PERSONALITY PSYCHOLOGY
INTRODUCTION
Personality—it’s who we are. Our
personalities determine how we act and react, as well as how we interact with
and respond to the world. Despite much research, the origins of personality are
still a mystery, though there are many theories that attempt to explain them.
Some researchers propose that children learn personality from their parents;
others believe personality is fixed from birth. Some theories address how
environment, genetics, and culture influence the development of personality.
What does it mean to have “personality”?
Someone with personality could be funny, passionate, daring, extroverted,
aggressive, egotistical, hot-tempered, or insecure. He or she might be
altruistic, humble, mellow, shy, or wary. He or she might even be all or any of
these things at different times and in different places, depending on the
situation. Researchers have developed many ways of assessing personality, but
even if we do gain an understanding of how we are, the question of why we’re that way remains.
PERSONALITY TRAITS
Personality is
the collection of characteristic thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that are
associated with a person. Personality traits are characteristic behaviors and feelings that are
consistent and long lasting.
Traits vs. States
Unlike traits, which are stable characteristics, states are temporary behaviors or
feelings that depend on a person’s situation and motives at a particular time.
The difference between traits and states is analogous to the difference between
climate and weather. Los Angeles has a warm climate, but on some days it may
have cool weather. In the same way, a person who has the trait of calmness may
experience a state of anxiety on a day when he or she faces a difficult
challenge.
Ancient Greek Ideas
The ancient Greeks believed that people’s personalities depended
on the kind of humor, or
fluid, most prevalent in their bodies. The ancient Greeks identified four
humors—blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile—and categorized people’s
personalities to correspond as follows:
·
Sanguine: Blood.
Cheerful and passionate.
·
Phlegmatic: Phlegm.
Dull and unemotional.
·
Melancholic: Black
bile. Unhappy and depressed.
·
Choleric: Yellow
bile. Angry and hot-tempered.
The Greek theory of personality remained influential well into
the eighteenth century.
Cattell’s Sixteen
Traits
Like the ancient Greeks, modern researchers believe in the
existence of a few basic personality traits. Combinations of these basic
traits, they believe, form other traits. Psychologist Raymond Cattell used a statistical
procedure called factor analysis to
identify basic personality traits from a very long list of English words that
identified traits. Factor analysis allowed Cattell to cluster these traits into
groups according to their similarities. He found that personality is made up of
sixteen basic dimensions.
The Big Five Traits
Other researchers have since clustered
personality traits into even fewer categories. Today, many psychologists
believe that all personality traits derive from five basic personality traits,
which are commonly referred to as the Big Five:
1. Neuroticism
2. Extraversion
3. Openness
to experience
4. Agreeableness
5. Conscientiousness
The Big Five traits remain quite stable over
the life span, particularly after the age of thirty. Although researchers
identified the Big Five traits by using a list of English words, these traits
seem to be applicable in many countries.
Criticisms of the Big Five Model
Critics of the Big Five have various arguments
against the model:
·
Some critics think that more than five traits
are needed to account for the wide personality differences among people.
·
Other critics argue that five traits are too
many. For example, they point out that openness correlates positively with
extraversion. These critics argue that just three traits— neuroticism,
extraversion, and agreeableness—should be enough to fully describe personality.
·
Still other critics argue that the Big Five
are somewhat arbitrary because they depend on the words used in the statistical
analysis that produced them. A different list of words may have yielded
different basic traits.
·
Some psychologists have questioned the
research supporting the stability of the Big Five traits across cultures. They
argue that the research could be biased because the use of Western tests is
more likely to uncover cultural similarities than differences.
PSYCHODYNAMIC THEORY OF PERSONALITY
Many psychologists have proposed theories that
try to explain the origins of personality. One highly influential set of
theories stems from the work of Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud, who first proposed the
theory of psychoanalysis. Collectively, these theories are known as psychodynamic theories. Although many different
psychodynamic theories exist, they all emphasize unconscious motives and desires,
as well as the importance of childhood experiences in shaping personality.
Sigmund Freud’s Theory of Psychoanalysis
In the late 1800s and early 1900s, Freud
developed a technique that he called psychoanalysis and used it to treat mental disorders. He
formed his theory of psychoanalysis by observing his patients. According to
psychoanalytic theory, personalities arise because of attempts to resolve
conflicts between unconscious sexual and aggressive impulses and societal
demands to restrain these impulses.
