Personality traits and behaviour ⢠Psychologists who follow the trait ...
Chapter 4 – Personality traits and behaviour •
Psychologists who follow the trait approach begin with ordinary language and common sense
•
Approach is based on correlational empirical research and focuses exclusively on individual differences (no absolute judgement, only relative) o However it does miss on things like what are common to all people and what makes them unique o Trait aspect focuses exclusively on individual differences; does not attempt to measure how ___ anyone is in an absolute senses
•
Every person is like everyone else, like some other people and like no one else.
•
Trait weakness: only look at the middle, don’t look at how we are as humans all the same or all unique
•
People are inconsistent – there are always exceptions to a general rule for someone’s behaviour – depends on rules of a situation and who is there – people do have consistent patterns of behaviour
•
Person-situation debate – Mischel triggered o behaviour was too inconsistent from one situation to the next to allow individual differences to be characterized accurately in terms of broad personality traits o Do people have consistent patterns of behaviour or is it dependent on each situation? o Are common, ordinary intuitions about people fundamentally flawed, or basically correct? o Why are psychologists still debating this topic?
The Situationist Argument o there is an upper limit to predicting what a person will do based on measurement of their personality, and this limit is quite low o situations are more important than personality traits in determining behaviour (Situationism) o Personality assessment is waste of time, intuitions about people are flawed: we think people are way more consistent than they are
•
The Situationists also believe that if traits are useful then you should be able to predict their behaviour o However you cannot predict someone’s behaviour with very much accuracy – took self-descriptions of personality and direct measures of behaviour from lab – correlations seldom exceeded .30 (this was later bumped up by Richard Nisbett to 0.40)
•
The response to this was that the situationist argument was based on too short of a literature review of poor studies in personality, that personality psychologists can do a better job at conducting their research and .40 is not a small correlation (absolute and relative comparison; 70% accuracy instead of 50% isn’t bad). o To improve, the lit review should include studies in natural settings and studies with assessment of high and low self-monitoring behaviour, and focus on general trends of behaviour o Psychologists should move the studies out of the lab more often: measure behaviour in real life o Moderator variables could be used to identify people that might be more consistent than others – high self-monitors (change quickly in situations), low self-monitors are the opposite. (check variance in behaviour) o Different behaviours are more consistent by nature – ie. Goal-directed (unique) vs. expressive gestures (don’t change) o Psychologists need to focus on general trends, rather than single actions.
•
Situationism – situations determine behaviour – though they rarely measured situational variables in the studies; used a lot of subtraction
•
Power of Situation – can have an all or none effect that is unpredictable o Measured in social psych experiments, traditionally randomly assign/expose people to 2 or more different conditions such as changing a subject’s attitude by the influence of monetary incentives
But how large is this effect?
o Three important situational experiments were analyzed to see the effect size
Experiments with attitudes and cognitive dissonance dealing with forced compliance and monetary intervention (change beliefs vs. pay off feelings)
Bystander Intervention ( in a hurry) Experiments
Milgram “electric shock” experiments
o Effect size was determined to be roughly the same as the personality trait correlation (0.40); situation and personality/traits appear to have equal effect
•
Situationists also argue that people’s perceptions of one another are largely erroneous; but our intuition says otherwise. Why are there so many personality words that are useful in the everyday world? (Number of descriptive words for something ~ importance)
•
What is the point of all this personality talk anyways if it’s so debated and unclear? o Useful because it affects life outcomes and how people go about things: people care about the most important things in their life o Is present throughout lifetherefore affects tons of outcomes! Institutional success, happiness, etc.
•
Personality Traits are better for describing how people will act in general
•
Situational Variables are relevant to how people will act under specific circumstances o Examples that support these are relationships and jobs, each is different but has aspects of similar behaviour o Personality variables are important as they comprise the psychological aspect of a person that stays with her throughout her life from one job and relationship to the next ones long-run effect mainly
•
Interactionism: persons and situations constantly interact with each other to produce behaviour together o The effect of a personality variable may depend on the situation, or vice versa (caffeine and extroverts/introverts: when combined they have an effect) o Situations are not randomly populated: people choose, or find themselves in, an environment that matches their personality o People change situations abruptly by what they do in them (e.g. swing the first punch) Stanford prisoner experiment
•
People like the situationist side (absolves responsibility), but personality explains ‘one size doesn’t fit all’ and that people are not powerless to overcome situationslife debate!
