Chapter 15: Personality

Humanistic Perspective
• Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers
Abraham Maslow’s Self-Actualizing Person
• Self-actualization – according to Maslow, the ultimate psychological need that arises
after basic physical and psychological needs are met and self-esteem is achieved
o The motivation to fulfill one’s potential.
o He studies healthy, creative people in history; such as Abe Lincoln
Carl Rogers’ Person-Centered Perspective
• Believed that people were basically good and endowed with self-actualizing tendencies.
• A growth-promoting climate consists of 3 things:
o Genuineness
 Being open with own feelings, dropping facades, and being transparent.
o Acceptance
 Unconditional positive regard – an attitude of total acceptance toward
another person.
o Empathy
 By sharing and mirroring our feelings and reflecting our meanings.
• Self-concept – all our thoughts and feelings about ourselves, in answer to the question
“who am I?”
o If positive, we tend to act and perceive the world positively.
• The individualism encouraged by humanistic psychology can lead to self-indulgence,
selfishness, and an erosion of moral restraints.
• Humanistic psychology fails to appreciate the reality of our human capacity for evil.

The Trait Perspective

• Trait – a characteristic pattern of behavior or a disposition to deal and act, as assessed
by self-report inventories and peer reports.
o People’s characteristic behaviors and conscious motives.
o Coined by Gordon Allport
• Psychologist William Sheldon classified people by body type.
o Endomorph: relaxed and jolly
o Mesomorph: bold and physically attractive.
o Ectomorph: high strung and solitary.
 Not much evidence supports this idea.
• Myers-Briggs Type Indicator – A test that offers the people who take it with labels for the
certain type they are.
• Hans and Sybil Eysenck believe we can reduce many of our normal individual various to
2 or 3 genetically influenced dimensions.
o Extraversion-introversion
o Emotional stability-instability
  Extraverts seek stimulation because their normal brain arousal is
relatively low. (biology influences)
 Our genes have much to say about the temperament and the behavioral
style that help define our personality (more so than how we were raised)
• Personality Inventory = a questionnaire (often with true false or a scale with disagree
 agree questions) on which people respond to items designed to gauge a wide range of
feelings and behaviors.
o Used to assess selected personality traits.
o Most extensively researched and widely used is the Minnesota Multiphasic
Personality Inventory (MMPI)
o Good way of developing a personality inventory.
• The MMPI is Empirically derived meaning it is a test developed by testing a pool of
items and then selecting those that discriminate between groups.
• In contrast to the subjectivity of the projective tests favored by psychoanalysts,
personality inventories are scored objectively.
o Objectivity does not guarantee validity
• Self-report personality tests are the most widely used method of assessing traits.
The Big Five Factors
• Gordon Allport
• The “Big Five” Personality Factors
Trait Dimension
o Emotional Stability
o Extraversion
o Openness
o Agreeableness
o Conscientiousness
• If a test specifies where you are on the five dimensions, it is said much of what there is to
say about your personality.
• Big five factor test is currently our best approximation of the basic trait dimension.
o In adulthood the Big Five traits are quite stable.
o Heritability usually runs about 50% or a bit more for each dimension.
o Big Five describe personality in other cultures reasonably well.

• The Barnum Effect – people fall for things that are good, make sense to themselves,
and seem accurate.
o Palm readings, astrology, Horoscopes.
Evaluating the Trait Perspective
• Our behavior is influenced by the interaction of our inner disposition with our
environment.
• Person-situation controversy – do people act differently according to whom they are with
or where they are?
o Most people recognize their traits as their own and have a very similar personality
their whole life.
 o Walter Mischel has pointed out that people do NOT act with predictable
consistency.
 Pointed out that people’s scores on personality tests only mildly predict
their behavior.
o Your average outgoingness, happiness, or carelessness over many satiations IS
predictable.
o Bottom Line: Traits exist. We differ. And our differences matter.
• In unfamiliar situations we may hide our traits as we attend carefully to social cues.
o But in informal situations we allow our traits to emerge.
• At any moment the immediate situation powerfully influences a person’s behavior,
especially when the situation makes clear demands.

The Social-Cognitive Perspective

• Albert Bandura proposed the Social-Cognitive Perspective.
o Views behavior as influences by the interaction between persons (and their
thinking) and their social context.
o Believe we learn many of our behaviors through conditioning or by observing
others and modeling our behaviors after theirs.
o What we think about our situations affects our behavior.
Reciprocal Influences
• Bandura called the process of interacting with our environment reciprocal determinism.
o The interacting influences between personality and environmental factors.
 Children’s TV-viewing habits (past behavior) influence their viewing
preferences (personal factor), which influence how television
(environmental factor) affects their current behavior.