The Conscious, the Preconscious, and the Unconscious
Freud believed that most mental processes are
unconscious. He proposed that people have three levels of awareness:
·
The conscious contains all the information that a person is
paying attention to at any given time.
Example: The words Dan is reading, the objects in his field of vision,
the sounds he can hear, and any thirst, hunger, or pain he is experiencing at
the moment are all in his conscious.
·
The preconscious contains all the information outside of a
person’s attention but readily available if needed.
Example: Linda’s telephone number, the make of her car, and many of her
past experiences are in her preconscious.
·
The unconscious contains thoughts, feelings, desires, and
memories of which people have no awareness but that influence every aspect of
their day-to-day lives.
Example: Stan’s unconscious might contain angry feelings toward his
mother or a traumatic incident he experienced at age four.
people make between ideas.
The Freudian Slip
Cathy calls up her mother on Mother’s Day and says, “You’re the
beast, Mom,” when she consciously intended to say, “You’re the best, Mom.”
According to psychoanalytic theory, this slip of the tongue, known as a
Freudian slip, reveals her unconscious anger toward her mother.
The Id, the Ego, and
the Superego
Freud proposed that personalities have three components: the id,
the ego, and the superego.
·
Id: a
reservoir of instinctual energy that contains biological urges such as impulses
toward survival, sex, and aggression. The id is unconscious and operates
according to the pleasure
principle, the drive to achieve pleasure and avoid pain. The id is
characterized by primary process
thinking, which is illogical, irrational, and motivated by a desire for
the immediate gratification of impulses.
·
Ego: the
component that manages the conflict between the id and the constraints of the
real world. Some parts of the ego are unconscious, while others are
preconscious or conscious. The ego operates according to the reality principle, the awareness that
gratification of impulses has to be delayed in order to accommodate the demands
of the real world. The ego is characterized by secondary process thinking, which is logical and rational. The
ego’s role is to prevent the id from gratifying its impulses in socially
inappropriate ways.
·
Superego: the
moral component of personality. It contains all the moral standards learned
from parents and society. The superego forces the ego to conform not only to
reality but also to its ideals of morality. Hence, the superego causes people
to feel guilty when they go against society’s rules. Like the ego, the superego
operates at all three levels of awareness.
Conflict
Freud believed that the id, the ego, and the superego are in
constant conflict. He focused mainly on conflicts concerning sexual and
aggressive urges because these urges are most likely to violate societal rules.
Anxiety
Internal conflicts can make a person feel anxious. In Freud’s
view, anxiety arises when the ego cannot adequately balance the demands of the
id and the superego. The id demands gratification of its impulses, and the
superego demands maintenance of its moral standards.
Defense Mechanisms
To manage these internal conflicts, people use
defense mechanisms. Defense mechanisms are
behaviors that protect people from anxiety. There are many different kinds of
defense mechanisms, many of which are automatic and unconscious:
·
Repression: keeping
unpleasant thoughts, memories, and feelings shut up in the unconscious.
Example: Nate witnessed his mother being beaten by a mugger when he was
seven years old. As an adult, he does not remember this incident.
·
Reaction
formation: behaving in a way that is opposite to
behavior, feelings, or thoughts that are considered unacceptable.
Example: Lisa feels sexually attracted to her roommate’s boyfriend but
does not admit this to herself. Instead, she constantly makes very disparaging
comments about the boyfriend and feels disgusted by the way he acts.
·
Projection: attributing
one’s own unacceptable thoughts or feelings to someone else.
Example: Mario feels angry toward his father but is not aware of it.
Instead, he complains that he cannot be around his father because his father is
such an angry man.
·
Rationalization: using
incorrect but self-serving explanations to justify unacceptable behavior,
thoughts, or feelings.
Example: Sylvia runs a red light while driving. She justifies this by
telling herself she was already in the intersection when the light changed to
red.
·
Displacement: transferring
feelings about a person or event onto someone or something else.
Example: Seth is angry at his professor for giving him a bad grade. He
leaves class and shouts angrily at a passerby who accidentally bumps into him.
·
Denial: refusing
to acknowledge something that is obvious to others.
