Lecture 3 - personality

What is personality
=psychological qualities that influence an individual's characteristic behaviour patterns, in a
stable and distinctive manner.
Keywords: Stability, Distinctiveness
Personality is related to job performance and career success.

-> types and traits

● Straightforward way to analyse personality > classify people in terms of personality
types
● Hippocrates (father of medicine) claimed there are 4 types of personality or
“temperament” and they are determined by bodily “humours”: blood, phlegm, black
bile, yellow bile.
● No evidence to confirm links between body chemistry and behaviour - more than four
personality types
● Type theory elaborated by Jung (1953): extraversion or introversion, sensation or
intuition, thinking or feeling, judging or perceiving.
● Jung’s theory developed by Myers&Briggs (Myers-Briggs type indicator). Individuals
are assigned to one side or other of each dimension, establishing 16 personality
types

-> the big 5

Many contemporary personality psychologists believe there are 5 basic dimensions of
personality (OCEAN - openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness,
neuroticism)
Not personality types, dimensions which describe common elements among the traits which
cluster together.