Personality

What is Personality?

Personality: The pattern of enduring

characteristics that produce consistency and
individuality in a given person
e.g. easy-going, selfish, kind, bad-tempered, etc.
! Our personalities
are a reflection of
who we are !
Unique, differentiates us
 What is Personality?

Different approaches:
- Psychodynamic
- Trait
- Learning
- Biological and Evolutionary
- Humanistic
 1. Psychodynamic Approaches
to Personality

- Based on the idea that personality is primarily

unconsciousness and motivated by inner forces
and conflicts about which people have little
awareness and over which they have no control
 1. Psychodynamic Approaches
to Personality
• Freud’s followers, Carl Jung, Karen
Horney, and Alfred Adler, refined the
theory and developed their own
theories

• Psychodynamics is the study of psychic

energy and the way that it is
transformed and expressed in behavior.

• Psychodynamic theorists disagree about

the exact nature of this psychic energy
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 Psychodynamic Approaches
to Personality
Freud: “in order to understand personality, it is necessary
to expose what is in the unconscious”
Unconscious: A part of the personality that contains the
memories, knowledge, beliefs, feelings, urges, drives,
and instincts of which the individual is not aware
- Can not be observed directly: slips of the tongue,
fantasies, dreams
 Psychodynamic Approaches
to Personality

• Some of the unconscious is made out of preconscious

– Preconscious: Holds material easily brought to mind

• Deeper in the unconscious are instinctual drives—the

wishes, desires, demands, and needs that are hidden from
conscious awareness because of the conflicts and pain
they would cause if they were part of our everyday lives.
– A safe have for our recollections of threatening events

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Psychodynamic Approaches
to Personality
Personality (its structure) consists
of three components:
- The id
- The ego
- The superego

As the Iceberg analogy shows,

small portion of the personality is
conscious.
 Parts of Personality: Id, Ego, & Superego
The Id
• Raw, unorganized, inborn part of personality
– What we have when we are born
• Kind of like our “animal part” (or child)
• Purpose: Reduce tension created by primitive
drives (sex, hunger, aggression)
• Works on the pleasure principle: reduce
tension, maximize satisfaction
• e.g. The part of you that wants to eat a huge
chocolate cake when you are on a diet
 Parts of Personality: Id, Ego, & Superego
The Ego
• Provides a buffer, balance between the id
and the outside world (and the superego) ID SUPEREGO
– Develops as we interact with the world
• Works on the reality principle: instinctual
energy is restrained to maintain the
individual’s safety and to help integrate the
person into society.
• “Executive” of personality
e.g. The part of you that decides to eat the
cake, but in a smaller amount, and then to
exercise to burn up the calories
 Parts of Personality: Id, Ego, & Superego

The Superego
• Helps control impulses from Id
– Prevents us from behaving in a morally improper
way by making us feel guilty if we do wrong.
• Represents the rights and the wrongs of
society
– Includes conscience
– Learned through parents, teachers, and other
significant individuals
• e.g. The part of you that says you must never
eat cake, it will make you fat!
- Ego must mediate between the demands of the superego
and id
- According to Freud’s Psychodynamic Theory, our ego
constantly struggles to balance the demands of the id and
the commands of the superego
 How Personality Develops:
The Psychosexual Stages
• Individuals encounter conflicts between
the demands of society (represented by the
superego) and their own sexual urges (id)
in all developmental stages of life; and this
process is what shapes our personality
• If this conflicts are not resolved, fixations
occur
Fixations: Psychosexual conflicts that
persist beyond the developmental period in
which they first occur
How Personality Develops:
The Psychosexual Stages
 How Personality Develops:
The Psychosexual Stages
§ Oral stage; the infant’s erotic feelings
center on the mouth, lips, and tongue.
§ Too much oral gratification grow into
overly optimistic and dependent adults;
they are likely to lack confidence and to be
gullible.
§ Too little gratification may turn into
pessimistic and hostile people later in life
who are sarcastic and argumentative.
 How Personality Develops:
The Psychosexual Stages
§ Anal stage; primary source of sexual
pleasure shifts from the mouth to the anus.
§ If parents are too strict in toilet training,
some children throw temper tantrums
and may live in self-destructive ways as
adults.
§ Others are likely to become obstinate,
stingy, and excessively orderly.
§ If parents are too lenient, their children
may become messy, unorganized, and
sloppy.
 How Personality Develops:
The Psychosexual Stages
• Phallic stage; Focus attention on genitals, the
differences between male and female anatomy
become more salient.
– Oedipal conflict: A child’s sexual interest
in his or her opposite-sex parent, typically
resolved through identification with the
same-sex parent
• Male unconsciously begins to develop a
sexual interest in his mother, starts to
see his father as a rival, and harbors a
wish to kill his father—as Oedipus did
in the ancient Greek tragedy.
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 How Personality Develops:
The Psychosexual Stages