•
The situationist and personality sides both have pros & cons
•
In the end the person-situation debate was resolved with that people are different from each other and that these differences do mater.
Chapter 7 – Using Personality Traits to Understand Behaviour (212-252) •
Traits exist: we should measure in order to a) predict and b) understand behaviour
•
Two assumptions: best way to test accuracy of a psychological understanding is to try to predict behaviours, and if you can predict which traits cause which behaviours, insights can be made as to why o Single Trait Approach: examines single highly important personality traits (What do people like that do?) o Many Trait Approach: examines highly important behaviours to figure out which traits caused them o Essential Trait Approach: which traits are most important o Typological Approach: don’t know if all people fit on developed trait scales; instead, try to group them by ‘types’ characterized by shared patterns of traits.
Single-trait approach Authoritarianism – basis for racial prejudice and fascism; historically affect society • Fromm: after WW2, wondered how people could have morally survived Nazi Germany. To deal with the freedom of choosing with no repercussions, they turned their will over to an authority so they could say they were ‘just taking orders’, and subsequently enjoyed giving them to people below them in the hierarchy personalities described as ‘authoritarian characters’. • Berkley Group came up with an anti-Semitism scale, ethnocentrism (prejudice) scale and political conservative scale called the California F scale o Found that there are genuine conservatives and pseudoconservatives which are authoritarians o Pseudoconservatives display contradictions between their traditional values and their acceptance of destructive attitudes/radical ideas o F Scale measure the traits of authoritarianism o RWA Scale: updated Right Wing Authoritarianism scale, by Canadian Bob Altemyer. Made up of three clusters of attitudes and behaviours: Authoritarian Submission: tendency to be obedient and submissive to established leaders (government, church, etc). Authoritarian Aggression: tendency to act with aggressive hostility towards anybody who might be marginalized (societal deviants, for example) Conventionalism: tendency to follow traditions and social norms endorsed by society and people in power • High in authoritarianism? Less empathy, uncooperative playing games, more likely to obey an authority figures commands no matter what (Milgram), oppose transsexuality, favour military interventions, and watch TV
•
Two important points: a) individual-difference construct, can’t explain Holocaust, but tries to determine which individuals would be predisposed to participate/support, and b) demonstrates how a trait can help explain a complex social phenomenon
“Integrity” and Conscientiousness – predicting productive employees – integrity tests (formal personality tests given to interviewees: general qualities measured by these tests are traits emotional stability and agreeableness: better than ability tests in many ways) • conscientiousness might not only be a good predictor of job performance, but also a cause of excellence (the ‘motivation’ component that separates good employees/students from bad) o Conscientousness tests are unbiased They correlate with academic success (more years in school, could be a marker variable, or signal of conscientiousness) and health Self-monitoring o High self monitors adjust behaviour according to situation, low self monitors do the opposite High: dramatic, emotional, humourous, verbally fluent, social poise Low: distrustful, perfectionist, independent, introspective, feel victimized o Positives and negatives to both: depends what you value o High and low self monitors usually have personality traits consistent with their nature o Factor analysis says high is really broken into three (extraversion, acting ability, and ‘other directedness’) changed the scale to 18 questions, it’s better now Many Trait Approach • California Q set – list of hundred traits/phrases printed on separate cards – not characteristic of the person to highly characteristic, 9 categories to cover this range – forced peaked/normal distribution • Can be S or I data; judge must determine what is important within a person, not across a range of people Delay of gratification: males are less prone to delay gratification • Many aspects of personality remain consistent across rapid development that occurs in childhood (girls and boys who are playful, reflective and reasonable and not emotionally unstable are likely to manifest the most delay) • Girls who delay are more competent, intelligent, attentive and resourceful (not seen in boys) • Boys who most delay are shy, quiet, compliant and anxious • Ego control (self-control or inhibition) and ego resiliency (healthy psychological adjustment) – those who delayed had high ego control and girls had high ego resiliency – boys not taught to value self-control and delay Drug Abuse: restless, fidgety, emotionally unstable, disobedient, nervous, domineering, immature, aggressive, teasing and susceptible to stress children have a tendency to abuse drugs – should be dealing with susceptibility to stress that leads to drug abuse
