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Chapter 12 Personality

Gateway Theme

Personality refers to the consistency we see in personal behavior patterns. Measures of personality reveal individual differences and help predict future behavior.

A key aspect of a person’s identity is personality, which we define as a person’s unique, long-term pattern of thinking, emotions, and behaviors. This is distinguished from character, which involves a judgment about the positive or negative aspects of a person’s individual qualities.

Think about the people you know. Can you anticipate with some accuracy how some of them would respond to different situations or circumstances? If so, this may reflect your knowledge of their unique personalities.

This understanding allows us to conceptualize not only the similarities but also the differences between the various people in our lives. They serve as a benchmark—a frame of reference, so to speak—for keeping others’ identities separate in our minds.

Gateway Questions

How do psychologists use the term personality?

Can personality be measured?

Are some personality traits more basic than others?

How do psychodynamic theories explain personality?

What are humanistic theories of personality?

What do behaviorists and social learning theorists emphasize in their approach to personality?

How do heredity and environment affect personality?

How can leadership skills help me in my personal and professional life?

Traits and Types

Personality traits are consistent behavior tendencies that appear in most circumstances. They are what provide the stability to personality, allowing us to predict how a person will behave across settings.

We cannot see traits—they are not a tangible “thing”—but we infer their existence from the stable behaviors that we attribute to them.

When a collection of traits that are similar all converge in the same individual, this creates a personality type. An example of this is the notion of a person being an introvert or an extrovert. Rather than being related to a single trait (of which extraversion is one), this refers to a number of different qualities that are related to each other.

Think of a type as a form of schema about a person’s identity. It can lead us to accurate or inaccurate assumptions about that individual, so we should use them carefully.

Self-Concept and Self-Esteem

“Who do you think you are?” Have you ever been asked this question? In the study of personality, the answer would reflect your self-concept. This is different from self-esteem, which is an assessment of one’s overall positive or negative attributes; in other words, self-esteem reflects how much one does or does not like themselves.

What factors inform our self-concept? What experiences may cause our self-esteem to rise or fall? Does the answer depend on our development stage?

The Whole Human: Personality Theories

Table 12.1 Comparison of Personality Theories

	Trait Theories	Psychoanalytic Theory	Humanistic Theories	Behaviorist and Social Learning Theories
Role of inheritance (genetics)	Maximized	Stressed	Minimized	Minimized
Role of environment	Recognized	Recognized	Maximized	Maximized
View of human nature	Neutral	Negative	Positive	Neutral
Is behavior free or determined?	Determined	Determined	Free will	Determined
Principal motives	Depends on one’s traits	Sex and aggression	Self-actualization	Drives of all kinds
Personality structure	Traits	Id, ego, superego	Self	Habits, expectancies
Role of unconscious	Minimized	Maximized	Minimized	Practically nonexistent
Conception of conscience	Traits of honesty, etc.	Superego	Ideal self, valuing process	Self-reinforcement, punishment history
Developmental emphasis	Combined effects of heredity and environment	Psychosexual stages	Development of self-image	Critical learning situations, identification, and imitation
Barriers to personal growth	Unhealthy traits	Unconscious conflicts, Fixations	Conditions of worth, incongruence	Maladaptive habits, unhealthy environment

A combined set of concepts, assumptions, and ideas that helps explain personality is a personality theory. This chapter will examine four such approaches:

1. Trait theories

2. Psychodynamic theories

3. Humanistic theories

4. Behaviorist and social learning theories

Interviews

One of the most commonly used method of assessing personality is the clinical interview, which can be either unstructured and informal or structured and use a series of predetermined questions.

Interviews allow for consideration of both verbal responses and nonverbal information (body language, posture, facial expressions, etc.), but have several limitations:

1. Preconceptions

2. Influence of the interviewers own personal characteristics

3. Deceptive answers by the person being interviewed

4. The halo effect, in which a favorable or unfavorable impression of one answer or characteristic spreads to the overall assessment of personality

Direct Observation and Rating Scales

Sample rating scale items

An extension of interviews is direct observation, which is exactly what it sounds like! A person’s behaviors are observed in a given setting, and a rating scale may be used to identify certain traits or behaviors.

Situational tests create analogues of real-life circumstances so that behavioral observation can take place with greater ease, though the artificial nature of the situation can be a problem.

Personality Questionnaires

MMPI-2 profiles

Questionnaires, sometimes called inventories, are pen-and-paper type assessments that are more objective than other approaches already covered. Some qualities of these include the following:

Reliability (or consistency)

Validity (or accuracy)

Norms (uniform standards)

There are many personality inventories, but the most widely used of all of them is the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, or MMPI. It provides a profile that assesses 10 different indices of personality, along with some validity scales that are designed to be sensitive to dishonest or random responding on the part of the test taker.

