Psychology

Chapter 7: The Personologists

 Rom Harré 2006

Human beings appear to differ from one another along many dimensions. Some people are gloomy and pessimistic. Others are cheerful and optimistic. There are shy people and there are ebullient people. There are submissive people and aggressive people. Attributes like these are the marks of differences in personality. Are they permanent traits of people, or do they come and go with the situations people find themselves in? How are we to explain the differences between presentations of self of different people in the same situations and the same person in different situations? Is a ‘scientific’ personology possible, in the sense of the possibility of the discovery of lawful relations between personality traits and the types of situations in which they are displayed? Are personality traits, if they exist, explanatory of human behaviour? The authors whose lives and works are to be discussed in this chapter had very different views on these questions. Some believed in the ex! istence of traits, others thought the very idea incoherent.

The ‘humours’ theory of human types, originating in antiquity, had held sway in Europe for at least a millennium. According to this classification, there were four basic human personality types: choleric, phlegmatic, melancholic and sanguine. The terminology is still in use today in the vernacular. The four temperaments were grounded in the physiology of the four humours. These were believed to be constituents of the human body, which varied in proportions from person to person and from time to time. A person in whom the hot and dry humours predominated was choleric, the cold and dry person was melancholic and so on. With the demise of the physiology of humours, theoretical support for the ancient quadruple personology collapsed, though it has survived as a commonsense classification.

The 20th century saw a revival of interest in the psychology of personality, led by  Gordon Allport . In the first chapter of his (1961) book, he frames the study of personality in a general conceptual scheme. There he distinguishes personality from character, and both from temperament. He introduced the concept of ‘trait’ as the main analytical tool, though with subtlety and appropriate reservations against its misuse. Allport's books were amongst the earliest to address the question of a scientific personology. They are still of outstanding intellectual quality. Reading his Pattern and Growth in Personality (1961), one has to remind oneself how long ago it was published, so relevant is it to the 21st century. Most of the work published after the Second World War has used methods presupposing positivistic ph! ilosophy of science and relying on dubious statistical inferences. Anticipations of most of the current criticisms of these attempts at a ‘scientific’ study of personality are already to be found in Allport's writings.

Allport's work straddles the rise and decline of the trait theory of personality. He was largely responsible for introducing the concept in the 1930s and in the 1960s provided the most telling criticisms of the misuses of the concept by people like his erstwhile colleague,  Raymond Cattell .  Hans Eysenck  was surely the most widely read British psychologist in the 20th century. However, as we shall see, he was among those whose work has proved most vulnerable to the kind of criticisms made by Allport and others. While ‘personality’ was the main topic of research for both Cattell and Eysenck, each undertook studies of other major dimensions or groups of dimensions along which they presumed people differ! ed intrinsically, for example ‘intelligence’. Here we are concerned mainly with their contributions to personality research.

Allport's emphasis on the complexity of the explanatory ‘packages’ required to understand people's behaviour has been echoed by many later writers. For example Walter Mischel argues that ‘one must take account of interaction between various qualities in the person and in the situation’. It follows that the most important research question is to ask ‘when are situations more important for explaining behaviour … when are personal variables likely to be most influential?’ (Mischel, 1986: 496). However, the main research thrust in personology has been animated by a rather simple version of the concept of a ‘trait’. Trait theorists have been accused not only of logical errors in their use of the concept of a trait, but also of misunderstandings of statistical methods. The most recent and telling of these criticisms can be found in the work of  James Lamiell .

Some of those who contest the presuppositions of trait theory, that is the alleged permanence, stability and universality of traits, have tried to develop another style of personality psychology, the dramaturgical theory. According to this theory, personalities are displays, performances suited to the immediate situation and to the people therein. Personality types are like roles in a play. In accordance with the dramaturgical theory the opening paragraph should be written: When and in what circumstances is this person likely to appear gloomy and pessimistic, playing some homespun version of Hamlet? When and in what circumstances is this very same person likely to appear ebullient and optimistic, in performing some more heroic role? There is no X which any given person is. Each of us has mastered the local repertoire of personality types to some degree, and is a more or less skilful performer.

Dramaturgical theorists observe and sometimes record actual human interactions. They analyse what they have seen or heard, looking for the conventions by which appropriate personality attributes are displayed, drawn from a working repertoire, finding who makes use of them and in what circumstances.  Erving Goffman  made outstanding contributions to the study of personality as a dramatic performance.

The trait theory and the dramaturgical approach are not irreconcilable. A person who is in command of a repertoire of personality types, to be displayed in the appropriate circumstances, must be ascribed certain capacities and skills. Like traits, the form in which capacities and skills are ascribed is conditional. ‘If such and such a situation occurs including this or that type of person, X will probably display such and such a personality attribute’. X's repertoire could be expressed in a hierarchically arranged set of capacities.

Gordon Willard Allport (1897-1967)

Raymond Bernard Cattell (1905-98)

Hans Jürgen Eysenck (1916-97)

James Thomas Lamiell (1950-)

Goffman, Erving (1922-82)

Reflections

APA citation:

Chapter 7: The personologists. (2006). In R. Harré, Key thinkers in psychology. London, United Kingdom: Sage UK. Retrieved from  http://search.credoreference.com/content/entry/sageuktp/chapter_7_the_personologists/0

HERE IS Maslow, A. H. (1943). A theory of human motivation. Psychological Review, 50(4), 370-396. doi:10.1037/h0054346

The link for it is http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Maslow/motivation.htm

HERE IS Bandura, A. (1999). A social cognitive theory of personality . In L. Pervin & O. John (Ed.). Handbook of personality (2nd ed., pp. 154-196). New York, NY: Guilford Publications. (Reprinted in D. Cervone & Y. Shoda [Eds.], The coherence of personality. New York, NY: Guilford Press).

The link for it is http://www.uky.edu/~eushe2/Bandura/Bandura1999HP.pdf