• Developing personality: phallic stage

– Oedipal conflict:
• Father as too powerful; he develops a fear that his father
may retaliate drastically by removing the source of the
threat:
– Son’s penis.
• Leads to castration anxiety,
– Becomes so powerful that the child represses his
desires for his mother and identifies with his father

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 How Personality Develops:
The Psychosexual Stages

• Developing personality: phallic stage

– Identification is the process of wanting to be like
another person as much as possible, imitating that
person’s behavior and adopting similar beliefs and
values.
– By identifying with his father, a son seeks to
obtain a woman like his unattainable mother.
• Oedipal conflict is said to be resolved, and Freudian
theory assumes that both males and females move on to
the next stage of development.
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 How Personality Develops:
The Psychosexual Stages

• Developing personality: phallic stage

§ Fixation at this stage leads to vanity and egotism in
adult life, with men boasting of their sexual
prowess and treating women with contempt, and
with women becoming flirtatious and
promiscuous.

§ Phallic fixation may also prompt feelings of low

self-esteem, shyness, and worthlessness.

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 Freud’s Psychoanalytic Theory: Defense
Mechanisms
- Underlying dynamics of personality and its
development are related to anxiety
- arises from the conflict of the id and the
superego, danger signal to the ego
- Neurotic anxiety; irrational impulses
may become uncontrollable

- To reduce anxiety people can use defense

mechanisms
- Unconscious strategies to reduce
anxiety by distorting reality and
concealing the source
- Basically repression; if fails other ones
Freud’s Psychoanalytic Theory: Defense
Mechanisms
 Freud’s Psychoanalytic Theory: Defense
Mechanisms
- All of us use defense mechanisms up to a
degree
- Use them to protect us from unpleasant
info

- If used all the time use a lot of psychic

energy for hiding and rechanneling
unacceptable impulses
- If so, a mental disorder called neurosis
 Evaluating Psychodynamic Approaches
• Limitations:
– Freud has been widely criticized for using
unscientific methods, lacking empirical
evidence/predictions
– Unobservable abstract concepts
– Subjective interpretation of symbolic meaning
– Important personality changes in adolescence and
adulthood
– Unclear in predicting developmental difficulties
– Gender differences (women as inferior, yearning
to be men)-weaker superego
– Limited population (upper-class Austrian women
seeking treatment)
• Important:
– Unconscious processes (memory, thinking,
decision making, goals)
– Defense mechanisms
– Treating mental disorders through psychoanalysis
 The Neo-Freudian Psychoanalysts

• Greater emphasis on ego

since it has more control
than the id
• Focus more on the social
environment
• Minimized the importance
of sex as a driving force
• More attention to society
and culture in personality
development
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 The Neo-Freudian
Psychoanalysts

• Jung rejected Freud’s view of the primary

importance of unconscious sexual urges.
– Primitive urges of the unconscious conceptualized
positively; ego’s source of strength and vitality
• A more general and positive life force that encompasses an
inborn drive motivating creativity and more positive
resolution of conflict
§ Unconscious consists of the personal unconscious
and the collective unconscious.
§ The personal unconscious; our repressed thoughts,
forgotten experiences, and undeveloped ideas, which may
enter consciousness if an incident or a sensation triggers
their recall.
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 The Neo-Freudian Psychoanalysts:
Building on Freud
• Jung’s collective unconscious: Common set of ideas,
feelings, images, and symbols that we inherit from our
relatives, the whole human race, and even animal
ancestors from the past
– Shared by everyone and is displayed in behavior that is common across
diverse cultures—love of mother, belief in supreme being, the fear of
snakes
– Archetypes: Universal symbolic representations of a particular person,
object, or experience, e.g., mother archetype reflects our ancestors’
relations with mother figures
• Play an important role in determining our day-to-day reactions,
attitudes, and values.
• E.g., the popularity of Harry Potter to its use of broad archetypes
of good and evil 13-27
 The Neo-Freudian
Psychoanalysts
• Horney’s neo-freudian perspective
– First feminist psychologist
– Suggested that personality develops in the context of
social relationships
• Particularly the relationship between parents and child
and how well the child’s needs are met
• Rejected Freud’s suggestion that women have penis envy
– What women envy most in men is not their anatomy but the
independence, success, and freedom women often are denied.
– Stressed the importance of cultural factors in the
determination of personality
• Women being ambivalent about success not to make enemies
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 The Neo-Freudian
Psychoanalysts:

