Personality

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Personality
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Personality

• What is it?
• Traits?
• States?
• Behavior?
• Abilities?
• Interests?
• Attitudes?
• All that a person ispast, present, future?

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Personality

• A persons characteristic pattern of thinking,
  feeling, and acting that is consistent across
  time and situations
• Relatively enduring underlying dispositions that
  influence behavior across situations

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Personality

• Esp. interesting variable because contributes to
  heritability of many behaviors
• For example, divorce is heritable, but why?
• 1/3 of h2 of divorce due to personality traits
• Personality is heritable, personality relates to
  divorce, making divorce heritable
• Other behaviors
• Crime, violence, altruism, etc.

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Current Personality Research

• Focus on measurement and quantification of
  differences among people
• Diminished focus on person as a whole
• Focus on constructs rather than persons
• Trait the fundamental construct unit

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Personality Trait Theory

• Traitstendencies to behave, think, or feel in
  certain ways in certain situations
• collections of similar thoughts, feelings, and
  behaviors
• traits are the constructs of personality
• Traits are dimensionala structure that recurs in
  the same qualitative form in different people,
  but at different quantitative levels (e.g., high
  or low on a trait)

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Analogy of a Trait Dimension

• People have different amounts or levels of a
  trait
• Across the composite of the population these
  different levels constitute a trait dimension
• Each person has a specific level of a physical
  characteristic of height
• The dimension of Tallness emerges as a population
  concept

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Personality vs. Intelligence

• The domain of Personality focuses on stable
  non-cognitive differences among people
• Domains of personality are distinguished from
  abilities or talents
• Can also distinguish personality from interests
  and to some degree from attitudes

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Domain of Personality

• Temperament
• Affective (i.e., emotional) differences
• Reactivity and Expressivity
• Positive and Negative Emotions
• Interpersonal Behaviors
• Closeness vs. Distance
• Agreeable vs. Hostile/Aggressive

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Domain of Personality (cont.)

• Behavioral Inhibition
• Careful and planful vs. impulsive
• Conscientious vs. irresponsible
• Tendency to withhold control behavioral response
  to emotional state

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Is Personality Real?Animal Studies of Personality

• So in regard to mental qualities, their
  transmission is manifest in our dogs, horses, and
  other domestic animals. Besides special tastes
  and habits, general intelligence, courage, bad
  and good tempers, etc. are certainly transmitted.

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Is Personality Real?Animal Studies of Personality

• With man we see similar facts in almost every
  family and we know through the admirable labours
  of Mr. Galton that genius, which implies a
  wonderfully complex combination of higher
  faculties, tends to be inherited and on the
  other hand, it is too certain that insanity and
  deteriorated mental powers likewise run in the
  same families. Charles Darwin, 1871

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Dog personalities

• St. Bernard gentle, loyal, wise
• Chesapeake Bay Retriever bright and happy
• Irish Setter happy-go-lucky, strong willed,
  willing to work
• Cairn Terrier - merry, hardy, quizzical
• Toy Poodle proud, intelligent
• Welsh Corgi alert, energetic, quick-footed
• English Toy Spaniel perky, of grand disposition
• Pekingese independent, dignified, regal, amiable

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Four Humors (Hippocrates)

• Blood sanguine (hopeful)
• Black bile melancholic (sad)
• Yellow bile choleric (easily angered)
• Phlegm phlegmatic (apathetic)

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Major Players

• Gordon Allport (1897-1967) believed that
  personality traits are real, stable, and have a
  biological basis.
• Hartshorne and May concluded from their research
  that personality traits do not exist situations
  determine behavior.
• Walter Mischel (1930- ) propounds the idea that
  personality traits are merely convenient
  fictions situations determine behavior.

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Challenge to Trait Theory

• Hartshorne and May
• Studying the stability honesty (honest behavior)
  in children
• Example behaviors
• Cheating in classroom
• Cheating on take-home exam
• Cheating during a game
• Stealing money
• Lying
• Exaggerating athletic performance

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Challenge to Trait Theory

• Average correlation across behaviors was only r
  .23
• Concluded honesty in any one situation was a poor
  predictor in any other situation
• Personality doesnt exist
• Situations determine behavior

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Person-Situation Debate

• Mischels review (1968)
• Selective review of studies of stability of
  personality/behavior
• There does tend to be consistency in self-reports
  of personality
• Found that the correlation between behavior in
  one situation was behavior in another situation
  is lowusually less than r .30

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Person-Situation Debate

• Mischel
• Traits are not frequently generalizable across
  situations
• Traits are impractical as psychological
  constructs due to low predictive validity
• Assumption of traits
• Consistency in self-reports of personality
  because people believe that they and others act
  consistently

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Person-Situation Debate

• Person X Situation Interaction
• Mischel proposed a specificity theory of
  behavior
• Must consider both the person and situation

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Interactionism

• Traits and situations interact to produce
  behavior
• The stronger the situational factors the less
  traits contribute to behavior
• Restrictive environments restrict behavior
• If everyone lived in a closet there would be very
  few differences in behavior
• Unstructured environments allow for differences
  among people
• Compare what people do when they travel alone to
  a country in which they dont speak the language

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Interactionism

• Certain situations allow for the expression of
  certain traits
• Classroom extraversion and conscientiousness
• War aggression, fearfulness, courage,
  leadership
• Jobs different jobs call on different traits

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Consistency of Personality revisited

• Interactionism is fine, but lets get back to
  Mischel
• Is personality/behavior really so inconsistent?
• Is there another way of looking at the problem?