Projective Tests of Personality

The Thematic Apperception Test

Based largely on Freud’s defense mechanism of projection, projective tests use ambiguous stimuli and assume that the test taker will project his or her unconscious issues onto it. The most famous is the Rorschach Inkblot Test, which asks people to tell what they see I0 blotted cards.

The Thematic Apperception Test is similar, but rather than looking at smeared blots the test taker looks at pictures and tells a story about what is happening in the scene.

These tests are notorious for their lack of reliability and validity, although scoring systems have been developed over the years to try to reduce this problem. When they are used as part of a group, or battery, of personality tests, they can provide useful information. But using them in isolation is not advised.

Predicting Behavior and Classifying Traits

Eysenck’s two-factor theory of personality

As discussed earlier, traits are consistent behavior tendencies that we associated with personality. They do not predict all of a person’s behavior, but their most typical ways of acting.

Several theorists have proposed different types or collections of traits. Review the following in your text:

Gordon Allport—central and secondary traits

Raymond Cattell—surface and source traits, and the use of factor analysis as a statistical technique

The Big Five

Most of the recent research in personality traits has focused on the Big Five personality traits (which is sometimes called the five-factor model).

This approach suggests that there are five core dimensions (sometimes called supertraits) of personality. Often abbreviated by the acronym OCEAN, they include the following:

Openness to experience

Conscientiousness

Extroversion

Agreeableness

Neuroticism

They have been identified across many cultures studied, and may be more universal than traits identified in previous models.

Think of the Big Five as larger, “umbrella-like” traits. Other traits that you might know fall under one of these five umbrellas, which is why this trait seems quite useful at simplifying the question of personality traits.

The Structure of Personality

Freud’s levels of consciousness

Among the earliest modern approaches in psychology is the psychoanalytic perspective, which notes that personality is a result of interacting (and often conflicted) forces that exist in a person’s unconscious. Adaptations of this early model are called psychodynamic approaches.

Freud’s model offered the idea that the personality is made of three interacting structures:

The id is an unconscious component that operates on the pleasure principle and seeks gratification as well as avoidance of pain.

The ego is the conscious part of personality that tries to balance the pleasure needs of the id and the rules and demands of society. It operates on the reality principle.

The superego reflects one’s moral conscience and imposes standards of right and wrong on our behaviors.

A healthy personality is one that balances these three components rather than seeing one dominate the other two. Typically, such a misbalance would be seen when the id or superego acts in an overly influential way.

The Dynamics of Personality

Freud noted that anxiety is often a result of competing demands, and he distinguished between neurotic and moral anxieties.

Sometimes when conflict emerges, we experience unconscious anxiety, and we engage defense mechanisms to keep this anxiety from breaking into awareness.

Can you think of ways in which the use of defense mechanisms could be both useful and problematic?

Freud also noted three levels of awareness: The conscious (what we’re aware of at a given moment), the preconscious (what is available to be brought into awareness with effort), and the unconscious (the repressed memories or urges of which we remain unaware).

Personality Development

Freud suggested that personality develops from birth throughout childhood and into adolescence, and each person goes through five stages of development. Each stage emphasizes an erogenous zone and if the stage is not successfully resolved fixation can occur.

During the oral stage, the mouth is the center of erogenous pleasure, and fixation can lead to becoming overly reliant or demonstrative of oral behaviors.

The anal stage involves a child learning to quell their id impulses, mostly in the form of toilet training. Fixation can lead to either an anal-retentive or anal-expulsive personality.

The phallic stage is marked by a child learning the importance of their own genitals, as well as the meaning of which genitals that they have. During this stage, boys are theorized to experience the Oedipus complex and girls the Electra complex.

The latency stage shows a break from these pseudosexual concerns and a greater emphasis on social interests and peers.

The genital stage occurs around puberty as child begins to turn into adult vis-à-vis puberty. We theoretically stay in this stage for the rest of our lives, as we direct our sexual impulses to other, appropriate targets.

What are some of the identified strengths and weaknesses of Freud’s model? Do you think it makes sense, or does it seem too farfetched? Remember you can feel both ways at the same time about different aspects of the theory.

The Neo-Freudians

While Freud’s model was very influential, others have taken his approach and gone in different directions with it. They are sometimes referred to as neo-Freudians.

Alfred Adler noted that the personality may involve people coming to terms with their own sense of inferiority, and that they naturally and rationally try to compensate for these areas of underdeveloped skill by striving for superiority. When they overfocus on them, however, this can lead to an inferiority crisis.

Karen Horney responded to Freud’s assertion that the body predetermines personality and noted that people experience basic anxiety if they feel isolated and helpless. She also noted different styles of interactions with others that people can use.