Example: Kate’s use of alcohol starts to affect her academic performance,
her job, and her relationships. However, she insists that she drinks only to
relieve stress and that she does not have an alcohol problem.
·
Regression: reverting
to a more immature state of psychological development.
Example: When six-year-old Jameel gets less attention from his parents
because of a new baby brother, he suddenly starts to wet his bed at night.
·
Sublimation: channeling
unacceptable thoughts and feelings into socially acceptable behavior.
Example: Priya deals with her angry feelings toward her family by writing
science-fiction stories about battles between civilizations.
Psychosexual Stages of Development
Freud believed that personality solidifies
during childhood, largely before age five. He proposed five stages of
psychosexual development: the oral stage, the anal stage, the phallic stage,
the latency stage, and the genital stage. He believed that at each stage of
development, children gain sexual gratification, or sensual pleasure, from a
particular part of their bodies. Each stage has special conflicts, and
children’s ways of managing these conflicts influence their personalities.
If a child’s needs in a particular stage are
gratified too much or frustrated too much, the child can become fixated at that
stage of development. Fixation is
an inability to progress normally from one stage into another. When the child
becomes an adult, the fixation shows up as a tendency to focus on the needs
that were over-gratified or over-frustrated.
Freud’s Psychosexual Stages
of Development
Stage
|
Age
|
Sources
of pleasure
|
Result
of fixation
|
Oral
stage
|
Birth to roughly twelve months
|
Activities involving the mouth, such as
sucking, biting, and chewing
|
Excessive smoking, overeating, or dependence
on others
|
Anal
stage
|
Age two, when the child is being toilet
trained
|
Bowel movements
|
An overly controlling (anal-retentive)
personality or an easily angered (anal-expulsive) personality
|
Phallic
stage
|
Age three to five
|
The genitals
|
Guilt or anxiety about sex
|
LatencyStage
|
Age five to puberty
|
Sexuality is latent, or dormant, during this
period
|
No fixations at this stage
|
Genital
stage
|
Begins at puberty
|
The genitals; sexual urges return
|
No fixations at this stage
|
Oedipus Complex
Freud believed that the crucially
important Oedipus complex also
developed during the phallic stage. The Oedipus complex refers to a male
child’s sexual desire for his mother and hostility toward his father, whom he
considers to be a rival for his mother’s love. Freud thought that a male child
who sees a naked girl for the first time believes that her penis has been cut
off. The child fears that his own father will do the same to him for desiring
his mother—a fear called castration
anxiety. Because of this fear, the child represses his longing for his
mother and begins to identify with his father. The child’s acceptance of his
father’s authority results in the emergence of the superego.
During his lifetime, Freud had many followers
who praised his theory, but his ideas, particularly his emphasis on children’s
sexuality, also drew criticism. Some of Freud’s followers broke away from him
because of theoretical disagreements and proposed their own theories. These
theorists are called neo-Freudians. Some important neo-Freudians were Carl
Jung, Alfred Adler, and object-relations theorists.
Penis Envy and Womb
Envy
Freud believed that the successful resolution
of the Oedipus complex played a crucial role in the formation of the superego
and the personality. However, he did not have a plausible account of how this
developmental phase applied to girls. Freud believed that because girls do not
have a penis, they don’t have the same motivation to develop a strong superego.
Instead, they develop penis envy,
or a sense of discontent and resentment resulting from their wish for a penis.
This gender-biased idea has raised strong criticism from many psychologists,
including the psychoanalyst Karen Horney. Horney proposed that it was more
likely that men have womb envy because
of their inability to bear children.
Carl Jung’s Analytical Psychology
Until the 1910s, Carl Jung was a follower and close friend of Freud’s. Like
Freud, Jung believed that unconscious conflicts are important in shaping
personality. However, he believed the unconscious has two layers: the personal unconscious, which resembled
Freud’s idea, and the collective
unconscious, which contains universal memories of the common human past.
Jung called these common memories
archetypes. Archetypes are
images or thoughts that have the same meaning for all human beings. Jung said
that archetypes exist in dreams as well as in art, literature, and religion
across cultures.
Example: The archetype of the “powerful father” can be seen in the
Christian conception of God, the Zeus of Greek mythology, and popular movies
such as The Godfather.
