Chapter 7:

Using Personality Traits to Understand

Behavior
The Personality Puzzle
Sixth Edition
by David C. Funder

Slides created by
Tera D. Letzring
Idaho State University
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 Objectives
• Discuss why it is important to measure or
judge traits
• Discuss the four research methods used to
connect traits and behavior
• Discuss how personality develops (and stays
the same) over the life span

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 Who Cares? The Point of
Measuring Traits
• Traits predict behavior.
• Traits can be used to understand behavior.

• Why do you think this is important?

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 Research Methods Used to
Connect Traits with Behavior
• Single-trait approach
• Many-trait approach
• Essential-trait approach
• Typological approach

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 The Single-Trait Approach
• What do people with a certain personality
trait do?
– Examine correlations between one trait and many
behaviors

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 The Single-Trait Approach
• Conscientiousness
– Integrity tests
– Used to select employees
• Less biased than “aptitude” tests
– Predicts job performance and absenteeism

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 The Single-Trait Approach
• Conscientiousness
– Predicts success in college
– Might explain motivation in general
– Predicts longer life expectancy
– Positively correlated with years of schooling

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 The Single-Trait Approach
• Self-monitoring
– It’s not necessarily better to be high or low.
– Actors scored high and mental patients scored
low.
– Correlates with several behaviors: performance in
job interviews and willingness to lie to get a date

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 The Single-Trait Approach
• Narcissism
– Charming, make good first impression
– Manipulative, overbearing, vain, etc.
– Many negative behaviors and attributes
– Why do they act like this?

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 The Many-Trait Approach
• Who does that important behavior?
– Examine correlations between one behavior and
many traits
• California Q-Set
– 100 personality descriptions
– Sort into a forced choice, symmetrical, and normal
distribution
– Compare characteristics within an individual

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 Uncharacteristic Neutral Characteristic
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

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 The Many-Trait Approach
• Delay of gratification:
– Necessary for achieving many important goals
– Sex similarities and differences
– Ego control: self-control or inhibition
– Ego resiliency: psychological adjustment

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 The Many-Trait Approach
• Drug abuse
• Depression
• Political orientation
– Authoritarianism

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 The Essential-Trait Approach
• Which traits are the most important? Which
traits really matter?
• Theoretical approaches to reducing the many
to a few
– Murray: 20 needs
– Block: ego-control and ego-resiliency

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 The Essential-Trait Approach
• Factor analytic approaches to reducing the
many to a few
– Eysenck: extraversion, neuroticism, psychoticism
– Tellegen: positive emotionality, negative
emotionality, constraint
– Cattell: 16 essential traits

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 The Essential-Trait Approach:
The Big Five and Beyond
• Discovery of the Big Five
– Lexical hypothesis
– Look for traits that have the most words and are
the most universal
– Factor analysis

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 The Essential-Trait Approach:
The Big Five and Beyond
• Implications of the Big Five
– Traits are orthogonal, or unrelated
– Can bring order to many research findings
– More complex than they seem at first
• Not orthogonal
• Higher-order factors
• Lower-order factors
• Labels are oversimplified

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 The Essential-Trait Approach:
The Big Five and Beyond

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 The Essential-Trait Approach:
The Big Five and Beyond
• Conscientiousness (already discussed)

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 The Essential-Trait Approach:
The Big Five and Beyond
• Extraversion: social, outgoing, active,
outspoken, dominant, adventurous
– Advantages: higher status, rated as more popular
and physically attractive, more positive emotions
– Disadvantage: drink more alcohol, higher risk of
being overweight, mate poaching
– Sensitive to rewards and positive emotions
– Life outcomes: happy, grateful, long life, healthy,
successful relationships, etc.
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 The Essential-Trait Approach:
The Big Five and Beyond
• Neuroticism: emotional instability, negative
emotionality
– Ineffective problem solving; strong negative
reactions to stress
– Sensitive to social threats
– Anxious and stressed

