual’s cognitions play an important role in the learning process.

- Person-oriented approaches
• Include and explain all aspects of the person in their theories.
• View depth psychology and behaviourism as inadequate as they only study specific aspects of the person.
• Existentialists believe people direct their lives through their own ideals.
• Rogers argues that people naturally strive for the fullest development of their inherited potential
• Kelly emphasises the efforts humans make to predict events in
their environment.

- Socially contextualised approaches
• Emphasizes embeddedness of individuals within social contexts.
• Ecosystemic approach: Individuals as parts of complex systems.
• This approach plays an important role in psychotherapy

A closer look at personality theories

• Personality theory explains individual differences based on human functioning models.
• Personologists, like car experts, need a model to compare different car types.
• Personality theories share common characteristics and deal with similar issues.
• It's useful to describe and explain all theories in terms of a common pattern to allow comparison, this pattern
allows readers to compare different views

✓ The view of the person underlying the theory
• Personality theories are based on a specific view of the person, encompassing assumptions about their
nature and existence. These views are embedded in a broader worldview, addressing questions about life's
meaning, human concerns, and their place in the world.

- Freud believed that behaviour is driven by conflicting moral norms and aimed to satisfy these drives while
avoiding guilt.
- Rogers believed people are generally good and their behaviour is geared towards their full potential.
- Maslow differentiated between 2 levels of human functioning: need satisfaction and a higher level where
people strive to achieve goals of their own choosing.

• A theorists' view of the person is crucial in their theory as it reflects their ideas on human functioning.
Understanding their views helps us comprehend how all people function on a basic level, reflecting their
philosophies of life.

✓ The structure of the personality
• Structural concepts are used to explain a person's functioning.
• They present us with propositions regarding hypothetical parts that make up the personality, and that
work together in some way to produce behaviour.
• Freud identified three major structural elements: id, ego, and superego.
• Kelly focused on one structural element: constructs, used to understand environment and predict events.

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