Depression: girls shy and reserved, over-socialized, self-punishing, and over-controlled at 7 years old were depressed at 18 years old – boys were unsocialized, aggressive and undercontrolled demonstrates how society’s teachings to each gender (girls: stay within limits, and boys: control is not important) Political Orientation: conservatives and liberals can be identified early by Q-sort • those that grew up to be Conservatives were at 3 or 4 tending to feel anxious in new environments, guilty, unable to handle stress well • those that grew up to be Liberals resourceful, self-reliant, independent, and confident o Logical! Essential-Trait Approach • Henry Murray came up with a list of 20 needs •
Jack Block: two essential characteristics, ego resiliency (psychological adjustment) and ego control (impulse control)based on Freudian concept that people continuously experience needs and impulses (Overcontrolled [high in ego-control] vs. undercontrolled [low in ego-control])
•
Eysenck came up with a Five Factor model
•
Tellegen came up with three superfactors (MPQ: positive emotionality, negative emotionality and constraint)
•
Cattell came up with ideas for S, I, L, and B data a 16 factor model (overextraction maybe)
Lexical Hypothesis: Important aspects of human life are labelled and highly important ones are labelled with multiple words •
Five Factors were taken from a search of the English language for personality words and developed into the Big 5 integration of Eysenck’s, Tellegen’s, and Cattell’s systems
•
The Big 5 – neuroticism, extraversion, openness (or intellect), agreeableness and conscientiousness (OCEAN) – traits are orthogonal – getting a high or low score on any one of these traits implies nothing about the chances of scoring high or low on another
•
Sometimes referred to as Roman numbers because titles are overly-simplified to encompass so many traits
Extraversion: associated with more happiness, optimism, success in relationships, jobs, and leadership
Neuroticism: ineffective means for dealing with stress, stronger negative reactions, sensitive to emotional threats, unhappy, sick
Agreeableness: conformability, level of socialization, love: more friends!
Openness to Experience (Intellect): creative, open-mimded, liberal,
o The Big 5 have been shown to exist in other culture’s languages o Some correlate with each other sometimes (issue) o Some people believe that the Big 5 should be expanded to 6 and include honesthumility
Chapter 9 – The Inheritance of Personality: Behavioural Genetics
•
Behavioural Genetics attempts to explain how individual differences in behaviour are passed from parent to child, and are shared by biological relatives o Personality Trait: a pattern of behaviour relevant to more than one situation.
•
Evolutionary Psychology attempts to explain how patterns of behaviour of humans are survival mechanisms
•
Behavioural genetics is controversial because it is associated with things like eugenics (selective breeding) and cloningunlikely though, because of identical combination needed of experience and genetics
Calculating Heritabilities o What is the degree to which variation in phenotype can be attributed to variation in genotype? o Behavioural genetics focuses on the 1% of unique genome for each person
r −r × 2 heritability coefficient (twins): ( MZ DZ )
ex. = 0.4 then phenotypic variance that can be explained by genetic variance is 40%
Family studies suggest 0.2, or 20% of variance explained by genetic variance
Effects of genes are interactive and multiplicative rather than additive: DZ twins’ similarity in genetic expression may be less than 50% - they share 25% of the 2-way interaction between genes, therefore 0.2 makes more sense
What Heritabilities Tell You o genes matter (jokes first law: everything is heritable, Erik Turkheimer) o Insight into etiology: whether specific behavioural or mental disorders are part of the normal range of heritability or are pathologically distinctive (inheritance of moderate retardation, but environment for severe; mainly moderate is good, severe end is bad) o Insight into effects of the environment: early environment effects: growing up together in the same home does not tend to make children similar to each other – adoptive siblings 0.05 correlation – non-shared environment important
•
Judith Rich Harris – family and shared environments don’t matter (radical and controversial) o There have been tons of studies looking at family influence; there could be confounding in that genes that parents gave children caused them to be a certain way, not the parent-child relationship itself. However, it is hard to believe that parents have no effect on their kids!