Carl Jung believed that the unconscious exists on two levels—the personal and collective unconscious. The first is similar to Freud’s unconscious, and the second is a shared storehouse of ideas and images that all humans share and pass on to other via archetypes. Some of these included the anima and animus, as well as the self-archetype (symbolized by the mandala).

Maslow and Self-Actualization

The humanistic approach focuses on the individual, free-will, subjective experiences, and personal choice, as well as the basic individual drive to self-actualization and achievement and the importance of human nature. Its development in response to the previously developed psychoanalytic and behavioral models dubbed it as the “third force” in psychology.

Recall Abraham Maslow’s discussion of the hierarchy of needs and his opinion that people work toward self-actualization. This desire to become fully functioning and to achieve all that we’re capable of is found in all people, and he identified several characteristics of “self-actualizers” (refer to your text). He also noted some suggestions for furthering your own journey toward self-actualization.

Carl Rogers’s Self Theory

Incongruence vs. congruence

Carl Rogers’s theory of personality is probably the most widely recognized of the humanistic theories. He spoke about the fully functioning person as one who lives in harmony with all aspects of their own self.

He also noted that our own view of our self—the self-image—can be accurate or inaccurate, and when we live in a state of incongruence it would be seen in the form of personality problems. The “real self” and the “perceived self” distinguish between who we really are and who we see ourselves as, and the ideal self is the person we wish we could be.

Another model discusses possible selves that are identities that we either could become or are afraid of becoming. As an example, have you ever said, “I’m never going to be like my mother (or father)?” If so, you’re considering a possible self.

Humanistic View of Development

Rogers’s model believed that the congruence or lack thereof between the various self-concepts was a result of getting positive and supportive messages of unconditional positive regard or conditions of worth from influential people (most notably parents) in our lives. Can you see how being taught that we are not loveable unless certain conditions are satisfied can teach us to distort our own self-images?

How Situations Affect Behavior and the Importance of Habits

From a behavioral model, personality is believed to be a series of well-learned habits that become so automatic that they become ingrained in our behaviors. They are acquired through the same processes of learning that you have studied earlier—operant and classical conditioning as well as observational learning and modeling.

This model also looks at situational determinants, acknowledging that sometimes our behaviors change based on the circumstances in which they occur. If you are likely to make jokes when talking with your friends at school, would you behave the same way with them at a funeral?

Although learning theorists examine habits and the elements of habits as the basis of personality, note that this is not a comprehensive model and it has been criticized for overlooking other important dynamics of thought. This is where social learning theory comes into play.

Social Learning Theory

Social learning theory examines three different components that relate to our behaviors and, by extension, one’s personality:

psychological situations

expectancy (or anticipation) of outcomes

reinforcement value of rewards

It also looks at one’s own assessment of their ability to be successful at given tasks, a concept called self-efficacy. While being highly self-efficacious is a good thing, one must also remember that self-efficacy without realism can be problematic. As an example, if you are sure you can pass an exam (high self-efficacy) without doing any studying or review (low realism), what is the likely outcome going to be?

Behaviorist View of Development

Learning theorists believe in the power of learning, and that personality is shaped this way. Reinforcement that we receive from others—social reinforcement—is a particularly important part of this process. Consider how this links personality theory to the study of social psychology, and social influence concepts.

Do We Inherit Personality?

Temperament might be thought of as an infant’s personality, but it is related to an overall pattern of attention, arousal, and mood. It shows up early in life and predicts later personality traits. Temperament is believed to be biologically determined. Does that mean that personality is also biological determined to some extent?

The study of this, behavior genetics, asks how much of our behavioral traits are inherited and how much are a result of the environment. Examine the Minnesota Twin Studies discussed in your text to understand this issue more fully.

Personality and Environment

Some people place more emphasis on the environment than others in its impact on their behaviors. See the brief quiz in the text for an assessment of this.

But traits and situations are not independent of each other. The trait-situation interaction notes that sometimes a trait can allow for a range of behaviors, and the situation determines where in that range you will fall. It is also possible (if not likely) that your own traits have an impact on the situations in which you find yourself.

How would you rate the subject’s emotional self-control?

In control at all times, shows no emotion

Has little control over emotions

Is easily aroused to emotional display

Expresses moderate emotion at times

Remains calm and controlled in most situations

Place a check at the point that describes the person’s degree of introversion/extroversion.

Very introverted, withdrawn

Very extroverted, friendly, active, and assertive

Moderately extroverted,

outgoing

Balanced mixture of introversion

and extroversion

Moderately introverted, shy

How would you rate the subject’s potential for leadership?

Very low Very highAbove averageAverageBelow average

How would you describe the subject’s prevailing mood?

Depressed, despondent

EuphoricHappy, relaxedNeutralSad, subdued