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Situational Specificity

• Studies of behavioral consistency almost always
  correlated a single situation
• Its very difficult to predict behavior in any
  given situation
• Error variance
• Factors unique to that situation
• Very hard to generalize from a single observation
  of behavior

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Aggregation

• Same issues in measurement of intelligence
• Any single item is a poor measure of g
• Error variance
• Specific variance
• Weak correlation with other variables
• How to deal with this problem?
• Aggregate responses for several items

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Aggregation

• Items are summed to form scales
• Less error less specific variance, more general
  trait variance
• Scales are summed to form composites
• Less error less specific variance, more g
  variance
• Can you apply the same concepts to behavior?

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Psychometric View

• Single responses or single behavioral samples do
  not measure accurately.
• Each situation is analogous to one item on a
  test.
• One item might not predict well, but the entire
  test score might.
• Need to measure behavior in a number of different
  situations.

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Predicting Most of the People Much of the Time

• Epstein
• Studies of stability in personality/behavior
  using aggregation
• Each day for about 1 month people were asked to
• Record most Pleasant and Unpleasant experience
  each day
• 90-item Checklist of emotions
• 66-item Checklist of response tendencies
  (impulses)
• Behavior carried out
• Situations

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Stability of Personality

• Items were aggregated to form scales
• Scale scores were then correlated
• 1 day day 1 with day 2
• 2 day mean day 13 with mean day 24
• 3 day mean day 135 with mean day 246
• 14 day mean all odd with mean all even days

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Epstein Tables Figures

• Tables 1 2 Pleasant Unpleasant Emotions
• Figure 1 Between-subjects reliability
• Figure 2 Standard deviations
• Figure 3 Within-subjects reliability
• Table 3 Most least reliable participants
• Figure 4 Reliability of observer ratings
• Figure 5 Reliability of self-report,
  other-report, and objective behavior

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Single Person Stability

• How stable is an individual?
• How stable is the organization of personality
  variables for a given individual?
• How stable is a persons profile of scores?

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Observer Ratings

• How stable are observer ratings?
• Same procedure for behaviors that relate to
  traits such as sociability and impulsivity

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Personality in the Aggregate

• Epstein demonstrated that personality is
  basically a persons average behavior across time
  and situations
• High stability of personality can be found
  self-reports, observer reports, or objective
  behaviors
• IF it is sampled and averaged over a sufficient
  number of occurrences

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Structure of Personality

• traits are based on the idea that certain
  behaviors/thoughts/feelings will covary
  (correlate or co-occur)
• Structure meaningful covariation, i.e, some
  traits go together, some do not
• The Structure of Personality is Hierarchical
• correlated behaviors/thoughts/feelings
  traits

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Alienation
Feels betrayed, deceived
Feels unlucky
Feels mistreated
Feels betrayed, deceived
Feels exploited
Sees self as target of false rumors
Believes others wish to him to fail
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Hierarchical Structure of Personality

• correlated behaviors/thoughts/feelings traits
• the different behaviors/thoughts/feelings are
  different expressions, indicators, or
  measurements of the same trait or process
• correlated traits higher-order traits (or
  factors)

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Negative Emotionality
Aggression hostile, reactive, vindictive,will
hurt others to get ahead
Alienation suspicious,feel others out to get me
Stress Reaction tense, nervous, worry, anxious,
irritable, break down under stress
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Hierarchical Structure of Personality

• correlated behaviors/thoughts/feelings traits
• correlated traits higher-order traits
• Goal Identify all the Uncorrelated higher-order
  traits
• basic structure of personality
• All lower order traits due to higher-order traits
• Higher-order traits represent the basic causal
  processes that underlie trait covariation

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Structure of Personality

• Once weve identified the basic processes we can
• organize and describe other constructs in terms
  of personality
• explain phenomena
• make novel predictions
• General consensus 3 to 5 super-traits or
  general personality factors
• How do we know?

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Lexical Hypothesis

• Traits are basically adjectives
• All important personality variables should be
  imbedded in the natural language
• List all the adjective in the dictionary that
  describe people
• Have people make ratings on the adjectives
• Factor analyze the ratings

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Big Five or Five Factor Model (FFM)

• Five factors emerge from lexical studies
• Necessary and sufficient for describing
  personality at the broadest level
• Hierarchical structure with these 5 factors on
  top

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The Big Five (spell OCEAN)

• Openness creative, independent, seeks new
  experiences
• Conscientiousness reliable, hardworking,
  persistent
• Extroversion sociable, outgoing, cheerful
• Agreeableness cooperative, trusting,
  conciliatory
• Neuroticism nervous, worrying, subject to
  negative emotions

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Critiques of the FFM model

• Factors arent independent
• Are really at the top of the hierarchy?
• Does the structure apply to all languages? What
  if there are differences?
• Atheoretical
• folk concepts not scientific constructs
• What are the mechanisms to trait covariation?

