What is the Trait Approach to Personality?
Identify fairly stable psychological and behavioral tendencies that differ between people
What are traits?
Stable individual differences e.g. Narcissism Agreeableness Paranoia
What are states?
Current individual differences between people
e.g.
High self-esteem from winning a game (or trait narcissism)
Friendliness when in a good mood (or all the time)
Paranoia because they’re after you! (or a delusion)
What are Two Key Points of the Trait Approach?
- Trait approach is based on empirical research.
Mostly correlational
- Hard to randomly assign traits
Emphasis on accurate measurement of traits
- Valid, Reliable, Generalizable
Traits should be able to predict behavior or mental states like beliefs and attitudes
- Trait approach focuses on individual differences.
What are the strengths and weaknesses of the second key point of the Trait Approach?
Strength: assesses and attempts to understand how people differ
- How extraverted are you? Relative to other people
Weaknesses:
- neglects aspects of personality common to all people
- and how each person is unique
Why do people do what they do?
Personality traits
Things caused by the situation
Human/cultural universals
Individual uniqueness
What was the Person Situation Debate?
A debate started by Walter Mischel
Which is more important for determining what people do, the person or the situation?
Why did Walter Mischel start the Person Situation Debate?
Because there were studies that found that all sorts of people could be manipulated into doing things they were not expected to do.
e.g. prison study
This brought about the question as to whether personality really even had an influence.
People who found studies for the power of situation:
Milgram
Zimbardo
Asch
What concept did Walter Mischel develop?
Situationism
What is Situationism?
That the situation is a stronger determiner of behaviour of an individual than personality.
Why did Walter Mischel not believe personality had much of an influence in behaviour and what was wrong with this?
Correlations for personality and behaviour rarely exceeded .30.
- Nisbett says .40
- concluded this was a low predictability
However Binomial Effect Size Display (BESD) actually showed that this correlation still made a significant difference: r = .4 changes 50/50 to 70/30
What was Walter Mischel reasoning behind his argument for Situationism?
He believed that: Situation + Personality = Behavior
And since the correlation for personality was, then:
0.4 X + .4 = 1.0
Therefore situation was 0.6
This was wrong however, situation also was found to have a correlation of around 0.3 - 0.4
so the remaining 0.1 - 0.2 is accounted for via measurement error and other traits.
Absolute versus relative consistency
Individual differences are maintained across situations, even when absolute behavior changes
Situations influence behavior, but people are still consistent
- an introvert will still be introverted at a pool party but probably less introverted compared to if he was at a chess tournament
Why don’t Scientists run “obvious” studies
e.g. Do religious people pray more than nonreligious?
Because the answer is so obvious that it is pointless to do so (r value will definitely be > 0.4), however this may make it appear as though personality does not have an effect, even though it has a huge effect.
Person by situation interaction
People with different personalities react differently to the same situation
e. g. party:
- introvert: “oh no”
- extravert: “oh yea!”
This means for studies such as “what are the effects of parties?”
- you should add a measure of personality to that study
- If you just focus on the situation and miss out on personality you might miss out on really important effects
Situation Personality Fit
Different traits are good and bad depending on the context of the situation.
e. g. Aggression:
- good for boxers
- bad for office workers
Self-selection into situations
Certain types of people go to or find themselves in different types of situations
e.g. Disagreeable people constantly finding that others are unhelpful to them
What is the Stereotype Content Model?
Made up of 2 dimensions of social judgment:
- Warmth
• How kind is this person? - Competence
• Is he or she competent?
What is Negativity bias?
- Pay more attention to negative traits
- More avoidant of negative than approaching of positive
- Remember bad more than good
- Bad hurts more than good feels positive
What is the Expectancy effect?
The idea that your expectations of someone can shape your subsequent judgment of them.
What is a classic example of the Expectancy effect?
The Intellectual bloomers study:
- Teachers were told certain kids would do well (even though this was a false expectation given to the teachers)
- but the teachers gave these students different treatment (high standards etc) and these student actually did end up doing well.
- Expectations breed results
- Self-fulfilling prophecy (another example is Men who thought they were meeting an attractive woman on the phone were nicer –> women treated them nicely back)
Expectancies in real life are..
• Based on (often accurate) information
• Personal history
- e.g. Taught their sibling
• Mutual acquaintances
- e.g. Other teachers
What criteria can assess accuracy according to constructivism/Postmodernism?
None, because personality is a social construction
- everyone’s opinion is valid and people can have different opinions
What criteria can assess accuracy according to critical realism?
Triangulation of information: Getting information from different methods can help us triangulate the truth if the answers seem to converge.
Convergent validation • Self report • Other report • Behaviour • Biological measures
