Are personality traits important? - People

Jean-Paul Sartre, “No Exit”
• Three characters wait endlessly in a drawing room,
each seeking self-definition from one another
“So this is hell. I'd never have
believed it. You remember all
we were told about the
torture-chambers, the fire
and brimstone, the "burning
marl." Old wive's tales! There's
no need for red-hot pokers.

“... Hell is other
people”
--Jean Paul Sartre

Surviving the Social World
• In Units One & Two, we discussed the how
people survive the non-social world
• In Unit Three, we will discuss four
processes for surviving the social world:
• Becoming a unique individual
• Thinking about other people
• Interacting with other people
• Self-Knowledge

Questions to Address
• Becoming a person–Personality Development
• What is personality?
• Do we need one?
• Where does it come from?
• How does it (and doesn’t it) change over time?

Questions to Address
• Understanding others--Social Cognition
• How do we develop an understanding of others’
minds?
• How do we make attributions about others from their
behavior?
• Dealing with others--Social Behavior
• How do we change in the ways that we deal with
others?
• How does our concern for others’ judgments affect our
actions?
• Knowing yourself--Self-Esteem
• Nature of self-esteem
• Is self-esteem important?

Personality
Honors Psychology

Exercise
1. Describe a friend’s personality
2. What good are these characteristics?

Personality
Personality refers to a person’s general manner of
interacting with the world, especially with other
people.
whether one is vulnerable or hardy,
sociable or reserved,
imaginative or unimaginative,
cooperative or uncooperative,
reliable or undependable.

Personality
Personality traits refer to enduring individual
differences in the tendency to behave, think, and feel
in certain consistent (that is, cross-situational) ways.
For example, a professor may be late to class one day-there’s
nothing to say about her personality from that
specific behavior.

Personality
BUT
when she’s late nearly every day,
for all the courses she teaches,
and late for most events,
late in paying her bills,
late in returning phone calls,
then we might describe her as tardy (a surface trait).

Personality
• If we learn further that
• she is sloppy in most of her work
• careless in many other activities,
• makes promises she never keeps
• unreliable in other ways,
• gives up easily on all sorts of tasks
• can never decide what she wants to do next on all
sorts of activities, then
• we describe her as undirected (a central trait).

Is this fair?
“Aren’t we just labeling people?”
“Isn’t all this subjective?”
“Isn’t it bad to judge people?”
It depends
Are personality traits real?
Do personality traits affect behavior?

Are central traits
REAL?

Are personality traits real?
Kenrick & Funder (1988) found
observers agree to a substantial degree in the traits they
assign to other people
observers don’t just agree about which alleged traits go
with which, but also about to whom these traits apply
observers reliably differentiate people even on relatively
common traits
observers increasingly agree with each other the longer
they have known the person and these ratings
increasingly correlate with the person’s actual behavior
observers’ ratings are just as reliable whether they know
one another or are strangers.

Personality Traits
Are personality traits reliable?
Costa & McCrae (1994) found that
even when personality tests are administered 30 to 40
years apart, they still correlate between +.50 and +.70.

Are central traits
IMPORTANT?

Are personality traits
important?
Personality traits cross-cut other ways of
categorizing people.
For example, men differ more among themselves in
curiosity than they differ from women, and women
differ more among themselves in curiosity than they
differ from men.
All groups are made up of people who are extremely
curious and people who wouldn’t care if you told
them that the moon is made of green cheese.

Are personality traits
important?
Personality traits cross-cut situations.
That is, people behave similarly across many different
situations.
Even when situation differences in behavior are large
(for example, how you act in a bar vs. Thanksgiving
dinner), personality differences are just as large.

Are personality traits
important?
Personality traits are important for surviving in the real
world
Productiveness: Barrick & Mount (1991) found that
personality differences account for job performance
differences even beyond IQ differences.

Are personality traits
important?
Personality traits are important for surviving in the real
world
Romance: Buss (1996) found that conscientious spouses
were less likely to have affairs than undirected spouses, and
antagonistic spouses were more likely to become aggressive
toward sexual rivals than agreeable spouses.

Are personality traits
important?
Personality traits are important for surviving in the real
world
Health: Friedman et al. (1995) found that personality
differences are related to risk- and health-promoting
behaviors.
Finding Criminals: Caspi et al (1994) found that the same
personality differences are related to delinquency in different
countries, different generations, and different races.