Alfred Adler’s Individual Psychology
Alfred Adler,
another follower of Freud and a member of his inner circle, eventually broke
away from Freud and developed his own school of thought, which he called individual psychology. Adler believed
that the main motivations for human behavior are not sexual or aggressive urges
but strivings for superiority. He pointed out that children naturally feel weak
and inadequate in comparison to adults. This normal feeling of inferiority
drives them to adapt, develop skills, and master challenges. Adler used the
termcompensation to refer
to the attempt to shed normal feelings of inferiority.
However, some people suffer from an
exaggerated sense of inferiority, or an inferiority complex, which can be due either to being spoiled or
neglected by parents. Such people overcompensate,
which means that rather than try to master challenges, they try to cover up
their sense of inferiority by focusing on outward signs of superiority such as
status, wealth, and power.
Object-Relations Theories
The object-relations school of psychoanalysis
emerged in the 1950s, led by a group of psychoanalysts that included D. W.
Winnicott and Melanie Klein. The term object relations refers to the relationships that people have
with others, who are represented mentally as objects with certain attributes.
Object-relations theorists believe that people are motivated most by
attachments to others rather than by sexual and aggressive impulses. According
to these theorists, the conflict between autonomy and the need for other people
plays a key role in shaping personality.
Criticisms of Psychodynamic Theories
Freud’s original ideas have little popularity
today, but many psychologists do adhere to neo-Freudian ideas. However, other
psychologists criticize psychodynamic theories for various reasons:
·
Some critics argue that psychodynamic theories
are not falsifiable (see pages 8-–9) and therefore unscientific. In response to
this criticism, proponents of psychodynamic theories point out that empirical
evidence does support some psychodynamic concepts. For example, empirical
research shows that there are unconscious mental processes, that people have
mental representations of other people, and that people use unconscious defense
mechanisms to protect themselves from unpleasant emotions such as anxiety.
·
Other critics argue that psychodynamic
theories are made by generalizing from a small number of patients to the whole
human population. Relying only on case studies can lead to faulty conclusions.
·
Still others argue that most psychodynamic
theories are not based on studies that fol low people from childhood to
adulthood. Instead, psychodynamic theorists listen to descriptions o f an adult
patient’s past and draw conclusions about the relevance of childhood
experiences. However, as described on pages 172–174, memories are not always
reliable.
BEHAVIORIST THEORY
The school of behaviorism emerged in the
1910s, led by John B. Watson.
Unlike psychodynamic theorists, behaviorists study only observable behavior.
Their explanations of personality focus on learning. Skinner, Bandura, and
Walter Mischel all proposed important behaviorist theories.
B. F. Skinner’s Ideas
As described in Chapter 7, “Learning and
Conditioning,” B. F. Skinner is
well known for describing the principles of operant conditioning. Skinner
believed that the environment determines behavior. According to his view,
people have consistent behavior patterns because they have particular kinds
of response tendencies.
This means that over time, people learn to behave in particular ways. Behaviors
that have positive consequences tend to increase, while behaviors that have
negative consequences tend to decrease.
Skinner didn’t think that childhood played an
especially important role in shaping personality. Instead, he thought that
personality develops over the whole life span. People’s responses change as
they encounter new situations.
Example: When Jeff was young, he lived in the suburbs. He developed a
liking for fast driving because his friends enjoyed riding with him and he
never got speeding tickets. After he left college, though, he moved to the
city. Whenever he drove fast, he got a speeding ticket. Also, his new friends were
much more cautious about driving in fast cars. Now Jeff doesn’t like to drive
fast and considers himself to be a cautious person.
Albert Bandura’s Ideas
Albert Bandura pointed
out that people learn to respond in particular ways by watching other people,
who are called models. See Chapter 7, “Learning and Conditioning,” for more
information on Bandura’s research on observational learning.
Although Bandura agrees that personality
arises through learning, he believes that conditioning is not an automatic, mechanical
process. He and other theorists believe that cognitive processes like thinking
and reasoning are important in learning. The kind of behaviorism they advocate
is called social-cognitive learning.
Whom Do We Imitate?