When parents are taught how to be good parents, their kids turn out better, and it is a child-specific skill and therefore wouldn’t show up in analyses of shared effect
o Could be influenced by the fact that family environments of adoptive families are often very similar because of social service agencies, and families of the same culture lead to an underestimate the family environment effect o Additionally love styles, juvenile delinquency and aggression found to be affected by shared family environment o Family studies show insight into personality when observational (B) data is used as opposed to S data from questionnaires because when self reporting people focus on differences between the family members o In the end child rearing, family environment and social class do affect personality Nature vs. Nurture •
The lower the variation there is on a trait, the lower heritability is likely to be
•
If a given trait has a high heritability, two things: a) may vary greatly across individuals or it might be largely determined by genes
•
Likewise, a low heritability trait may vary less across individuals, or it might depend less on genes
How Genes Affect Personality •
Association method: molecular geneticists try to determine whether differences in a trait are correlated with differences in particular gene across individuals o Thought they found a homosexual gene o ie. Sensation seeking and DRD₄, ADHD and sensation seeking o Serotonin allele lengths: short tends to be neurotic o Many different genes interact for behaviour
•
Gene-Environment Interactions o Genes are just a blueprint (can’t live in a blueprint of a house) o Basic Principle: genes can influence behaviour of people who live in some kind of environment; no environment no person and vice versa: these factors interact o Environment can affect heritability itself through interactions
E.g.: adequate nutrition and height
o As environment or genes stay constant then theoretically the other will contribute more to variation o Genes can affect how individual is treated in environment leading to effects on personality o People also choose their environment (based on genes) leading to effects on their personality o The most important effect of the environment is that the same environment can affect different individuals in different ways
Stressful environment and predisposed person; the genotype is important, but only for people who have experienced a certain kind of environment
•
Epigenetics: the influence of environment, particularly early in development, determines whether a gene is turned on/off
•
Interactions doesn’t even encompass it all; genes can change environments, and vice versa
•
Behavioural genetics should not be viewed negatively because it does not state that personality can’t be changed, it simply shows how genetics can put people at risk for certain negative outcomes and how they can be avoided.
•
If we understand an individual’s biological predispositions, help them find an environment where her personality and abilities lead to good outcomes, not bad
•
Future studies: o Explain how genes create brain structures and aspects of physiology that are important to personality o Explain how a person’s genetically determined tendencies interact with the environment to determine behaviour
o So far though, it has been proven that personality is inherited to an important degree!
Chapter 19 •
We must limit ourselves to a certain personality perspective because we cannot account for everything at once without hopeless confusion
•
Each approach to personality focuses on a limited number of key concerns and ignores everything else
•
Each approach is right in some situations and wrong in others o Approaches can be evaluated on the amount to which they are useable o No single approach accounts for everything – this is good because it keeps us open-minded to new approaches and alternatives, and one could never account for everything
•
How to Choose an Approach o Choose approaches which help understand the topic of interest o Choose approaches which appeal to you
•
Why Should You Understand Alternative Approaches? 1) Avoid arrogance 2) Understand the proper basis and value of evaluating alternative approaches 3) You will have a way of dealing with those psychological phenomena you will run across that do not fit into your approach 4) Give yourself the chance to change your mind later 5) At some point integrate some of the different approaches
•
Cross-Situational Consistency and Aggregation o People remain who they are regardless of the situation. This means that on the general people stay the same but still can be different from individual situation to situation.
•
Biological Roots of Personality o
They exist
o Is very complex and full of interactions which do not make things simple and additive •
The Unconscious Mind, free will and responsibility are highly important
•
The Nature of Happiness is seeking out and achieving meaningful challenges and growth
•
Peoples behaviours can change and this can change the environment they are in
•
The study of culture in psychology is beginning to reveal similarities and differences between and within cultures
•
Construals are instrumental into understanding a person o Your experiences, biology, needs, ambitions and perceptions give you an image of reality and then you decide what to do.
