Personality

What personality is
Trait models
Measurement issues
Biology of personality
Cognitive theories
Personality style
Mischels critique

What is Personality?
A set of characteristics
Consistent across time
Consistent across situations
Distinguishes individuals from each other

Important Questions
Study of individuals or individual differences?
Are traits descriptive or dispositional?
Structure
Hierarchy
Centrality

Trait Theories

 How many traits do we need?

Different numbers of factors
Nearly all have extraversion and neuroticism
Useful for conceptualizing personality

The Big Five:

Superfactors of Personality
Measuring Personality: Observation
Problems of reliability and consistency
Behavior can mean many things
Still has to be coded into trait categories

Measuring Personality: Interviews

Works best if highly structured
But then why use an interview?

Measuring Personality:
Inventories
Questionnaires (paper or computer)
Produce a personality profile
Easy to score and statistically analyze
Generally no hidden agendas

Measuring Personality: Projective Tests

Include Rorschach and TAT
Concerns about validity and reliability

The Brain and Personality

Certain biological tendencies may affect
personality
Extraverts are less arousable than introverts
Neuroticism may be related to the sensitivity of
emotional parts of the brain
Underarousal of nervous system may be related to risk
taking or criminal behavior

Temperament
Innate tendencies to behave in certain ways
Correlation between temperament at infancy
and adulthood
An example: sensation seeking
Tendency to engage in risky behavior
Related to levels of blood chemicals

A Genetic Link

Minnesota Twin Studies

Identical and fraternal twins

Raised together or apart

Calculate heritability of personality traits

Significant effect of heritability on traits

Cognitive Theories
George Kellys Personal Construct Theory
How people construe situations is crucial
Rep test

Personality Styles (1950-1970)

Begins with Authoritarian Personality
Syndrome of traits and features
Held together by common higher order motives

Concerns with California F-Scale in terms of

acquiescence bias

Later styles
Internal-external
Complexity
Social desirability and social approval

The Mischel Critique

Walter Mischel 1977
Behavior is not consistent across situations
Typically low correlations
And trait measures do not predict behavior very well

 Situations control behavior part of a much

larger critique

Subsequent Mischel
People do have fairly consistent goals
And fashion behavior to meet them
Have a clear sense of what behaviors will work in
what situations
How situations are construed --- Kelly
The ifthen model
Therefore have to understand cognition and planning

Mischels Version of Consistency

Interrelations of affects, goals, plan, etc.
Profiles of behavior across situations

Responses to Mischel
Predicting behavior is better when aggregate
across situations -- Epstein
Religion example
Often want to predict single behavior

Person-situation interaction works better but

also not practical

Whats wrong with the Mischel

approach?

 Philosophical dead-end
If microscopic enough can always predict better
But how microscopic

if..then model is not very practical

Still need to predict behavior of people grossly
And map people onto the same dimensions
Individuality is nice, but