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Development of Multidimensional Personality
Questionnaire (MPQ)

• Self-report inventory that attempts to measure
  all the important trait constructs of personality
• Provides a general framework (i.e., theory) to
  reference other constructs

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Development of MPQ

• Began in 1970s by Auke Tellegen
• Trying to develop a scale to measure individual
  differences in hypnotic susceptibility
  (Absorption scale)
• Also includes measures of Extraversion and
  Neuroticism
• Undertook iterative rounds of data collection and
  scale revision

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Development of MPQ

• Kept identifying new traits
• Eventually wanted to cover all of normal
  personality (bandwidth)
• Try to construct scales that were relatively
  pure measures of their trait construct, e.g.,
  no overlapping items, low correlations among
  scales (fidelity)

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Development of MPQ

• Ended up with 11 primary or lower order scales
• correlations among 11 scales suggest 3
  higher-order traits
• Positive Emotionality
• Negative Emotionality
• Behavioral Constraint

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Factor Analysis of Primary Scales

• Scales were constructed to maximize their
  homogeneity
• However, an interpretable pattern correlations
  was still present
• Therefore, this structure is a discovery of human
  variation not an artifact of the measurement

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Once factors have been identified have to give a
psychological interpretation of their meaning
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Big 5 and MPQ

• MPQ factors are broader constructs than the Big 5
  factors
• Extraversion relates to Communal-PEM
• Neuroticism to NEM esp. Stress Reaction
• Conscientiousness to CON Achievement
• Agreeableness to Aggression, Alienation, Social
  Potency
• Openness modestly related to Absorption

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Validity Scales

• Unlikely Virtues
• Index of social desirability, i.e., people try to
  present themselves an unrealistic favorable way
  (impression management)
• Tendency to claim uncommon virtuousness or deny
  common frailties
• Some people will endorse some items
• Should exclude very high scorers
• Unlikely their other responses are valid

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Unlikely Virtues Scale

• Example items
• At times I have been envious of someone.
• Never in my whole life have I wished for things
  that I was not entitled to.
• My opinions are always completely reasonable.
• At times I have eaten too much.
• I have always been completely fair to others.
• I have occasionally felt discouraged about
  something.
• I have at times been angry with someone.

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Response Inconsistency Indices

• An index of response consistency devoid of any
  psychological characteristics
• Detect invalid response patterns
• True Response Inventory (TRIN)
• Variable Response Inventory (VRIN)

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TRIN

• Yea-saying or Nay-saying scale
• Composed of pairs of correlated items that are
  keyed in the opposite direction
• Very high or low scores indicate stereotypic true
  or false responding

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TRIN

• Example of TRIN item pairs
• 1) Most of the time I feel blue.
• I am happy most of the time.
• 2) I am usually happier when I am alone.
• I am happiest when I am with people.
• 3) When someone hurts me, I try to get even.
• I would rather turn the other cheek than get
  even when someone treats me badly.

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VRIN

• Detect random responding
• Composed of pairs of items that are keyed in the
  same direction
• Extremely high scores indicate haphazard
  responding or lack of understanding

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VRIN

• Example of VRIN item pairs
• 1) When someone hurts me, I try to get even.
• When people insult me, I try to get even.
• 2) I am quite effective at talking people into
  things.
• I am quite good at convincing others to see
  things my way.
• 3) I usually do not like be a follower.
• When I work with others I like to take charge.

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Heritability of Personality

• Like everything else, personality has a genetic
  component
• What about environmental contributions?
• Most earlier theories of personality (e.g.,
  Freud) implicate early childhood experiences in
  personality development

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A Summary of the Broad Heritability of the Big
Five Based on Recent Twin Studies
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Combined Model Fitting by Finkel McGue - 12
Kinships (N4,298 pairs)

• MZ - Males
• MZ - Females
• DZ - Males
• DZ - Females
• DZ - Opposite Sex
• Siblings - Males
• Siblings - Females

• Siblings - Opposite Sex
• Father - Sons
• Father - Daughters
• Mother - Sons
• Mother - Daughters

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Heritability of Multidimensional Personality
Questionnaire Scores Based on the Minnesota Twin
Family Study - (12 Kinships 4,300 pairs)
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Heritability of Multidimensional Personality
Questionnaire Scores Based on the Minnesota Twin
Family Study vs. MISTRA
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Heritability Estimates Based on 12 Kinships (4300
pairs), MZA Twins (74 pairs) and MZT Twins (626
pairs)
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Heritability of Personality

• h2 30 to 50
• c2 5 or less
• e2 50-70, of which 15-30 is measurement error
• What if we got rid of measurement error?

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Stable component Of Aggression
Aggression At Time 1
Aggression At Time 2
Unique to Time 1
Unique to Time 2
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Personality Genetics

• The stable part of personality is mostly due to
  genetics
• Environments have effects on personality, but
  seems to be of limited duration
• No matter what situation youre in you always
  carry your genes
• Genes are what is constant across time and
  situations