•
There is a fine line between normal and abnormal personality o Most people have abnormal characteristics but overall are “normal”
•
Personality psychology attempts to turn our observations of ourselves and each other into a mutual understanding
Psychologists who follow the trait approach begin with ordinary language and common sense
•
Approach is based on correlational empirical research and focuses exclusively on individual differences (no absolute judgement, only relative) o However it does miss on things like what are common to all people and what makes them unique o Trait aspect focuses exclusively on individual differences; does not attempt to measure how ___ anyone is in an absolute senses
•
Every person is like everyone else, like some other people and like no one else.
•
Trait weakness: only look at the middle, don’t look at how we are as humans all the same or all unique
•
People are inconsistent – there are always exceptions to a general rule for someone’s behaviour – depends on rules of a situation and who is there – people do have consistent patterns of behaviour
•
Person-situation debate – Mischel triggered o behaviour was too inconsistent from one situation to the next to allow individual differences to be characterized accurately in terms of broad personality traits o Do people have consistent patterns of behaviour or is it dependent on each situation? o Are common, ordinary intuitions about people fundamentally flawed, or basically correct? o Why are psychologists still debating this topic?
The Situationist Argument o there is an upper limit to predicting what a person will do based on measurement of their personality, and this limit is quite low o situations are more important than personality traits in determining behaviour (Situationism) o Personality assessment is waste of time, intuitions about people are flawed: we think people are way more consistent than they are
•
The Situationists also believe that if traits are useful then you should be able to predict their behaviour o However you cannot predict someone’s behaviour with very much accuracy – took self-descriptions of personality and direct measures of behaviour from lab – correlations seldom exceeded .30 (this was later bumped up by Richard Nisbett to 0.40)
•
The response to this was that the situationist argument was based on too short of a literature review of poor studies in personality, that personality psychologists can do a better job at conducting their research and .40 is not a small correlation (absolute and relative comparison; 70% accuracy instead of 50% isn’t bad). o To improve, the lit review should include studies in natural settings and studies with assessment of high and low self-monitoring behaviour, and focus on general trends of behaviour o Psychologists should move the studies out of the lab more often: measure behaviour in real life o Moderator variables could be used to identify people that might be more consistent than others – high self-monitors (change quickly in situations), low self-monitors are the opposite. (check variance in behaviour) o Different behaviours are more consistent by nature – ie. Goal-directed (unique) vs. expressive gestures (don’t change) o Psychologists need to focus on general trends, rather than single actions.
•
Situationism – situations determine behaviour – though they rarely measured situational variables in the studies; used a lot of subtraction
•
Power of Situation – can have an all or none effect that is unpredictable o Measured in social psych experiments, traditionally randomly assign/expose people to 2 or more different conditions such as changing a subject’s attitude by the influence of monetary incentives
But how large is this effect?
o Three important situational experiments were analyzed to see the effect size
Experiments with attitudes and cognitive dissonance dealing with forced compliance and monetary intervention (change beliefs vs. pay off feelings)
Bystander Intervention ( in a hurry) Experiments
Milgram “electric shock” experiments
o Effect size was determined to be roughly the same as the personality trait correlation (0.40); situation and personality/traits appear to have equal effect
•
Situationists also argue that people’s perceptions of one another are largely erroneous; but our intuition says otherwise. Why are there so many personality words that are useful in the everyday world? (Number of descriptive words for something ~ importance)
•
What is the point of all this personality talk anyways if it’s so debated and unclear? o Useful because it affects life outcomes and how people go about things: people care about the most important things in their life o Is present throughout lifetherefore affects tons of outcomes! Institutional success, happiness, etc.
•
Personality Traits are better for describing how people will act in general
•
Situational Variables are relevant to how people will act under specific circumstances o Examples that support these are relationships and jobs, each is different but has aspects of similar behaviour o Personality variables are important as they comprise the psychological aspect of a person that stays with her throughout her life from one job and relationship to the next ones long-run effect mainly
•
Interactionism: persons and situations constantly interact with each other to produce behaviour together o The effect of a personality variable may depend on the situation, or vice versa (caffeine and extroverts/introverts: when combined they have an effect) o Situations are not randomly populated: people choose, or find themselves in, an environment that matches their personality o People change situations abruptly by what they do in them (e.g. swing the first punch) Stanford prisoner experiment
•
People like the situationist side (absolves responsibility), but personality explains ‘one size doesn’t fit all’ and that people are not powerless to overcome situationslife debate!