Research has shown that people are more likely
to imitate some models than others. People tend to imitate models they like or
admire and models they consider attractive and powerful. People are also more
likely to imitate models who seem similar to themselves. Furthermore, if people
see models being rewarded for their behavior, they will be more likely to
imitate those models. Advertisers often use these research results when they
design ads. For example, ads that try to persuade young adults to purchase a
certain brand of soft drink often show young, attractive models who are being
rewarded with good times for their soda-drinking behavior.
Walter Mischel’s Ideas
Walter Mischel,
like Bandura, is a social-cognitive theorist. Mischel’s research showed that
situations have a strong effect on people’s behavior and that people’s
responses to situations depend on their thoughts about the likely consequences
of their behavior. Mischel’s research caused considerable debate because it
cast doubt on the idea of stable personality traits. Mischel himself did not
want to abandon the idea of stable personality traits. He believed that
researchers should pay attention to both situational and personal
characteristics that influence behavior.
Today, most psychologists acknowledge that
both a person’s characteristics and the specific situation at hand influence
how a person behaves. Personal characteristics include innate temperaments,
learned habits, and beliefs. The environment includes opportunities, rewards,
punishments, and chance occurrences. Personality results from a two-way
interaction between a person’s characteristics and the environment. This
process of interaction is called reciprocal
determinism. People’s characteristics influence the kind of environment
in which they find themselves. Those environments, in turn, influence and
modify people’s personal characteristics.
Criticisms of Behavioral Approaches
Critics of the behavioral approach to
personality maintain three arguments:
·
Behaviorist researchers often do animal
studies of behavior and then generalize their results to human beings.
Generalizing results in this way can be misleading, since humans have complex
thought processes that affect behavior.
·
Behaviorists often underestimate the
importance of biological factors.
·
By emphasizing the situational influences on
personality, some social-cognitive theorists underestimate the importance of
personality traits.
HUMANISTIC THEORY
Some psychologists at the time disliked
psychodynamic and behaviorist explanations of personality. They felt that these
theories ignored the qualities that make humans unique among animals, such as
striving for self-determination and self-realization. In the 1950s, some of
these psychologists began a school of psychology called humanism.
Humanistic psychologists try to see people’s
lives as those people would see them. They tend to have an optimistic
perspective on human nature. They focus on the ability of human beings to think
consciously and rationally, to control their biological urges, and to achieve
their full potential. In the humanistic view, people are responsible for their
lives and actions and have the freedom and will to change their attitudes and
behavior.
Two psychologists, Abraham Maslow and Carl
Rogers, became well known for their humanistic theories.
Abraham Maslow’s Theory
The highest rung on Abraham Maslow’s ladder of human
motives is the need for self-actualization.
Maslow said that human beings strive for self-actualization, or realization of
their full potential, once they have satisfied their more basic needs. Maslow’s
hierarchy of needs theory is described on page 247.
Maslow also provided his own account of the
healthy human personality. Psychodynamic theories tend to be based on clinical
case studies and therefore lack accounts of healthy personalities. To come up
with his account, Maslow studied exceptional historical figures, such as
Abraham Lincoln and Eleanor Roosevelt, as well as some of his own
contemporaries whom he thought had exceptionally good mental health.
Maslow described several characteristics that
self-actualizing people share:
·
Awareness and acceptance of themselves
·
Openness and spontaneity
·
The ability to enjoy work and see work as a
mission to fulfill
·
The ability to develop close friendships
without being overly dependent on other people
·
A good sense of humor
·
The tendency to have peak experiences that are
spiritually or emotionally satisfying
Carl Rogers’s
Person-Centered Theory
Carl Rogers,
another humanistic psychologist, proposed a theory called the person-centered theory. Like Freud,
Rogers drew on clinical case studies to come up with his theory. He also drew
from the ideas of Maslow and others. In Rogers’s view, the self-concept is the most
important feature of personality, and it includes all the thoughts, feelings,
and beliefs people have about themselves. Rogers believed that people are aware
of their self-concepts.
Congruence and
Incongruence
Rogers said that people’s self-concepts often do not exactly
match reality. For example, a person may consider himself to be very honest but
often lies to his boss about why he is late to work. Rogers used the term incongruence to refer to the
discrepancy between the self-concept and reality. Congruence, on the other hand, is a fairly accurate match between
the self-concept and reality.
