14.5: Trait Models of Personality: Consistencies

The importance of free will and personal choice was emphasized by humanistic models of personality and appealed to a generation of young people who were dissatisfied with the determinism of behaviorism.

Chimpanzees have the capacity for aggression, according to their research.
There is compelling evidence that aggression is part of humans' genetic heritage.
actualization of our full genetic potential is unlikely to bring about the state of eternal bliss that Rogers imagined.
Both humans and Chimpanzees have capacity for altruism, according to research.
Human nature is a mix of selfish and altruistic motives.

According to Rogers's research, the discrepancy between people's descriptions of their actual versus ideal selves is greater for emotionally disturbed people.

Over the course of therapy, the difference decreases.
Rogers thought that the finding was indicative of a lessened of conditions of worth.
The people who showed a decrease in incongruence after therapy weren't the people who improved.

Today's influential but controversial "positive psychology" movement can be traced back to Maslow's research on the characteristics of self-actualized individuals.

Although he rarely gets credit for it, he introduced this term.

His work is problematic.
The assumption that self-actualized individuals tend to be creative and free may have limited his search for historical figures who displayed these qualities.
He may have fallen prey to confirmation bias because he wasn't blind to his hypothesis about the personality features of self-actualized individuals.

Humanistic models are difficult to alter.

If the study showed that virtually no one was self-actualized, humanistic psychologists could say that most people's drives toward self-actualization had been stifled.

Although the claim that self-actualization is the central motive in personality may not be testable, the principle that we should develop our potential to the fullest may have considerable value as a philosophy of life.

They look at the question of what makes up our personality, rather than the question of what causes it.

Like early chemists who tried to identify the elements of the periodic table, trait theorists aim to identify the major elements of personality, which, as we've learned, are relatively enduring dispositions that affect our behaviors across situations.

It is difficult to invoke personality traits as causes of behavior.

We're just reasoning in a big circle because Inter restates the same evidence that we used to think the child was aggressive.

To avoid this error in logic, we need to show that personality traits correlate with biological or laboratory measures.

We need to narrow down the pool of possibilities.

According to Gordon Allport, there are more than 17,000 terms in the English language referring to personality traits: shy, stubborn, impulsive, greedy, cheerful, and on and on.
The method analyzes the correlations and concludes that a child is aggressive only because he or she engages in aggressive that gives rise to these correlations.
Let's start with an example.

In a hypo more than simply describe behaviors we've already observed, personality traits must do popularity, liveliness, risk-taking, sensation seeking, and impulsivity.

When we look at the correlation matrix, we'll notice that some of the cells only contain numbers.

The correlation matrix suggests that there are two factors in these two sets of variables.
The for measures mal technique of factor analysis uses more rigorous statistical criteria to accomplish the same goal as the eyeball method.

The correlation matrix of six personality measures has a perfect correlation, which is represented by the 1.00s on the diagonal.

People's handshakes tell us a lot about their personality.

It's likely that we'll talk a lot about a personality trait if it's important enough in our language.

Factor analyses of trait terms in dictionaries and works of literature led to the emergence of the Big Five.

Extraverted people are social and active.

People with neurotic tendencies tend to be tense.

conscientious people are careful and responsible

Open people tend to be curious about the world.

The Big Five can be remembered with the help of two acronyms--OCEAN or CANOE.

Most of us are in the middle of the distributions of these traits, with each of us occupying some location on each of these dimensions.
People with psychological disorders tend to get scores on more than one of these dimensions.
A severely depressed person is likely to be low in extraversion, high in neuroticism, and about average on the other three dimensions.

Remarkably, the Big Five appear in people's ratings of personality even when researchers ask participants to describe people they've only seen, not met.

The popular dating website uses the ences.
The research evidence for a person who is high in openness to success in this area is minimal.

They are probably imposing their implicit personality theories on the apes because of their preference for abstract art.

