Problem 5
Personality Traits:
Trait Approach
Learning Goals:
1. What are the basic building blocks or personality?
2. What is personality?
Personality → Can be defined as the distinctive and characteristic patterns of thought,
emotion, and behaviour that make up an individual’s personal style of interacting with the
physical and social environment. It is a set of psychological traits that are organised to
influence an individual.
→ There are 2 types of personalities:
- Dispositions → Implies the customary moods and attitude toward the life around one.
- Inner Mental-life → Is the way one behaves in relation to one's inner psychic
processes; it is the inner attitude, the characteristic face, that is turned towards the
unconscious.
Traits → Relatively stable patterns of thought, feeling, or behaviour that characterise an
individual.
States → Temporary patterns of thought, feeling, or behaviour.
The Four Temperaments of Hippocrates (370 B.C.)
Four humors (bodily fluids) that affect health and personality.
4 fundamental personality types:
- Sanguine (blood): prone to optimism
- Choleric (yellow bile): prone to anger
- Phlegmatic (mucus): prone to apathy
- Melancholic (black bile): prone to sadness
Biochemistry proved him wrong.
Gallen had used the 4 identified liquids and connected them to personality traits shown
above.
Taxonomies / Theories:
Gordon Allport:
- Came up with the initial 4000 super traits.
- Had the idiographic approach. → The belief that everyone is unique, and have their
own individual traits.
- Allport wanted to understand the differences between people in personality and to
see how the different characteristics and processes (like learning, memory, and
biological processes) that exist within an individual interact and function together.
, - Allport came up 3 different types of traits:
- Cardinal Traits → Believed (Allport) that some people have dispositions that
influence most aspects of their behaviour; they are highly generalised traits.
(E.g. If a person’s whole life seems to be organised around goal achievement
and the attainment of excellence, then achievement might be his cardinal
trait.)
- Central Traits → L ess persuasive, but still quite generalised traits. Allport
believed many people are broadly influenced by central traits.
- Secondary Dispositions → More specific, narrow traits, or “attitudes”.
Allport believed that because of shared experiences and common cultural influences, most
persons tend to develop some roughly common kinds of traits, and they can be compared on
these common dispositions. It is this part of his many contributions that makes his ideas still
central for work at the Trait-Dispositional Level.
Allport’s Motivation Theory:
Functional Autonomy Of Motives → The idea that drives can become independent of the
original motives for a given behaviour. In other words, the drive becomes autonomous and
distinct from the motive, whether the motive was instinct, or something else. It is a change is
the motive due to maturation.
Criticisms On Allport’s Theory:
- Allport rejected the behavioural (which he thought was too deep) and the humanistic
(which he thought wasn’t deep enough) approaches.
- He emphasised on the uniqueness of each individual and the importance of the
present as opposed to his/her history, for understanding their personality.
- Allport focused too much on traits, and not on the environmental factors.
- Little research was done.
Raymond B. Cattell:
- Narrowed Allport’s 4000 traits down to 16 super traits.
- Used the Nomothetic Approach (The idea that some people can have the same traits,
but in different degrees).
- Researched in large samples and used factor analysis.
- Believed all traits were inferred from behaviour.
Cattell believed the trait is also the basic unit of study it is a “mental structure”, inferred from
behaviour, and a fundamental construct that accounts for behavioural regularity or
consistency.
Factor Analysis → A mathematical procedure that helps to sort test responses into relatively
homogeneous clusters of items that are highly correlated.
→ Using this method, researches have reached reasonable agreement about the five types
of dimensions or factors on which English trait terms may be clustered, (Big Five Structure).