• Alfred Adler - Proposed that the primary human

motivation (not sexual needs) is striving for
superiority in a quest for self-improvement and
perfection
• People seek to overcome feelings of inferiority developed
as children that may or may not have a basis in reality.
– Such feelings often spark positive development and
personal growth.
• Inferiority complex: Adults who have not been able to
overcome the feelings of inferiority they developed as
children
– The basis for neurosis
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 Erikson’s Theory of
Psychosocial Development

• Erikson developed one of the more

comprehensive theories of social development.
– Psychosocial development involves changes in our
interactions and understanding of one another as well
as in our knowledge and understanding of ourselves
as members of society.
– Developmental changes occur throughout life as a
series of eight stages
• Four of them occur during childhood
– The passage through each of these stages necessitates
the resolution of a crises or conflict; may not be
resolved entirely but should sufficiently
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Figure 3 - Erikson’s Theory of Psychosocial
Development: The Search for Identity

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 Erikson’s Theory of
Psychosocial Development
Trust-versus-mistrust stage
• Birth to age 1½ years
• Develop feelings of trust or lack of trust
• If physical requirements and psychological needs for attachment
are consistently met and their interactions with the world are
generally positive

Autonomy-versus-shame-and-doubt stage

• 1½ – 3 years of age
• Develop independence and self doubt
• If exploration and freedom are encouraged, or they experience
shame, self-doubt, and unhappiness if they are overly restricted
and protected 12-32
 Erikson’s Theory of Psychosocial
Development
Initiative-versus-guilt stage
• 3 – 6 years of age
• Conflict between independence of action and negative results of
that action
• Individuals of their own right, make decisions about behavior; if
positive reaction from parents initiative

Industry-versus-inferiority stage
• 6 – 12 years of age
• Develop positive social interactions
• Increasing competency in social interactions or academic skills,
characterizes successful psychosocial development; difficulties
feelings of failure and inadequacy
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Social Development: Erikson’s theory
of psychosocial development
• Identity-versus-role-confusion stage; a time of
major testing, try to determine what is unique
– Attempt to discover who they are, what their strengths
are, and what kinds of roles they are best suited to play
for the rest of their lives—their identity.
– Feels pressure to identify what to do with his/her life.
• At a time of major physical changes as well as important
changes in what society expects of them, so can find the period
an especially difficult one.
– Declining reliance on adults for information with a shift
toward using the peer group as a source of social
judgments.
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Social Development: Erikson’s theory
of psychosocial development

• During early adulthood, people enter the

intimacy-versus-isolation stage.
– Focuses on developing close relationships with
others.
– Difficulties; feelings of loneliness and a fear of such
relationships
– Successful resolution; possibility of forming
relationships that are intimate on a physical,
intellectual, and emotional level
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Social Development: Erikson’s theory
of psychosocial development
• Development continues; generativity-versus-
stagnation stage.
– Generativity is the ability to contribute to one’s
family, community, work, and society and to assist
the development of the younger generation.
– Success; feeling positive about the continuity of life
– Difficulties; own activities as trivial

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Social Development: Erikson’s theory
of psychosocial development

• Last stage of psychosocial development; the

ego-integrity-versus-despair stage,
– Spans later adulthood and continues until death.
– Success; a sense of accomplishment
– Difficulties; regret over what might have been
achieved but was not
• Development continues all through life

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Social Development: Erikson’s theory
of psychosocial development