• Different people choose different environments.

o You choose your environment and it then shapes you.
• Our personalities shape how we interpret and react to events.
• Our personalities help create situations to which we react.
o Behavior emerges from the interplay of external and internal influences.
• At every moments our behavior is influences by our genes, our experiences, and our
personalities
Personal Control
• Personal Control – our sense of controlling our environment rather than feeling
helpless.
• Julian Rotter
o External Locus of Control – the perception that chance or outside forces
beyond one’s control can determine one’s fate.
o Internal Locus of Control – the perception that one controls one’s own fate.
 Those who have Internal Locus are better off.
 • Martin Seligman
o Learned Helplessness - the hopelessness and passive resignation an
animal/human learns when unable to avoid repeated aversive events.
 Dogs strapped into a harness preventing them from leaping over to the
other side where there is no chock makes them lay down and accept the
pain
 Uncontrollable bad events Perceived lack of controlGeneralized
helpless behavior
 Happy are those who choose their own path.
• Success requires enough optimism to provide hope and enough pessimism to prevent
complacency.
• Most college students perceive themselves as less likely than their average classmate to
developing a drinking problem. This is an example of unrealistic optimism.
• Positive Psychology – the scientific study of optimal human functioning; aims to
discover and promote strengths and virtues that enable individuals and communities to
thrive.
o Positive subjective well-being
o Positive character
o Positive groups, communities, and cultures.
Assessing Behavior in Situations
• Social-cognitive researchers explore the effect of differing situations on people’s
behavior patterns and attitudes.
• It is much better to assess someone by watching them perform similar tasks to what they
are interviewing for than pencil-paper techniques.
o Predicts the success of applicants better.
o A person’s past behavior patterns best predict future behavior.
Evaluating the Social-Cognitive Perspective
• More than other perspective, it builds from psychological research on learning and
cognition.
• Critics say it focuses so much on the situation that it fails to appreciate the person’s inner
traits.

Exploring the Self

• Possible selves
o Include your visions of the self you dream of becoming to the self you fear
becoming.
• Underlying this research is an assumption that the self, as organizer of our thoughts,
feelings, and actions, is a pivotal center of personality.
• Spotlight Effect – overestimating others’ noticing and evaluating our appearance,
performance, and blunders.
Self-Esteem
• Self-esteem – one’s feelings of high or low self-worth.
o Those with low self-esteem do not necessarily see themselves as worthless, but
they seldom say good things about themselves.
 o High self-esteem will make you more successful and better off in life
• “Stigmatized” have faced discrimination and lower status, yet maintain their self-esteem:
o They value the things at which they excel.
o They attribute problems to prejudice.
o They compare themselves to those in their own group.
• Self-serving bias – our readiness to perceive ourselves favorably.
o People accept more responsibility for good deeds than for bad, and for success
than for failures.
 Students criticize the exam they did poorly on, not the lack of studying.
o Most people see themselves as better than average.
• Finding their self-esteem threatened, people with large egos may do more than put others
down; they may react violently.
• All of us some of the time, and some of us much of the time, do feel inferior.
• Humans function best with modest self-enhancing illusions.
Culture and the Self
• Individualism – giving priority to one’s own goals over group goals, and defining one’s
identity in terms of personal attributes rather than group identifications.
o Strive for personal control and individual achievement
o America is an individualistic country.
o Me.
o Many, often temporary or casual relationships. (confrontation acceptable)
o “The squeaky wheel gets the grease”
o Report greater happiness than in collectivist cultures.
• Collectivism – giving priority to the goals of one’s group (often one’s extended family or
work group) and defining one’s identity accordingly.
o Cut off from family and friends, a collectivist might experience a greater loss of
identity.
o Asians
o Us.
o Few, close and enduring relationships. (harmony valued)
o “The Quacking duck gets shot”
o Shy in new groups because they are away from their strong attachments made in
previous groups.

The Modern Unconscious Mind

• Many now think of the unconscious not as seething passions and repressive censoring but
as cooler information processing that occurs without our awareness. The unconscious
involves:
o The schemas that automatically control our perceptions and interpretations.
o The parallel processing of different aspects of vision and thinking.
o The emotions that activate instantly, before conscious analysis.
• Recent history has supported Freud’s idea that we defend ourselves from anxiety.
• Terror-management theory – proposes that faith in one’s worldview and the pursuit of
self-esteem provide protection against a deeply rooted fear of death.
o Death anxiety motivates contempt for others and esteem for oneself.