•
The situationist and personality sides both have pros & cons
•
In the end the person-situation debate was resolved with that people are different from each other and that these differences do mater.
Chapter 7 – Using Personality Traits to Understand Behaviour (212-252) •
Traits exist: we should measure in order to a) predict and b) understand behaviour
•
Two assumptions: best way to test accuracy of a psychological understanding is to try to predict behaviours, and if you can predict which traits cause which behaviours, insights can be made as to why o Single Trait Approach: examines single highly important personality traits (What do people like that do?) o Many Trait Approach: examines highly important behaviours to figure out which traits caused them o Essential Trait Approach: which traits are most important o Typological Approach: don’t know if all people fit on developed trait scales; instead, try to group them by ‘types’ characterized by shared patterns of traits.
Single-trait approach Authoritarianism – basis for racial prejudice and fascism; historically affect society • Fromm: after WW2, wondered how people could have morally survived Nazi Germany. To deal with the freedom of choosing with no repercussions, they turned their will over to an authority so they could say they were ‘just taking orders’, and subsequently enjoyed giving them to people below them in the hierarchy personalities described as ‘authoritarian characters’. • Berkley Group came up with an anti-Semitism scale, ethnocentrism (prejudice) scale and political conservative scale called the California F scale o Found that there are genuine conservatives and pseudoconservatives which are authoritarians o Pseudoconservatives display contradictions between their traditional values and their acceptance of destructive attitudes/radical ideas o F Scale measure the traits of authoritarianism o RWA Scale: updated Right Wing Authoritarianism scale, by Canadian Bob Altemyer. Made up of three clusters of attitudes and behaviours: Authoritarian Submission: tendency to be obedient and submissive to established leaders (government, church, etc). Authoritarian Aggression: tendency to act with aggressive hostility towards anybody who might be marginalized (societal deviants, for example) Conventionalism: tendency to follow traditions and social norms endorsed by society and people in power • High in authoritarianism? Less empathy, uncooperative playing games, more likely to obey an authority figures commands no matter what (Milgram), oppose transsexuality, favour military interventions, and watch TV
•
Two important points: a) individual-difference construct, can’t explain Holocaust, but tries to determine which individuals would be predisposed to participate/support, and b) demonstrates how a trait can help explain a complex social phenomenon
“Integrity” and Conscientiousness – predicting productive employees – integrity tests (formal personality tests given to interviewees: general qualities measured by these tests are traits emotional stability and agreeableness: better than ability tests in many ways) • conscientiousness might not only be a good predictor of job performance, but also a cause of excellence (the ‘motivation’ component that separates good employees/students from bad) o Conscientousness tests are unbiased They correlate with academic success (more years in school, could be a marker variable, or signal of conscientiousness) and health Self-monitoring o High self monitors adjust behaviour according to situation, low self monitors do the opposite High: dramatic, emotional, humourous, verbally fluent, social poise Low: distrustful, perfectionist, independent, introspective, feel victimized o Positives and negatives to both: depends what you value o High and low self monitors usually have personality traits consistent with their nature o Factor analysis says high is really broken into three (extraversion, acting ability, and ‘other directedness’) changed the scale to 18 questions, it’s better now Many Trait Approach • California Q set – list of hundred traits/phrases printed on separate cards – not characteristic of the person to highly characteristic, 9 categories to cover this range – forced peaked/normal distribution • Can be S or I data; judge must determine what is important within a person, not across a range of people Delay of gratification: males are less prone to delay gratification • Many aspects of personality remain consistent across rapid development that occurs in childhood (girls and boys who are playful, reflective and reasonable and not emotionally unstable are likely to manifest the most delay) • Girls who delay are more competent, intelligent, attentive and resourceful (not seen in boys) • Boys who most delay are shy, quiet, compliant and anxious • Ego control (self-control or inhibition) and ego resiliency (healthy psychological adjustment) – those who delayed had high ego control and girls had high ego resiliency – boys not taught to value self-control and delay Drug Abuse: restless, fidgety, emotionally unstable, disobedient, nervous, domineering, immature, aggressive, teasing and susceptible to stress children have a tendency to abuse drugs – should be dealing with susceptibility to stress that leads to drug abuse