So what are these
central traits?

Early Trait Theories
Extraverted
Introverted
Emotionally
Unstable
(Neurotic)
Emotionally
Stable
Moody
Anxious
Rigid
Sober
Pessimistic
Reserved
Unsociable
Quiet
Passive
Careful
Thoughtful
Peaceful
Controlled
Reliable
Even-tempered
Calm
Touchy
Restless
Aggressive
Excitable
Changeable
Impulsive
Optimistic
Active
Sociable
Outgoing
Talkative
Responsive
Easygoing
Lively
Carefree
Leadership
Introverted-
Stable
Introverted-
Neurotic
Extraverted-
Stable
Extraverted-
Neurotic

The Big Five
Openness to experience-nonopenness
Conscientiousness-undirectedness
Extroversion-introversion
Agreeableness-antagonism
Neuroticism-stability

Where do our
personalities come
from?

The Origin of Personality
In adults, personality differences show up most
clearly in situations that are
novel
ambiguous
stressful
involve life transitions.
In these situations, “the reticent become withdrawn,
the irritable become aggressive, and the capable
take charge.”
Examples: early puberty in girls, going to college, and
losing a job

The Origin of Personality
Infants also differ in how they react to novel, ambiguous,
and stressful situations.
Reactions often correlate with many of the same outcomes
predicted by personality factors:
infants’ negative reactions to novelty, for example, predicted
their internalization of negative events (“This bad thing
happened because I’m just bad”) in middle childhood;
infants’ negative emotionality predicted their internalization
and “acting out” in middle childhood.

The Origin of Personality
Researchers are now attempting to link temperament
differences in infancy with personality traits:
Activity (energy level) seems to be positively related to
extraversion and negatively related to agreeableness and
conscientiousness.
Inhibition (fearfulness, shyness, withdrawal) seems to be
positively related to neuroticism and negatively related to
extraversion.
Persistence (attention span, distractibility, interest) seems to
be positively related to agreeableness, conscientiousness,
and openness to experience.

The more personality changes...
How our personalities change:
Between the late teens and 30 years old, people
typically become
less neurotic,
less extroverted,
more conscientious, and
more agreeable.

...the more it stays the same.
How we stay the same:
Example--Fear of new people
Infants who are more frightened by new people
and situations remain so in middle childhood
and adolescence.
Fear of new people and situations in middle
childhood were correlated with the likelihood of
living with one’s parents in young adulthood.

Temperament & Personality
Temperamental differences don’t act alone to create
personalities.
People interpret and react to different temperaments
differently, often in accordance with who the child is in
the family and what sex the child is.

Family Roles
Sibling rivalry: Finding a niche
Split-parent identification is stronger among sibs raised
together and stronger in same-sex sibs
First borns dominate and care for their younger sibs, and
they also have a greater interest in preserving the status
quo.
Compared to later borns, first borns are
less open to new experiences but more responsible,
achievement-oriented, and organized than later-borns;
less agreeable, more jealous, more fearful, more
assertive, more dominant, and less sociable.

Gender Differences
Infants are already being treated in gender-specific ways
according to their sex
Fathers describe girl newborns as soft, small, and beautiful, boy
newborns as firm, strong, an d well coordinated.
Mothers who were asked to hold an infant (variously dressed as a girl
named “Beth” and as a boy named “Adam”) talked more to Beth than
Adam, and gave Adam more direct gazes unaccompanied by talk.
Later, adults give aid and comfort to girls while expecting boys
to be self-reliant.
For example, college students were quicker to call for help if the
crying infant was a girl rather than a boy.
When two-year-olds were given a problem-solving task, mothers
were more likely to aid their daughters than their sons.
Children themselves actively promote sex-segregated play,
especially for boys.

Identity & Adolescence
• Trading Parents?
• In the transition to adulthood,
• Adolescents demonstrate more emotional autonomy from
parents: they feel more independent and idealize them less.
• Adolescents demonstrate less emotional autonomy from their
peers and their resistance to peer pressure plummets from fifth to
eighth grade.
• In both industrial and hunter-gatherer societies, teen males join
their peers in such dangerous behavior as getting in fights,
irresponsible driving or--in hunter-gatherer societies--climbing
trees too fast.
• young men, for example, drive much more recklessly than
otherwise when another young man is the passenger
• young women do not seem to be influenced by young women
passengers.

