PERSONALITY PSYCHOLOGY
HOOFDSTUK 1
Personality: The set of psychological traits and mechanisms within the individual that are organized and
relatively enduring and that influence his or her interactions with, and adaptations to, the intrapsychic, physical
and social environments.
Psychological traits: Characteristics that describe ways in which people are different from each other or are
similar to each other.
Psychological mechanisms: Similar to traits, except that mechanisms refer more to the processes of
personality. A psychological mechanism may make people more sensitive to certain kinds of information of the
environment (input), may make them more likely to think about specific options (decision rules) or may guide
their behavior towards certain categories of action (outputs)
Person-environment interaction:
- Perception: how we see or interpret an environment
- Selection: the manner in which we choose situations to enter
- Evocations: the reactions we produce in others, often quite unintentionally
- Manipulations: the ways in which we intentionally attempt to influence others
Three levels of personality analysis:
1. Like all others (the human nature level):
- need to belong
- capacity for love
2. Like some others (the level of individual and group differences)
- variations in need to belong (individual differences)
- men more physically aggressive than women (group difference)
3. Like no others (the individual uniqueness level)
- Karel’s unique way of expressing his anger
- Feline’s unique way of expressing her curiosity
Human nature: The traits and mechanisms of personality that are typical of our species and are possessed by
everyone or nearly everyone.
Nomothetic research: Research that involves statistical comparisons of individuals or groups, requiring samples
of subjects on which to conduct research.
- Is typically applied to identify universal human characteristics and dimensions of individual or group
differences
Idiographic research: Research focused on a single subject, trying to observe general principles that are
manifest in a single life over time.
Domains of knowledge about human nature:
- Traits the person is born with or develops (dispositional domain)
- Biological events (biological domain)
- Conflicts within the person’s own mind (intrapsychic domain)
- Personal and private thought, feelings, desires, beliefs and other subjective experiences (cognitive-
experiential domain)
- Social, cultural and gendered positions in the world (social and cultural domain)
- The adjustments that the person must make to the inevitable challenges of life (adjustment domain)
,Within each of these domains of personality, we focus on 2 key elements:
1. The theories that have been proposed within each domain, including the basic assumptions about
human nature
2. The empirical research that has been accumulating with each of these domains
Dispositional domain: Deals centrally with the ways in which individuals are disposed to behave, and why
these dispositions differ from one another.
Biological domain: Assumes that humans are, first and foremost, collections of biological systems, and these
systems provide the building blocks for behavior, thoughts and emotion.
- genetics
- psychophysiology (nervous systems)
- evolution
Intrapsychic domain: Deals with mental mechanisms of personality, many of which operate outside of
conscious awareness.
Cognitive-experiential domain: Focuses on cognition and subjective experience such as conscious thoughts,
feelings, beliefs and desires about oneself and others.
Social and cultural domain: Assumes that personality is not something that merely resides within the heads,
nervous systems and genes of individuals. Rather, personality affects, and is affected by, the social and cultural
context.
Adjustment domain: Refers to the fact that personality plays an important key role in how we cope with, and
adapt and adjust to the eb and flow of events in our day-to-day lives.
A good theory is one that fulfils 3 purposes in science:
1. Provides a guide for researchers
2. Organizes known findings
3. Makes predictions
Theories and beliefs: Beliefs are often personally useful and crucially important to some people, but they are
based on leaps of faith, not on reliable facts and systematic observations. Theories, on the other hand, are
based on systematic observations that can be repeated by others and that yield similar conclusions.
Standards for evaluating personality theories:
1. Comprehensiveness (volledig)
2. Heuristic value (wetenschappelijke waarde)
3. Testability (testbaarheid)
4. Parsimony (spaarzaamheid: hoeveelheid aannames)
5. Compatibility and integration across domains and levels
HOOFDSTUK 3
Fundamental issues for a personality psychology based on traits
1. How to conceptualize traits
2. How to identify the most important traits
3. How to formulate a comprehensive taxonomy of traits
Basic formulations of a trait:
1. Traits as internal causal properties
2. Traits as purely descriptive summaries
, Personality coherence: The manifestation of personality traits shifts with age. The act manifestations have all
changed, but something critical has remained the same, the overall level of dominant acts.
State: Transient behavioral expression of personality that may appear inconsistent or even incompatible with
how that person typically behaves.
Act frequently approach: A method to determine which acts or behaviors best define a certain personality
trait.
Involves 3 key elements:
1. Act nomination: Involves asking a large number of people to name all kinds of behaviors they feel
pertain to a certain category and then determine the most frequently names behaviors of that
category.
2. Prototypically judgement: Identifying which acts are most central to, or prototypical of, each trait
category.
3. Recording of act performance: Securing information on the actual performance of individuals in their
daily lives.
Approaches to identify important traits:
1. Lexical approach: The approach to determining the fundamental personality traits by analyzing
language.
- synonym frequency
- cross-cultural universality
2. Statistical approach: Having a large number of people rate themselves on certain items, and then
employing a statistical procedure to identify groups or clusters of items that go together. The goal of
the statistical approach is to identify the major dimensions or ‘coordinates’ of the personality map.
- factor analysis
3. Theoretical approach: The theoretical approach to identify important dimensions of individual
differences starts with a theory, which then determines which variables are important. The theoretical
strategy dictates in a specific manner which variables are important to measure.
Sociosexual orientation (Simpson & Gangestad, 1991): Men and women will pursue one of two alternative
sexual relationship strategies:
1. Seeking a single committed relationship characterized by monogamy and tremendous investment in
children.
2. The second sexual strategy is characterized by a greater degree of promiscuity, more partner switching and
less investment in children.
Taxonomies of personality:
- Eysenck’s hierarchical model of personality: 3 main traits
- Neuroticism- emotional stability (N)
- Extraversion- introversion (E)
- Psychoticism (P)
Type level trait level habitual response level specific response level
- Cattell’s Taxonomy: The 16 personality factor system: There are 16 basic traits (identified with factor
analysis)
- Circumplex Taxonomies of personality (Wiggins): Mainly focused on interpersonal traits (=what
people do to and with each other).
The 2 resources that define social exchange are love and status.
- adjacency: the variables that are next to each other are positively correlated
