Chapter 3: Individual Differences, Personality and Self

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Chapter 3 Individual Differences, Personality
and Self
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Chapter aims

• Explore concepts and ideas that make up theories
  about individual differences, personality and
  self
• Examine the limits of mainstream thinking as we
  understand personality in terms of subjectivity
  and identity

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Defining personality

• Definitions are often contradictory.
• Personality derived from Latin persona, which
  means mask
• i.e. A visible aspect of ones character
• OR
• The essential character of a person

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Approaches to studying personality

• Nomothetic
• Constructing tools to measure personality
• Hippocrates
• Jung
• Myers-Briggs
• The Eysencks

• Idiographic
• Emphasizes the contingent character of
  personality
• Psychodynamics
• Phenomenology
• Identity

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Hippocrates four temperaments

• Melancholic
• Introspection and withdrawal, heavy downcast
  moods
• Choleric
• Cranky, fiery, irritable
• Sanguine
• Cheerful, hopeful, basically optimistic
• Phlegmatic
• Sluggish, apathetic, listless, laid back

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Jungs inner and outer worlds
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Jung

• Introverts
• Withdrawn
• Unsociable
• Prefer to be alone
• Shy
• Passive
• Careful
• Thoughtful

• Extraverts
• Sociable
• Outgoing
• Talkative
• Gregarious
• Active
• Optimistic
• Impulsive

For Jung, each person has both introverted and
extraverted characteristics
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Myers-Briggs personality index

• Preference between
• Extraversion or introversion
• Sensing or intuition
• Thinking of feeling
• Judgment or perception
• Affects individuals choice as to
• Whether to direct perception and judgement upon
  environment or world of ideas
• Which of the two kinds of perception to rely on
• Which of these two kinds of judgement rely on
• Whether to use judging or perceptive attitude for
  dealing with environment

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The science of personality

• Hans and Michael Eysenck developed scientific
  tests to identify and explain personality
• Leads to essentialist explanations of personality
• Has the effect of constituting and disciplining
  the study of personality
• Ignores social determinants of personality

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Psychodynamics

• An idiographic approach based on work of Freud
• Individual seen as processual phenomenon
• Individual forced to resolve multiple internal
  conflicts
• Identifies problems such as
• Neurosis
• Psychosis
• Narcissism
• Inhibition
• Anxiety
• Regression

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Phenomenology

• An idiographic approach based on work of Husserl
• Focus on the experiences of the knowing, acting
  and feeling subject
• Aim was liberation and self-actualization
• Personality reflects the progress made by
  individuals towards this

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The individual

• Assumed to be essential to human life
• Celebrated by society
• We are individuals
• We live in individual ways
• We have individual opinions
• We want to reward the work of individuals
• BUT it is an arbitrary category through which we
  are disciplined
• Alternative is to see humans as role holders in a
  wider collective

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Identity

• Associated with critical approaches
• Extends the scope of studying personality
• Focus on the meaning and purposes of our lives
• Basic anxiety comes from being in the world
• Never-ending search for identity to resolve this
  anxiety

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End of the individual?

• The schizophrenic self (Laing)
• Authoritarian and marketing personalities (Fromm)
• Narcissistic personalities
• Existential anxiety

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Key issues

• Whether the methods of the nature sciences are
  appropriate for studying personality
• Whether personality is an outcome of nature or
  nurture (or both)
• Is personality static or open-ended?
• What is the best approach to studying
  personality?
• The degree of explanatory power attributed to
  personality in understanding OB