People with firm handshakes tend to be more open to experience and less neurotic than people with limp handshakes.

High conscientiousness, low neuroticism, and perhaps high agreeableness are associated with successful job performance.

Extraversion is correlated with successful performance among salespersons.
It is thought that conscientious people are more likely than others to engage in healthy behaviors, such as exercising and not smoking.

Social media use has the Big Five dimensions.

Observers can gauge people's extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness by looking at their Facebook profiles.
We tend to keep the subtraits of neuroticism, such as anxiety-proneness and insecurity, private and hidden from others, so they are no better than chance in guessing their neuroticism levels.
Facebook users with high levels of extraversion tend to write about social activities more frequently than other users, and Facebook users with high levels of openness tend to write about intellectual topics more frequently than other users.

The Big Five seem to think that the president will succeed.

Presidential biographers were asked to rate the U.S. presidents from George Washington to George W. Bush.
Independently assessed ratings of presidents' historical greatness were correlated with their conscientiousness and openness to experience scores.

The Big Five dimen the Big Five can help predict the answer to enduring questions by scoring on cross-cultural relevance of personality.

There may be limits to the Big Five's cross-cultural universality, raising the possibility that agreeableness and conscientiousness may be shaped in important ways by culture.
Dog people have higher scores than cat people and some investigators have found dimensions in addition to the Big Five.
The Chinese tradition factor has been revealed by neuroticism and openness to experience sonality studies in China.

Studies in Germany, Finland, and several other countries suggest the presence of a factor that includes honesty and humility in addition to the Big Five.

There was no evidence for the Big Five in the study of forager-farmers from an underdeveloped region of Bolivia.
There were only two broad dimensions reflecting prosociality and a tendency to work hard.
The question of a "universal" structure of personality is still open.

People from largely individualistic cultures like the United States tend to focus on themselves and their personal goals, whereas people from largely collectivist cultures like Asia tend to focus on their relations with others.

People from individualism report higher self-esteem than those from collectivist cultures.
People's behavior in collectivist cultures is more influenced by social norms than in outlying cultures.

We shouldn't make a big deal of the difference between individualism and collectivist cultures.

Asian countries differ greatly in their levels of collectivism.

The 4th quarile is a system for organizing personality differences.

The research by Peter Rentfrow, Samuel, and Jeff Potter shows that people may not be aware of all important features of personality.

There is no correlation between morality and the levels of extraversion on the map, despite the fact that there are many theories of personality, including those of Freud and his follow U.S. states.

This research raises questions.
Hans Eysenck, Auke Tellegen, and C. Robert Cloninger maintain that in relatively isolated states.

The Big Three model of personality structure is an alternative to the Big Five.

The whole story of why we differ from each other is not told by personality traits.

The story of Jack and Oskar is fascinating.
They were identical twins from the Minnesota Twins study who were separated almost immediately after birth, although Jack passed away in 2015.

Jack and Oskar have nearly the same personality despite not having known each other for 40 years.

Their scores on the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, a personality questionnaire that we'll learn about later in the chapter, are similar to those of the same person taking the test twice.
Jack was raised by a Jewish family in the Caribbean and joined a kibbutz when he was 17.

During World War II, the region of the former Czechoslovakia that was under Hitler's control was where Oskar was raised by his maternal grandmother.

Jack and Oskar's political attitudes are not the same as night and day.
Jack used to enjoy war movies that portrayed Germans in a bad light.
He helped build the Jewish state in Israel.
As World War II drew to a close, Oskar became a member of the Hitler Youth movement, despite being an ardent Nazi and anti-Semite.
Jack and Oskar have the same personality, but they have different ways in which they manifest it.

Basic tendencies and characteristic adaptations are related.

People can express their personality traits in vastly different ways depending on their upbringing, interests, and skills.
In Jack and Oskar's case, it seems likely that the same basic tendencies-- intense loyalty and devotion to social causes-- were expressed in markedly different characteristic adaptations: Jack's Judaism and profound dislike of Germans and Oskar's Nazism.

