Summary Personality Psychology
Introduction to personality psychology
Adjectives that can be used to describe characteristics of people are called trait-descriptive
adjectives. The adjectives describing personality refer to several very different aspects of
people. Words such as thoughtful refer to inner qualities of mind. Words such as charming
refer to the effect a person has on other people.
Personality defined
Personality is 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.
Personality is the set of psychological traits
Psychological traits are characteristics that describe ways in which people are different from
each other. Traits also define ways in which people are similar. Traits describe the average
tendencies of a person. Research on personality traits asks four questions:
- How many traits are there?
- How are the traits organized?
- What are the origins of traits?
- What are the correlations and consequences of traits?
And mechanisms
Psychological mechanisms are like traits, except that the term mechanisms refer more to the
processes of personality. Like the psychological mechanisms that involve cognitive processes
that entail an information-processing activity. Most psychological mechanisms have three
essential ingredients:
- Inputs: being more sensitive to certain kinds of information from the environment
- Decision rules: making it more likely to think about certain options
- Outputs: guiding their behavior toward certain categories of action
Within the individual
Within the individual means that personality is something a person carries with him or
herself over time and from one situation to the next. Although our personalities are certainly
influenced by our environments, and especially by the significant others in our lives, we feel
that we carry with us the same personalities from situation to situation in our lives.
,That are organized and relatively enduring
Organized means that the psychological traits and mechanisms, for a given person, are not
simply a random collection of elements. Personality is organized because the mechanisms
and traits are linked to one another in a coherent fashion. Psychological traits are relatively
enduring over time and are somewhat consistent over situations.
And that influence
The influential force of personality means that personality traits and mechanisms can have
an effect on people’s lives. Persons are not passive beings merely responding to external
forces. Rather, personality plays a key role in affecting how people shape their lives.
His or her interactions with
Interactions with situations include
- Perceptions: refers to how we ‘see’, or interpret, and environment
- Selection: the manner in which we choose situations to enter – how we choose our
friends, hobbies, or careers
- Evocations: reactions we produce in others, quite often unintentionally
- Manipulations: the ways in which we intentionally attempt to influences others
The environment
The physical environment often poses challenges for people. Some of these are direct threats
to survival. Our social environment also poses adaptive challenges, like what we encounter in
our struggle for belongingness, love, and esteem. Intrapsychic means within the mind. We all
have memories, dreams, desires, fantasies, and a collection of private experiences that we
live with each day.
Three levels of personality analysis
Personality can be analyzed at three different levels:
- Like all others: the human nature level or universals. The ways in which we are all
alike
o Human nature: the traits and mechanisms of personality that are typical of
our species and are possessed by everyone or nearly everyone
- Like some others: the level of individual and group differences or particulars. The
ways in which we are like some people but unlike others
o Individual differences are ways in which each person is like some other people
o Group differences are people in one group that may have certain personality
features in common, and these common features make that group of people
different from other groups
Age groups
Socioeconomic groups
Gender groups
Cultural or ethnic group
- Like no others: the individual uniqueness level or uniqueness. The ways in which we
are unlike any other person
o Nomothetic: individual instances of general characteristics, studies involving
statistical comparisons of individuals or groups
, o Idiographic: this type of research focuses on a single subject, case study
Six domains of knowledge about human nature
The various views of researchers in personality stem not from the fact that one perspective is
right and the others wrong but, rather, from the fact that they are studying different domains
of knowledge. A domain of knowledge is a specialty area of science and scholarship, in which
psychologists have focused on learning about some specific and limited aspects of human
nature. The whole personality is the sum of the various parts and the connections among
them. The field of personality can be neatly cleaved into six distinct domains of knowledge
about human nature:
- Traits the person is born with or develops: dispositional domain
o The ways in which individuals are disposed to behave, and why these
dispositions differ from one another
- Biological events: biological domain
o Humans are collections of biological systems, and these systems provide the
building blocks for behavior, thought, and emotion
Genetics of personality
Psychophysiology of personality: in terms of nervous system
functioning
Evolution
- Conflicts within the person’s own mind: intrapsychic domain
o Mental mechanisms of personality, many of which operate outside of
conscious awareness. It also includes defense mechanisms, such as
repression, denial, and projection
- Personal and private thoughts, feelings, desires, beliefs, and other subjective
experiences: cognitive-experiential domain
o Focuses on cognition and subjective experience such as conscious thought,
feelings, beliefs, and desires about oneself and others
o One important element of our experiences entails the self and self-concept
but also our self-esteem
o Another element is intelligence
- Social, cultural, and gendered positions in the world: social and cultural domain
o Personality affects, and is affected by, the social and cultural context
- The adjustments that the person must make to the inevitable challenges of life:
adjustment domain
o Personality plays a key role in how we cope with, adapt, and adjust to the ebb
and flow of events in our day-to-day lives. Many important problems in coping
and adjustment can be traced to personality
Standards for evaluating personality theories
- Comprehensiveness: does the theory do a good job of explaining all of the facts?
- Heuristic value: does the theory provide a guide to important new discoveries about
personality that were not know before?
- Testability: does the theory render precise enough that it can be tested empirically?
- Parsimony: does the theory contain few premises and assumptions parsimony
- Compatibility and integration across domains and levels: consistent with what is
known in other domains
, Chapter 2: Personality assessment, measurement, and research
design
Sources of personality data
Perhaps the most obvious source of information about a person is self-report data (S-data) –
the information a person reveals.
Self-report data (S-data)
There are a lot of ways to collect this type of data, but the most common is through
questionnaires. There are good reasons for using self-report. The most obvious reason is that
individuals have access to a wealth of information about themselves that is inaccessible to
anyone else.
Self-report can take a variety of forms, ranging from open-ended ‘fill in the blank’ to forced-
choice true-or-false questions. Sometimes there are referred to as unstructured and
structured. A more structured way of doing a self-report is through a Likert scale
Self-report measures have limitations and weaknesses. For it to be effective, respondents
must be both willing and able to answer the questions put to them. Yet people are not
always honest, especially when asked about unconventional experiences. Some people also
may lack accurate self-knowledge.
Observer-report data (O-data)
This type of data capitalizes on other sources for gathering information about a person’s
personality. An advantage of observer-reports is that observers may have access to
information not attainable through other sources. Also, multiple observers can be used to
assess each individual. The use of multiple observers allows investigators to evaluate the
degree of agreement among observers (inter-rater reliability).
A key decision point that researchers face is how to select observers. Personality researchers
have two strategies:
- Use professional personality assessors who do not know the participant in advance
- Use individuals who actually know the target participants
o An advantage is that such observers are in a better position to observe the
target’s natural behavior
o Another advantage is that multiple social personalities can be assessed. Each
one of us displays different sides of ourselves to different people
o A disadvantage can be that the observer can be biased in certain ways
because they know the participant
Researchers must also determine whether the observation occurs in a natural or artificial
setting. In naturalistic observation, observers witness and record events that occur in the
normal course of the lives of their participants. In contrast, observation can take place in
contrived or artificial settings, where the participants has to perform tasks.