Depression: girls shy and reserved, over-socialized, self-punishing, and over-controlled at 7 years old were depressed at 18 years old – boys were unsocialized, aggressive and undercontrolled demonstrates how society’s teachings to each gender (girls: stay within limits, and boys: control is not important) Political Orientation: conservatives and liberals can be identified early by Q-sort • those that grew up to be Conservatives were at 3 or 4 tending to feel anxious in new environments, guilty, unable to handle stress well • those that grew up to be Liberals resourceful, self-reliant, independent, and confident o Logical! Essential-Trait Approach • Henry Murray came up with a list of 20 needs •
Jack Block: two essential characteristics, ego resiliency (psychological adjustment) and ego control (impulse control)based on Freudian concept that people continuously experience needs and impulses (Overcontrolled [high in ego-control] vs. undercontrolled [low in ego-control])
•
Eysenck came up with a Five Factor model
•
Tellegen came up with three superfactors (MPQ: positive emotionality, negative emotionality and constraint)
•
Cattell came up with ideas for S, I, L, and B data a 16 factor model (overextraction maybe)
Lexical Hypothesis: Important aspects of human life are labelled and highly important ones are labelled with multiple words •
Five Factors were taken from a search of the English language for personality words and developed into the Big 5 integration of Eysenck’s, Tellegen’s, and Cattell’s systems
•
The Big 5 – neuroticism, extraversion, openness (or intellect), agreeableness and conscientiousness (OCEAN) – traits are orthogonal – getting a high or low score on any one of these traits implies nothing about the chances of scoring high or low on another
•
Sometimes referred to as Roman numbers because titles are overly-simplified to encompass so many traits
Extraversion: associated with more happiness, optimism, success in relationships, jobs, and leadership
Neuroticism: ineffective means for dealing with stress, stronger negative reactions, sensitive to emotional threats, unhappy, sick
Agreeableness: conformability, level of socialization, love: more friends!
Openness to Experience (Intellect): creative, open-mimded, liberal,
o The Big 5 have been shown to exist in other culture’s languages o Some correlate with each other sometimes (issue) o Some people believe that the Big 5 should be expanded to 6 and include honesthumility
Chapter 9 – The Inheritance of Personality: Behavioural Genetics
•
Behavioural Genetics attempts to explain how individual differences in behaviour are passed from parent to child, and are shared by biological relatives o Personality Trait: a pattern of behaviour relevant to more than one situation.
•
Evolutionary Psychology attempts to explain how patterns of behaviour of humans are survival mechanisms
•
Behavioural genetics is controversial because it is associated with things like eugenics (selective breeding) and cloningunlikely though, because of identical combination needed of experience and genetics
Calculating Heritabilities o What is the degree to which variation in phenotype can be attributed to variation in genotype? o Behavioural genetics focuses on the 1% of unique genome for each person
r −r × 2 heritability coefficient (twins): ( MZ DZ )
ex. = 0.4 then phenotypic variance that can be explained by genetic variance is 40%
Family studies suggest 0.2, or 20% of variance explained by genetic variance
Effects of genes are interactive and multiplicative rather than additive: DZ twins’ similarity in genetic expression may be less than 50% - they share 25% of the 2-way interaction between genes, therefore 0.2 makes more sense
What Heritabilities Tell You o genes matter (jokes first law: everything is heritable, Erik Turkheimer) o Insight into etiology: whether specific behavioural or mental disorders are part of the normal range of heritability or are pathologically distinctive (inheritance of moderate retardation, but environment for severe; mainly moderate is good, severe end is bad) o Insight into effects of the environment: early environment effects: growing up together in the same home does not tend to make children similar to each other – adoptive siblings 0.05 correlation – non-shared environment important
•
Judith Rich Harris – family and shared environments don’t matter (radical and controversial) o There have been tons of studies looking at family influence; there could be confounding in that genes that parents gave children caused them to be a certain way, not the parent-child relationship itself. However, it is hard to believe that parents have no effect on their kids!