Is social behavior
determined only by
personality?

Beyond Traits
Social/Cognitive Approach
Humanistic Approach
Psychodynamic Approach

Social-Cognitive Perspective
Based on research on learning, cognition, and social
influence
Focuses on beliefs and habits that increase or decrease
people’s ability to take control of their lives and
accomplish goals

Social-Cognitive Perspective
Locus of Control
proposed by Julian Rotter
belief that rewards either are or are not controllable by
one’s own efforts
may be internal or external

Social-Cognitive Perspective
Self-Efficacy
proposed by Albert Bandura
belief about one’s ability to perform specific tasks
can be high or low

Social Cognition
Beyond Traits
Differences in cognitive processing also play a large role
in personality
E.g., delay of gratification

Delay of Gratification

Delay of gratification
Self-control in 4- to 5-year-old children is highly
correlated with adult competence
• Ability to concentrate
• Verbal fluency
General competence
•
• Foresight
•
•
•
Gets rattled/immaturity under stress
Low self-esteem
Slow to make social contacts

Humanistic Perspective
Focuses on the human tendency to create belief
systems and to govern our lives in accordance with
these beliefs
Phenomenological reality - one’s conscious
understanding of his/her world

Humanistic Perspective
Carl Rogers’s person-centered approach
self-concept is central to personality
conditional positive regard - love and praise is withheld
unless one conforms to others’ expectations
unconditional positive regard - accepting a person
regardless of who they are or what they do

Humanistic Perspective
Abraham Maslow
hierarchy of needs
self-actualization - the
realization of one’s
dreams and capabilities

Psychoanalytic Approach
Developed by Sigmund Freud
Psychoanalysis is both an
approach to therapy and a
theory of personality
Emphasizes unconscious
motivation - the main causes of
behavior lie buried in the
unconscious mind

Rational,
planful,
mediating
dimension
of personality
Moralistic,
judgmental,
perfectionist
dimension of
personality
Irrational,
illogical,
impulsive
dimension of
personality
Psychoanalytic Approach
Ego
Id
Conscious
Superego Preconscious
Unconscious
Information
in your
immediate
awareness
Information
which can
easily be
made
conscious
Thoughts,
feelings,
urges, and other
information
that is difficult
to bring to
conscious
awareness

Divisions of the Mind
Id - instinctual drives present at birth
does not distinguish between reality and fantasy
operates according to the pleasure principle
Ego - develops out of the id in infancy
understands reality and logic
mediator between id and superego
Superego
internalization of society’s moral standards
responsible for guilt

• Conscious - all
things we are
aware of at any
given moment
Psychoanalytic Approach
Ego
Id
Conscious
Superego Preconscious
Unconscious

• Preconscious -
everything that can,
with a little effort, be
brought into
consciousness
Psychoanalytic Approach
Ego
Id
Conscious
Superego Preconscious
Unconscious

• Unconscious -
inaccessible
warehouse of
anxietyproducing
thoughts and
drives
Psychoanalytic Approach
Ego
Id
Conscious
Superego Preconscious
Unconscious

Psychosexual Stages
Freud’s five stages of personality development, each
associated with a particular erogenous zone
Fixation - an attempt to achieve pleasure as an adult in
ways that are equivalent to how it way achieved in
these stages

Oral Stage (birth - 1 year)
Mouth is associated with sexual pleasure
Weaning a child can lead to fixation if not handled
correctly
Fixation can lead to oral activities in adulthood

Anal Stage (1 - 3 years)
Anus is associated with pleasure
Toilet training can lead to fixation if not handled
correctly
Fixation can lead to anal retentive or expulsive
behaviors in adulthood

Phallic Stage (3 - 5 years)
Focus of pleasure shifts to the genitals
Oedipus or Electra complex can occur
Fixation can lead to excessive masculinity in males and
the need for attention or domination in females

Latency Stage (5 - puberty)
Sexuality is repressed
Children participate in hobbies, school and same-sex
friendships

Genital Stage (puberty on)
Sexual feelings re-emerge and are oriented toward
others
Healthy adults find pleasure in love and work, fixated
adults have their energy tied up in earlier stages