According to Rogers, parents promote incongruence if they give
their children conditional love. If a parent accepts a child only when the child
behaves a particular way, the child is likely to block out experiences that are
considered unacceptable. On the other hand, if the parent shows unconditional
love, the child can develop congruence. Adults whose parents provided
conditional love would continue in adulthood to distort their experiences in
order to feel accepted.
Results of
Incongruence
Rogers thought that people experience anxiety when their
self-concepts are threatened. To protect themselves from anxiety, people
distort their experiences so that they can hold on to their self-concept.
People who have a high degree of incongruence are likely to feel very anxious
because reality continually threatens their self-concepts.
Example: Erin believes she is a very generous person, although she is often
stingy with her money and usually leaves small tips or no tips at restaurants.
When a dining companion comments on her tipping behavior, she insists that the
tips she leaves are proportional to the service she gets. By attributing her
tipping behavior to bad service, she can avoid anxiety and maintain her
self-concept of being generous.
Criticisms of
Humanistic Theories
Humanistic theories have had a significant influence on
psychology as well as pop culture. Many psychologists now accept the idea that
when it comes to personality, people’s subjective experiences have more weight
than objective reality. Humanistic psychologists’ focus on healthy people,
rather than troubled people, has also been a particularly useful contribution.
BIOLOGICAL APPROACH
Psychologists agree that environmental factors
interact with genetic factors to form personality. Some psychologists have proposed
theories that emphasize these genetic influences on personality.
Hans Eysenck’s Theory
Psychologist Hans Eysenck believes that genetics are the primary
determinate of personality, although he thinks conditioning also plays a role.
According to Eysenck, personality traits are hierarchical, with a few basic
traits giving rise to a large array of more superficial traits. Genetically
determined differences in physiological functioning make some people more
vulnerable to behavioral conditioning. Eysenck suggests that introverted people
have higher levels of physiological arousal, which allows them to be
conditioned by environmental stimuli more easily. Because of this, such people
develop more inhibitions, which make them more shy and uneasy in social situations.
Empirical evidence for genetic contributions
to personality comes mainly from two kinds of studies: studies of children’s
temperaments and heritability studies.
Studies of Temperament
Temperament refers
to innate personality features or dispositions. Babies show particular
temperaments soon after birth. Temperaments that researchers have studied
include reactivity, which refers to a baby’s excitability or responsiveness,
and soothability, which refers to the ease or difficulty of calming an upset baby.
Researchers have studied children from infancy
to adolescence and found that temperaments remain fairly stable over time.
However, temperaments can also be modified over time by environmental factors.
Heritability Studies
Heritability studies also provide evidence for
genetic contributions to personality. Heritability is a mathematical estimate that indicates how
much of a trait’s variation in a population can be attributed to genes. For
more information about heritability, see page 35.
Twin studies help researchers to determine
heritability, as described in Chapter 2, “Evolution and Genes.” Researchers
have shown that identical twins raised together are more similar than fraternal
twins raised together in traits such as positive emotionality, negative
emotionality, and constraint. Identical twins separated early in life and
raised apart are more similar in these traits than are fraternal twins raised
together. Both of these research findings suggest the existence of a genetic
component to personality.
Behavioral geneticists have shown, after doing
studies in many different countries, that the heritability of personality
traits is around .5, which means that 50 percent of the variation in
personality traits in a group of people can be attributed to genetic
differences among those people.
The Influence of
Family Environment
Surprisingly, research shows that sharing a
family environment doesn’t lead to many similarities in personality. There is
no or little correlation between the personality traits of adopted children and
their adoptive parents. Researchers think this is because parents don’t act the
same way with all their children. Children’s temperaments influence how a
parent behaves toward them, and a child’s gender and place in a birth order can
also affect how that child is treated.
Environmental Influences
The environment also has important influences
on personality. These include peer relationships and the kinds of situations a
child encounters. As described on page 277, under “Walter Mischel’s Ideas,” the
interactions between innate characteristics and environmental factors are
two-way. Children’s temperaments are likely to influence their peer
relationships and the situations they encounter. Similarly, peers and
situations can modify children’s personality characteristics.
Evolutionary Approaches
Evolutionary theorists explain personality in
terms of its adaptive value. Theorists such as David Buss have argued that the
Big Five personality traits are universally important because these traits have
given humans a reproductive advantage.
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