When parents are taught how to be good parents, their kids turn out better, and it is a child-specific skill and therefore wouldn’t show up in analyses of shared effect
o Could be influenced by the fact that family environments of adoptive families are often very similar because of social service agencies, and families of the same culture lead to an underestimate the family environment effect o Additionally love styles, juvenile delinquency and aggression found to be affected by shared family environment o Family studies show insight into personality when observational (B) data is used as opposed to S data from questionnaires because when self reporting people focus on differences between the family members o In the end child rearing, family environment and social class do affect personality Nature vs. Nurture •
The lower the variation there is on a trait, the lower heritability is likely to be
•
If a given trait has a high heritability, two things: a) may vary greatly across individuals or it might be largely determined by genes
•
Likewise, a low heritability trait may vary less across individuals, or it might depend less on genes
How Genes Affect Personality •
Association method: molecular geneticists try to determine whether differences in a trait are correlated with differences in particular gene across individuals o Thought they found a homosexual gene o ie. Sensation seeking and DRD₄, ADHD and sensation seeking o Serotonin allele lengths: short tends to be neurotic o Many different genes interact for behaviour
•
Gene-Environment Interactions o Genes are just a blueprint (can’t live in a blueprint of a house) o Basic Principle: genes can influence behaviour of people who live in some kind of environment; no environment no person and vice versa: these factors interact o Environment can affect heritability itself through interactions
E.g.: adequate nutrition and height
o As environment or genes stay constant then theoretically the other will contribute more to variation o Genes can affect how individual is treated in environment leading to effects on personality o People also choose their environment (based on genes) leading to effects on their personality o The most important effect of the environment is that the same environment can affect different individuals in different ways
Stressful environment and predisposed person; the genotype is important, but only for people who have experienced a certain kind of environment
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Epigenetics: the influence of environment, particularly early in development, determines whether a gene is turned on/off
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Interactions doesn’t even encompass it all; genes can change environments, and vice versa
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Behavioural genetics should not be viewed negatively because it does not state that personality can’t be changed, it simply shows how genetics can put people at risk for certain negative outcomes and how they can be avoided.
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If we understand an individual’s biological predispositions, help them find an environment where her personality and abilities lead to good outcomes, not bad
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Future studies: o Explain how genes create brain structures and aspects of physiology that are important to personality o Explain how a person’s genetically determined tendencies interact with the environment to determine behaviour
o So far though, it has been proven that personality is inherited to an important degree!
Chapter 19 •
We must limit ourselves to a certain personality perspective because we cannot account for everything at once without hopeless confusion
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Each approach to personality focuses on a limited number of key concerns and ignores everything else
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Each approach is right in some situations and wrong in others o Approaches can be evaluated on the amount to which they are useable o No single approach accounts for everything – this is good because it keeps us open-minded to new approaches and alternatives, and one could never account for everything
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How to Choose an Approach o Choose approaches which help understand the topic of interest o Choose approaches which appeal to you
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Why Should You Understand Alternative Approaches? 1) Avoid arrogance 2) Understand the proper basis and value of evaluating alternative approaches 3) You will have a way of dealing with those psychological phenomena you will run across that do not fit into your approach 4) Give yourself the chance to change your mind later 5) At some point integrate some of the different approaches
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Cross-Situational Consistency and Aggregation o People remain who they are regardless of the situation. This means that on the general people stay the same but still can be different from individual situation to situation.
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Biological Roots of Personality o
They exist
o Is very complex and full of interactions which do not make things simple and additive •
The Unconscious Mind, free will and responsibility are highly important
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The Nature of Happiness is seeking out and achieving meaningful challenges and growth
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Peoples behaviours can change and this can change the environment they are in
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The study of culture in psychology is beginning to reveal similarities and differences between and within cultures
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Construals are instrumental into understanding a person o Your experiences, biology, needs, ambitions and perceptions give you an image of reality and then you decide what to do.
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There is a fine line between normal and abnormal personality o Most people have abnormal characteristics but overall are “normal”
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Personality psychology attempts to turn our observations of ourselves and each other into a mutual understanding
