Trait and Social-Cognitive Perspectives on Personality

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Trait and Social-Cognitive Perspectives on
Personality

• Module 26

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Personality

• An individuals characteristic pattern of
  thinking, feeling, and acting

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Trait

• A characteristic pattern of behavior or a
  disposition to feel and act, as assessed by
  self-report inventories and peer reports

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Trait Perspective

• To understand personality you must consider our
  enduring patterns of behavior, those that were
  born with and that stay fairly constant across
  situations.

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Three important trait researchers

1. Gordan Allport
2. Raymond Carttell
3. Hans Eysenck

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Gordon Allport (1897-1967)

• American psychologist who disagreed with Freud in
  the following ways/areas
• - played down the role of the unconscious in
  healthy people
• - current experiences more important than early
  childhood experiences
• - personality should only be studied in normal
  adults

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• He believed that personalities are unique.
• This caused a problem. It made it difficult to
  produce general ideas that could be tested by
  others.
• He came up with over 18,000 ways to describe
  people.

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Raymond Cattell( 1905-1998)Factor Analysis

• English psychologist who reduced the traits down
  to 16 key personality dimensions or factors to
  describe personality
• Each factor measured by using a questionnaire,
  and plotted on a continuum.

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Hans Eysenck (1916-1997)

• German psychologist who reduced the traits down
  even further, down to 2 dimensions.
• Two major dimensions
• Introversion/Extraversion
• Emotionally Unstable/Stable

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Dimensions in Detail

• Extraverts outgoing and sociable
• Introverts keep to themselves and quiet
• Emotionally stable relaxed and calm
• Emotionally unstable anxious and tend to worry

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Eysencks Personality Factors
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The Big Five Traits (McCrae Costa)

• Openness
• Extraversion
• Agreeableness
• Emotional Stability
• Conscientiousness

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The Big Five Traits
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Personality Inventories

• Questionnaires on which people respond to items
  designed to gauge a wide range of feelings and
  behaviors
• Used to assess selected personality traits
• Often true-false, agree-disagree, etc. types of
  questions

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Personality Inventories(objective test) vs.
Projective Test (subjective test)

• Show greater validity (measures what it is
  suppose to)
• Offer greater reliability (yields consistent
  results)
• Scoring or interpreting
• Projective tests, months or years of training
• Personality Inventories, very simple and
  uncomplicated

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Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI)

• Most widely used of all personality tests.
• Originally developed to identify abnormal
  behavior.
• 500 questions.
• MMPI-2, 2nd version assesses people on 10
  clinical scales used to diagnose psychological
  disorders and 15 additional content scales used
  to measure the persons attributes such as anger,
  anxiety, etc.

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Evaluating the Trait Perspective

• Criticisms
• 1. does not consider the situation
• 2. does not explain why
• 3. does not consider the effects of our thoughts
  on our behavior

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Social-Cognitive Perspective

• Perspective stating that understanding
  personality involves considering the situation
  and thoughts before, during, and after an event

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Albert Bandura

• People learn by observing and modeling others or
  through reinforced or rewarded.

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Reciprocal Determinism Three Factors Shape
Personality

• Bandura believed our personality is shaped by the
  interaction between three factors, this model is
  called reciprocal determinism.
• The three factors are
• Thoughts or cognitions
• The environment
• A persons behaviors

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Reciprocal Determinism
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How do our feelings of personal control affect
our behavior?

• Locus of Control Two Types
• 1. External locus of control
• 2. Internal locus of control

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External Locus of Control

• The perception that chance, or forces beyond a
  persons control, control ones fate
• Example When you try to get a job, its not
  what you know that matters, but who you know.

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Internal Locus of Control

• The perception that we control our own fate
• Example If you want to be a success, depend on
  hard work, not luck.

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Internal vs. External Control

• People with an internal locus of control are
• - healthier
• - cope better with stress
• - are less likely to be depressed

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Learned Helplessness

• The hopelessness and passive resignation an
  animal or human learns when unable to avoid
  repeated bad events
• Martin Seligman studied dogs that were unable to
  escape a painful stimulus and eventually stopped
  trying to escape.

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Learned Helplessness
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Positive Psychology

• Seligman leads the positive psychology movement,
  which focuses on how we can function at optimal
  levels and on the factors that help us to reach
  those levels.

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Optimistic Explanatory Style

• When something goes wrong the person explains the
  problem as
• Temporary
• Not their fault
• Something limited to this situation

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Pessimistic Explanatory Style

• When something goes wrong the person tends to
• Blame themselves
• Catastrophize the event
• See the problem as beyond their control

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Assessing Personality

• Social-cognitive perspective would stress putting
  people into simulated actual conditions to
  determine how they would behave
• They use experiments
• They look at the persons past behaviors to
  predict the persons future behaviors.

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Evaluating Social-Cognitive Perspective

• Positive Objective and easily tested
• Negative - Fails to consider the influence of
  emotions and motivation on behavior

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The End