SOSC1960

Discovering Mind and Behavior

Lecture 10
Personality

Exercise
Write a few words to describe the personality
of your best friend.

Personality
The pattern of enduring characteristics that
produce consistency and individuality in a
given person
Consistency (across time and situations)
Individuality (help describe and explain
variations across individuals)

Approaches to personality and assessment

methods
Criteria in assessing personality

Freudian approach
Unconsciousness
A part of the personality that contains
memories, knowledge, beliefs, feelings, urges,
drives, and instincts of which an individual is
not aware
Cannot be observed directly
but can be interpreted through clues such as

Superego
Represents the rights and
wrongs of society as
handed down by parents,
teachers, and other
important figures;
conscience
Ego
Buffer the conflicts
between the id and the
outside world;
integration into society
Id
Sex drives (libido),
survival drives,
aggressive drives;
immediate gratification
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Defense mechanisms
Neurotic anxiety occurs when the id threatens
to become conscious
Unconscious strategies people use to
reduce
__________________
by concealing the
anxiety
source of anxiety from themselves and others

Defense mechanisms
Repression: unacceptable or unpleasant id
impulses are pushed back to the unconscious
E.g.

a man unable to recall that he has killed

someone
Regression: people behave as if they were at
an earlier stage of development
E.g.

an individual fixated at the oral stage might

begin
eating excessively under stress
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Defense mechanisms
Displacement: redirecting expression of
unwanted feelings or thoughts from a powerful
person to a weaker one
E.g.

a man beats his wife after being criticized by his

boss
Rationalization: People provide self-justifying
explanations in place of the actual, but
threatening, reason for their behavior
E.g.

a student who goes out drinking the night before

a big
test rationailzes his behaviour

Defense mechanisms
Denial: people refuse to accept or
acknowledge anxiety-producing information
E.g.

a woman denies that her husband requested a

divorce
Projection: attributing unwanted impulses and
feelings to someone else
E.g. a man angry at his father complains that his
father is
angry with him

Defense mechanisms
Sublimation: people divert unwanted impulses
into socially acceptable thoughts, feelings, or
behaviors
E.g. a person with strong feelings of aggression
becomes a
competitive basketball player
Reaction formation: unconscious impulses are
expressed as their opposite in consciousness
E.g. a mother who unconsciously hates her child acts
in an
overly loving way toward the child

Neurosis
A mental disorder
when tremendous
amount of psychic
energy is used for
defense
mechanisms

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Evaluation
Contributions
ideas of unconsciousness, defense mechanisms, and
children roots of adult personality

Limitations
Lack of empirical data and verification, partially due
to the fuzziness of the concepts (e.g., how to
measure fixation or id drives?)
Derivation of the concepts and theories from a
limited population (upper-class Austrian women who
sought treatment from Freud)
Important changes in personality can take place
during adolescence and adulthood
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Assessing personality: Projective methods

Projective personality tests
Tests in which a person is shown some vague,
ambiguous stimuli and asked to describe them
or tell a story about them
The responses are considered to be
projections of ones unconsciousness and
personality

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Projective personality tests

to obtain from the subject, what he cannot or
will not say, frequently because he does not
know himself and is not aware what he is
revealing about himself through his projections
(Frank, 1939)

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Rorschach Test
A series of symmetrical inkblots
Test-takers are asked What might this be?

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Thematic Apperception Test

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Projective Drawings: House-Tree-Person

Test (Buck, 1948)

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Some interpretations of the HTP Test

House
Windows, doors, and sidewalks are ways that
others enter or see into the house, so they
relate to openness, willingness to interact with
others
shades, shutters, bars, curtains, and long and
winding sidewalks indicate some unwillingness to
reveal much about yourself

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Some interpretations of the HTP Test

Tree
The trunk is seen to represent the ego, sense
of self, and the intactness of the personality
small trunks are limited ego strength, large trunks
are more ego strength/intact personality

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Some interpretations of the HTP Test

Person
Person of the same sex is what you admit is
like you; person of the opposite sex is what
you may not admit is like you

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Limitations
The personality to be measured is ill-defined
Test-takers responses may be limited by
verbal or figural expression ability
Lack of standard procedures (may introduces
errors)
Lack of standard scoring and interpretation
(may introduce subjectivity biases)

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Trait approaches
Trait theory
A model of personality that seeks to identify
basic
the ________________
necessary to describe
traits
personality
Traits are characteristics and behaviors that
are consistently displayed in different
situations

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Gordon Allport
Identified 18,000 terms to describe personality.
Which are the most basic?
Cardinal: single characteristic that directs most of a
persons activities
Central: five to ten major characteristics of an
individual
Secondary: characteristics that affect behavior in
fewer situations and are less influential

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Raymond Cattell
Factor analysis: statistical method of
identifying associations among a large number
of variables to reveal more general patterns
16 source traits, the basic personality
dimensions; Sixteen Personality Factor
Questionnaire (16 PF)

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Cattells Self-Report Inventory

Big Five personality traits

Openness to experience
Toleration for and exploration of the unfamiliar

Conscientiousness
Degree of organization, persistence, and motivation in goaldirected behavior.