Parachuting from airplanes, sampling spicy foods, and living life in the fast lane are some of the things high sensation seekers enjoy.

When they go out to eat, low sensation seekers like risk, adventure, and novelty and always order chicken parmigiana at the same restaurant.
It is possible that sensation seeking is tied to socially constructive behaviors in some people but socially destructive behaviors in others.
The sensation-seeking scores of firefighters and prisoners are the same, but the scores of college students are different.
People can express tendencies to take risks in either socially constructive or destructive outlets.
Why some sensation seekers end up in firehouses and prisons is a mystery.

Freud argued that following childhood, personality is more or less fixed.

Longitudinal studies that track people over time show that personality traits can change over time.
Across the general population, openness, extraversion, and neuroticism tend to decline a bit from the late teens to early 30s, whereas conscientiousness and agreeableness tend to increase a bit.
Studies show that the levels of most traits don't change much after 30 and they don't change much after 50.
We don't know if psychotherapy can change personality, but many psychologists are less optimistic about this prospect than they were in Freud's day.

There has been a lot of discussion about whether medica tion can change personality tendencies.

One study shows that people who take Paxil experience less hostility and more interest in socializing than people who don't take the drug.
In high scores on measures of sensation, people with clinical depression had higher levels of certain characteristics compared to people who did not have clinical depression.

There are intriguing scientific, practical, and ethical questions raised by these findings.

It is possible that anxiety is a crucial warning signal.

The questions are important for us to consider as a society.

Through the early and mid-20th century, trait theory was highly influential.

As noted previously, psychologists assumed that trait influence behavior across many Chapter 14 situations.

In his review of the literature, he found low correlations between different behaviors.
A classic study by Hugh Hartshorne and Mark May looked at correlations between behavioral indicators of honesty among children.
Children were given the opportunity to steal a dime, change their answers on an exam, and lie in contrived situations created by Hartshorne and May.
The correlations of children's behavior across these situations were low.
Children who steal aren't more likely to cheat than other children.

Researchers have reported similar findings in adults for such characteristics as dependency, friendliness, and conscientiousness.

It seems that people aren't as consistent as we think.

Measures of personality aren't helpful for what they were designed to do.

Some psychologists tried to explain our belief in the predictive power of personality traits in terms of our cognitive biases.
We see people's personality because we mistake situational influences on their behavior, such as peer pressure, for personality influences.

According to Seymour Epstein, Mischel was correct that personality traits aren't highly predictive of isolated behaviors, such as lying or cheating, in a single situation.

We'll probably do better than chance if we use extraversion to predict whether our friend will attend a party.
If we use this measure to predict our friend's behavior across an average of many situations, we will probably do well.
According to Kenrick & Funder, personality traits can be used to predict behavioral trends, such as whether someone will be a responsible employee or a difficult spouse.

The emphasis on description is both strength and weakness.

These models have advanced our understanding of personality structure and helped psychologists predict performance in jobs, even the job of leader of the world's largest superpower.
Some trait models don't give much insight into the causes of personality.
The Big Five don't shed much light on the origins of personality differences among people.

Hans Eysenck tried to remedy this shortcoming.

According to Eysenck, the personality dimensions of extraversion- introversion are produced by differences in the threshold of arousal of the reticular activated system.

The RAS is responsible for keeping us awake, as we learned in the text.
At this point in the chapter, you might be wondering how the activity of your RAS is related to extraversion and introversion.
They're bored and underaroused.
The Yerkes-Dodson law states that they seek out stimulation to jack up their arousal.
In contrast, introverts tend to be over stimulated and try to shut out stimulation, again including other people (Campbell et al., 2011).
Extraverts prefer loud to soft music.
Eysenck's theorizing shows that trait theories can generate fruitful hypotheses about the relationship between personality and biological variables.