DEFINING PERSONALITY

• Personality refers to important and relatively stable

aspects of behavior.
• Consider a young woman whose personality includes
the trait of “painfully shy.” She will behave shyly in many
different situations, and over a significant period of
time. There are likely to be exceptions:
• She may be more outgoing with her family or a close
friend, or at her own birthday party. But
• she will often have difficulty dealing with other people,
which will continue for months or
• even years and will have a significant effect on her
general well-being.
 DEFINING PERSONALITY
• Personality is that which predicts what a person will do
in a given situation
• It is an more or less an enduring organization of a
person’s behavior
• It is a dynamic organization within the individual of
those psycho-physical systems that determine his or her
unique adjustments with his or her environment
 PERSPECTIVES IN
PSYCHOLOGY
• Perspectives mean views or prospects about a certain
construct
• Perspectives in psychology stand for the different
approaches and techniques that are used for the
analysis of behavior
• Why do you act the way you do? Have you ever
wondered why some people are the life of the party
and others prefer to curl up with a good book? Or why
you remember certain events but not others? People
have studied the mind and how it works since the time
of the ancient Greeks, but the scientific study of
psychology only dates back to a little over a hundred
years ago.
 DEBATES IN PERSONALITY
PSYCHOLOGY
• 1. The Nature Nurture Debate
• 2. Freewill vs Determinism
• 3. Idiographic VS. Nomothetic
• 4. Conscious VS. Unconscious
• 5. The Person VS. the Situation
 DEBATES IN PERSONALITY
PSYCHOLOGY
• 1. Nature VS Nurture
• The Reaction Range Concept
• Positive and Negative Eugenics
• Epigenetics
• Eugenics of normalcy
• Protein methylation and DNA
• Human genome project
 A QUESTION TO PONDER

• Do you think that our genetic framework determines

our behavior or an interplay between the genes and
the environment determines how we behave?
 DEBATES IN PERSONALITY
PSYCHOLOGY
• 2. Free Will VS. Determinism
• The Stanford Prison Experiment and how it identified the
limits of free will?
• How our everyday lives challenge the notion of
determinism?
 DEBATES IN PERSONALITY
PSYCHOLOGY
• NOMOTHETIC VS. IDIOGRAPHIC
• The nomothetic approach is one in which scientific
procedures are adopted in an attempt to
establish universal laws of human behaviour and thought.
• The idiographic approach, in contrast, focuses on the
individual, and attempts to understand and describe the
unique personality of any one person. The idiographic
approach does not seek to establish universal laws
about human personality and behaviour.
 DEBATES IN PERSONALITY
PSYCHOLOGY
• The Conscious VS. The Unconscious
• Another debate within personality psychology is to do
with the extent to which conscious and unconscious
mental processes influence how we think,
feel and behave.
• Unconscious mental processes are, by their very nature,
hidden from direct awareness and are usually regarded
as not able to become conscious.
• Freudian psychoanalytic theory firmly regards the
unconscious as the driving force for all conscious
experience, feelings and behaviour.
 DEBATES IN PERSONALITY
PSYCHOLOGY
• At the other extreme is the viewpoint that only
conscious experience, thought and feeling, is of interest
to the personality psychologist.
• This is best exemplified in the humanistic approach, but
may also be seen as a view adopted by the
behavioural and cognitive approach.
• Self-awareness, self-understanding, and belief in the
ability of a person to change his or her personality
depends heavily on consciousness.
 DEBATES IN PERSONALITY
PSYCHOLOGY
• The Person and the Situation
• The problem with “cross situational consistency”
• Cross situational consistency that if a person is defined as
being, lets say, an extrovert, he or she is expected to be
an extrovert in most situations
• However, the situation in which a person is has more role
to play here
• These variations in behavior can be explained by a
variety of perspectives
• Psychologists havePSYCHOLOGICAL
different ways of looking
PERSPECTIVES
at behavior…click on the links to learn more
about each area of psychology!

• Psychoanalytic perspective
• Behaviorist perspective
• Humanistic perspective
• Cognitive perspective
• Biological perspective
• Social psychological perspective

See p. 12
 GROUNDBREAKING
FINDINGS
• Throughout the course of history, scientists have dealt
three great shocks to our feelings of self-importance.
Nicolaus Copernicus demonstrated that the Earth is not
the center of all creation, but merely one of several
planets that rotate around the sun.
• Charles Darwin showed that humans are not a unique
and privileged life form, but just one of many animal
species that have evolved over millions of years.
• Sigmund Freud emphasized that we are not even the
masters of our own minds, but are driven by many
powerful unconscious processes
 WHO HASN’T HEARD OF
FREUD?
• This is one of the most well-known psychological perspectives
in history developed by Sigmund Freud.

• Freud believed that emotional problems are due to anxiety

from unresolved conflicts that reside in unconscious