Extraversion
Capacity for joy, need for stimulation

Agreeableness
Ones orientation along a continuum from compassion to
antagonism in thoughts, feelings, and actions

Neuroticism
Proneness to psychological distress and excessive cravings35
or urges

Evaluation
Contributions
Clear, straightforward description of people
Allow us to readily compare one person with another

Limitations
Which theory is most accurate? How many basic
traits are there?
The traits are simply some descriptive labels of
behavioral pattern. But how do we explain
personality?

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Assessing personality: Self-report measures

Self-report measures
Asking people questions about a sample of
their behavior
The self-report data is then used to infer the
personality characteristics of the person

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Sixteen Personality Factor (16PF; Cattell,

1946)
Some measures are of larger scale and greater
length. They measure a number of traits (or
personality factors).
185 items, forced-choice
Sample items:
I make decisions based on

I find it hard to give a speech to strangers

a. feelings

a. yes

b. feelings and reason equally

b. somewhat

c.

c.

reason

no

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Minnesota Multiphasic Personality

Inventory-2 (MMPI-2)
A widely-used self-report test, particularly
useful in identifying people with
__________________________
Sample items:
I feel useless at times
a. True
b. False
c. Cannot say

I am bothered by an upset stomach

several times a week
a. True
b. False
c. Cannot say

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Limitations

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Limitations
Response styles
Socially desirable responding

Present oneself in a favorable

light

Acquiescence

Agree with whatever is

presented

Deviance

Make unusual or uncommon

responses

Extreme

Make extreme rating

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Learning approaches
Operant conditioning
Personality is a collection of learned behavior
patterns through reinforcement and
punishment
E.g. A person is sociable at parties because he has
been reinforced for displaying social behaviors (e.g.,
winning contracts, winning friends)

Learning theorists are interested in looking at

how the environment shape peoples
personality
The importance of context
People may act differently across different situations 46
depending on the patterns of reinforcers

Observational learning
Continual and repeated exposure to the
behavior of models shape the personality
A full range of behaviors are learned by
watching adults (watching television, watching
peers, etc.)

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Self-efficacy
Belief in ones personal capabilities to carry out
a specific task or produce a desired outcome
People with high self-efficacy have higher
aspirations and greater persistence
Prior successes and failures, and reinforcement
and encouragement from others help selfefficacy develop

I believe I can!

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Evaluation
Contributions
Learning theories can explain either consistency or
inconsistency
Friendly at school but not at homebecause different
reinforcement history in the two settings

Objective and scientific conceptualization of

personality
Observable behaviors and environment

Limitations
Deterministic
Human behaviors are shaped by external forces that
are beyond the individuals control
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Assessing personality: Behavioral assessment

Behavioral assessment
Direct observation and record of an individuals
behavior used to describe personality
Naturalistic observations or observations in
controlled conditions

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Particularly informative for

understanding
psychological difficulties

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Limitations
Need an impartial, objective observer or rater
(but who? parents, teachers, supervisors,
trained observers?)
Observation or rating biases
Confirmation bias
Leniency or severity bias

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Criteria in assessing personality

Personality characteristic manifests in
many behaviors (an universe of behaviors)
A personality test could only sample some
presumably relevant behaviors from this
universe

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Reliability
consistency in measurement

Electronic scale
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Reliability
A
Measured weight (in pounds) of a one-pound metal bar at three different
trials.

Scale A

Scale B

Scale C

1.3

0.9

1.3

1.1

1.3

1.05

Reliable

Reliable

Not reliable
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_________________
A test is considered valid if it measures the
characteristic it purports to measure
A personality test is valid if its test scores
indeed reflect personality

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(source: http://mindcity.sina.com.tw/qa/folder/love/index.shtml)

Recently you checked email and found that someone had bombed
your inbox with a lot of junk emails. What would you do?
- Create a new email account
- Just delete them
- Forward them to someone you hate
- Reply and take revenge
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The characteristic measured by a given test is

defined by results of empirical research, not by
what the developer chooses to name the test
Ways to test validity
converge
_______________
validity: Correlation with other
nt
personality
scales
predictiv
_______________
validity: whether test scores are
e
predictive of psychological and behavioral outcomes
(e.g. size of social network, depression, well-being,
etc)

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Required Readings
Ch. 13

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