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 The Essential-Trait Approach:
The Big Five and Beyond
• Neuroticism
– Negatively correlated with happiness, well-being,
and physical health
– General tendency toward psychopathology
– Life outcomes: problems in family relationships,
dissatisfied with jobs, criminal behavior

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 The Essential-Trait Approach:
The Big Five and Beyond
• Agreeableness: conformity, friendly
compliance, likeability, warmth
– Cooperative and easy to get along with
– Smoke less
– Women tend to be higher than men
– Among children, related to less vulnerability of
being bullied
– Life outcomes: psychologically well adjusted,
healthy heart, dating satisfaction
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 The Essential-Trait Approach:
The Big Five and Beyond
• Openness to experience/intellect
– Most controversial trait
• Approach to intellectual matters or basic
intelligence
• Value of cultural matters
• Creativity and perceptiveness
• Less replicable across samples and cultures

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 The Essential-Trait Approach:
The Big Five and Beyond
• Openness to experience/intellect
– Viewed by others as creative, open-minded, and
clever
– More likely to believe in UFOs, astrology, and
ghosts
– Life outcomes: drug use, artistic interests

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 The Essential-Trait Approach:
The Big Five and Beyond
• Universality of the Big Five
– When translated to other languages: four or five
of the factors appear
– When starting with other languages: some overlap
but no one-to-one correspondence
– Scores vary by geographic region

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 The Essential-Trait Approach:
The Big Five and Beyond

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 The Essential-Trait Approach:
The Big Five and Beyond
• Beyond the Big Five (criticisms)
– Not orthogonal
– There is more to personality
– Too broad for conceptual understanding

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 Typological Approach to Personality
• Based on doubt about whether it is valid to
compare people quantitatively on the same trait
dimensions
• Important differences between people may be
qualitative
• Challenges
– Find the divisions that distinguish different types
– Come up with basic types that characterize the
whole range of personality
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 Typological Approach to Personality
• Three replicable types
– Well adjusted, maladjusted overcontrolling,
maladjusted undercontrolling
– But types do not predict behavior beyond what
can be predicted with quantitative trait scores

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 Typological Approach to Personality
• Is it useful to think about people in terms of
types?
– Yes (maybe)
– Summary of standing on several traits
– Make it easier to think about how traits within a
person interact with each other
– But don’t add to ability to predict outcomes

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 Personality Development
Over the Life Span
• Personality development
• Combination of genetic factors and early
experience
• Strong tendency to maintain individual
differences throughout life in comparison to
others
– Rank-order consistency

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 Personality Development
Over the Life Span
• Stability increases with age
– Cumulative continuity principle
– Psychological maturation
• Also evidence of mean level change over time
– Most change occurs in young adulthood
– May be based on changing social roles

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 Mean Scores on Big Five Personality
Traits Between Ages 10 and 60 for
Men (M) and Women (F)

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 Personality Trait Change
in Adulthood
• Definitions of change
• Mean-level change
• Individual differences in change

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 Thinking About Personality
Development
• Has your own personality ever changed? Is it
changing now? Why or why not?
• Can you come up with explanations for how
each trait is affected by the way social demands
change as one grows older?
• What about people whose trait levels are more
stable than those described in Figure 7.4, or
those that change in opposite ways? How could
these outcomes be explained?
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 Clicker Question #1
A researcher who is interested in the construct
of cooperativeness and wants to discover what
this trait is able to predict should use the
a) single-trait approach.
b) many-trait approach.
c) essential-trait approach.
d) typological approach.

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 Clicker Question #2
Which of the following statements about
personality development is true?
a) Personality changes very little after age 30.
b) Rank-order stability tends to be high.
c) The mean levels of traits change over time.
d) Both b and c are correct.

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 Clicker Question #3
The typological approach is
a)not useful because people only differ from
each other quantitatively, not qualitatively.
b)a combination of the single-trait and many-
trait approaches.
c)useful because it is a way to summarize many
findings.
d)based on the importance of quantitative
ratings of all people on the same traits.
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