SOSC1960

Discovering Mind and Behavior

Lecture 10
Personality

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

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 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)

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 Approaches to personality and assessment
methods
 Criteria in assessing personality

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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

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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
__________________ by concealing the
source of anxiety from themselves and others

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

 Regression: people behave as if they were at

an earlier stage of development
 E.g.

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 Defense mechanisms
 Displacement: redirecting expression of
unwanted feelings or thoughts from a powerful
person to a weaker one
 E.g.

 Rationalization: People provide self-justifying

explanations in place of the actual, but
threatening, reason for their behavior
 E.g.
 Defense mechanisms
 Denial: people refuse to accept or
acknowledge anxiety-producing information
 E.g.

 Projection: attributing unwanted impulses and

feelings to someone else
 E.g.
 Defense mechanisms
 Sublimation: people divert unwanted impulses
into socially acceptable thoughts, feelings, or
behaviors
 E.g.

 Reaction formation: unconscious impulses are

expressed as their opposite in consciousness
 E.g.
 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 one’s 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
the ________________ necessary to describe
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
person’s 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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Cattell’s 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 goal-
directed behavior.
 Extraversion
 Capacity for joy, need for stimulation
 Agreeableness
 One’s 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. reason c. no 40
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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 I am bothered by an upset stomach
a. True several times a week
b. False a. True
c. Cannot say 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 people’s
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 one’s 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 self-
efficacy develop

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“I believe I can!”
 Evaluation
 Contributions
 Learning theories can explain either consistency or
inconsistency
 Friendly at school but not at home—because 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 individual’s control
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Assessing personality: Behavioral assessment
 Behavioral assessment
 Direct observation and record of an individual’s
behavior used to describe personality
 Naturalistic observations or observations in
controlled conditions

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Particularly informative for
understanding
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psychological difficulties
 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

Measured weight (in pounds) of a one-pound metal bar at three different

trials.
Scale A Scale B Scale C
1 1 1.3 0.9
2 1 1.3 1.1
3 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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最近你打開電子信箱，每次都發現不知哪個人寄
了一堆垃圾信件給你，把信箱都灌爆了，你會有
什麼反應呢？
 更換信箱
 自認倒霉，直接刪除
 轉寄給討厭的人
 破口大罵，回信報復
(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
 _______________ validity: Correlation with other
personality scales
 _______________ validity: whether test scores are
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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