• Criticism; approach anchored in male-oriented

concepts
– Gilligan; women develop identity through the
establishment of relationships
– The construction of caring networks among
themselves and others

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 2. Trait Approaches:
Placing Labels on Personality

Trait Theory: Seeks to identify the basic traits

necessary to describe personality
– Traits: Consistent personality characteristics and
behaviors displayed in different situations
e.g. friendliness,
selfishness
• Trait theorists do not assume that some people
have a trait and others do not
• They propose that all people possess certain
traits but the degree to which a particular trait
applies to a specific person varies and can be
quantified
e.g. Some people are more friendly than others, but
everyone shares the “trait”, that is friendliness
More Friendly

Less Friendly
Allport’s trait theory: Identifying basic
characteristics
Cardinal trait

• Single characteristic that directs most of a person’s activities; e.g.,

power-hungry person may be driven by all-consuming need for
control
• Most people do not develop a single, comprehensive cardinal
trait

Central trait
• Major characteristics of an individual
• possess a handful of central traits that make up the core of
personality
• E.g., honesty and sociability

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Allport’s trait theory: Identifying basic
characteristics

Secondary trait

• Affect behavior in fewer situations

• Less influential than cardinal and central traits
• E.g., reluctance to eat meat, a love of modern art

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 Cattell: Factoring Out Personality
• Factor analysis: Statistical method of identifying
associations among a large number of variables
to reveal more general patterns
– Factors: Combinations of traits
– administer of a questionnaire to many participants
• Asks them to describe themselves by referring to an
extensive list of traits.
– By statistically combining responses and computing
which traits are associated with one another in the
same person,
• Identify the most fundamental patterns or combinations of
traits
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 Cattell: Factoring Out Personality
• Cattell
– Source traits; Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire
(16PF)
– Basic dimensions of personality
• Eysenck (1995) used factor analysis to identify
patterns of personality
– Best be described in terms of just three major
dimensions
– By evaluating people along these three dimensions,
was able to predict behavior accurately in a variety of
situations
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Eysenck: Factoring Out Personality
• Three major dimensions
Extraversion

• Relates to the degree of sociability

Neuroticism

• Encompasses emotional stability

Psychoticism

• Degree to which reality is distorted

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Eysenck : Factoring Out Personality

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The Big Five Personality Factors and
Dimensions of Sample Traits
Big Five Personality Traits

• The big five emerge consistently across a number of

domains
– Factor analysis of major personality traits, checklists of self-
descriptions, inventories, self-report measures by observers
of others’ personality traits
– Emerged consistently in other populations; children, college
students, older adults, speakers of different languages,
cross-cultural studies
• Consensus; the best description of personality traits we
have today.
– Debate; over the specific number and kinds of traits and
even the usefulness of trait approaches in general
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 Evaluating Trait Approaches to Personality
• Advantages
– Provide straightforward explanation of people’s
behavioral consistencies
– Allows for between-people comparisons
– Important influence on the development of several useful
personality measures that are used in clinical,
educational, organizational settings
• Disadvantages
– Validity of trait conceptions of personality is questionable
– Do not provide explanations for behavior, but mere
descriptions
 3. Learning Approaches:
We are What We’ve Learned

Skinner’s Behaviorist Approach

“Personality is a collection of
learned behavior patterns”
e.g. If I am sociable, it is because I have
been reinforced for displaying social
behaviors, i.e., I have been rewarded
by being accepted in a social circle
• Humans are infinitely changeable
through the process of learning new behavior patterns
– Focus is not on inner person so no interest in consistency across
situations
 3. Learning Approaches:
We are What We’ve Learned
Social Cognitive Approaches: Emphasize the influence of a
person’s cognitions as well as observation of others’ behavior,
in determining personality

“Personality develops through repeated observation of others’

behavior” – no need to experience first hand
 Learning Approaches: We are
What We’ve Learned
• Albert Bandura; emphasis on role by self-efficacy
– Belief that we have the personal capabilities to
master a situation and produce positive outcomes
• Underlies people’s faith in their ability to carry out a
specific task or produce a desired result.
• High self-efficacy; higher aspirations and greater
persistence in working to attain goals and ultimately
achieve greater success than those with lower self-efficacy.
• How do we develop self-efficacy?
– By paying closer attention to our previous successes and
failures; if fail, less likely to so it again
– Direct reinforcement and encouragement from others
– https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HnACsrdGZAI
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 Learning Approaches: We are What
We’ve Learned
• How much consistency exists in personality?
– Walter Mischel; different approach to personality
• Personality is variable from one situation to another
• Situationism; particular situations give rise to particular kinds of
behavior
– Some situations influential (i.e., in a movie theater), others permit
variability in behavior (i.e., at a party some eat some dance)
– personality cannot be considered without taking the particular context
of the situation into account
• Cognitive-affective processing system theory (CAPS): People’s
thoughts and emotions about themselves and the world determine
how they view, and then react, in situations
– Prior expectancies in different situations affect behavior

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 3. Learning Approaches:
We are What We’ve Learned

• Self-esteem: The component of personality that encompasses our positive

and negative self-evaluations
• Domain specific; high self-esteem in academic domain but low self-esteem
in sports
 Evaluating Learning Approaches to
Personality
• Advantages
– Helped make personality psychology a scientific
venture
– Produced important, successful means of treating a
variety of psychological disorders

• Disadvantages
– Have a deterministic view of human behavior,
which maintains that behavior is shaped primarily
by forces beyond the individual’s control
 4. Biological and Evolutionary Approaches:
Are We Born with our Personality?
-“Important components of personality are inherited by
genes”
Temperament: Inborn behavioral style and characteristic
way of responding that emerges early in life

- Evolutionary explanation; “Personality traits that led to

our ancestors’ survival and reproductive success are more
likely to be preserved and passed on to subsequent
generations”
— Inherited roots of personality

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 Evaluating Biological and Evolutionary
Approaches to Personality
• Genes have indeed been linked to specific
personality characteristics
• But they cannot be viewed as the sole cause of
personality
• Because they interact
with the environment
to shape who we are
 Evaluating Biological and
Evolutionary Approaches

• Unlikely that 1 single gene is linked to a specific trait

– E.g., the dopamine-4 receptor accounts for 10 % of the
variation between thrill-seeking behavior in individuals;
the rest is attributable to other genes and the environment
• Even if genes are found to be linked to specific
personality characteristics, they cannot be viewed as
the sole cause of personality
– May not be expressed if not turned on by environment
– Behaviors produced by genes may help create a specific
environment; a smiley baby makes parents more
responsive
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 5. Humanistic Approaches:
The Uniqueness of You
• Emphasize people’s innate goodness
“People strive to reach their full potential
if they are given the opportunity”
 Self-actualization: A state of
self-fulfillment in which people
realize their highest potential,
each in a unique way
And for this we need..
• Unconditional Positive Regard:
Attitude of unconditional
acceptance and respect, no matter
what a person says or does
e.g. especially important in therapy setting
 Evaluating Humanistic Approaches
to Personality
• Advantages
– Highlights the uniqueness of human beings
– Guides the development of a new form of therapy
designed to alleviate psychological difficulties

• Disadvantages
– Difficulty of verifying the basic assumptions of the
approach
– Making the assumption that people are basically
“good”
Assessing Personality: Determining What
Makes Us Distinctive

To assess personality scientifically, we

use psychological tests
Psychological Tests: Standard
measures devised to assess behavior
objectively
 Psychological tests:
• The qualities that psychological tests
should have
• Reliability: the measurement should be
consistent
• Validity; the test should measure what
it is supposed to measure
• Norms: the average test performance
should be determined for the scores of
people compared to each other
 Self-Report Measures
Self-Report Measures: Asks people questions
about a sample of their behavior to determine
larger patterns of behavior and personality
e.g. Minnesota
Multiphasic Personality
Inventory -2 (MMPI-2)
Standardized: the questions
have been validated
 Projective Methods
Projective Personality Tests: Person is shown
an ambiguous stimulus and asked to describe it
or tell a story about it
Rorschach Test: A test that involves showing a series of
symmetrical visual stimuli to people and then asking
them what the figures represent
Thematic Apperception Test (TAT):
A test consisting of a series of pictures about
which a person is asked to write a story
 Behavioral Assessment
• Measures individual’s
behavior to describe
characteristics indicative
of personality
– Should be objective
– Should quantify the
behavior as much as
possible
• E.g., the frequency of
behavior, the duration of
behavior
Personality