Ch. 3 personality

Words that describe traits, attributes of a person that are characteristic of a person and perhaps enduring over time

How should we conceptualize traits?

How can we identify which traits are the most important from among the many ways that individuals differ?

How can we formulate a comprehensive taxonomy of traits—a system that includes within it all the major traits of personality?

traits as internal causal properties

traits as purely descriptive summaries

Traits are presumed to be internal in that individuals carry their desires, needs, and wants from one situation to next

Desires and needs are presumed to be causal in that they explain behavior of individuals who possess them

Traits can lie dormant in that capacities are present even when behaviors are not expressed

Scientific usefulness of viewing traits as causes of behavior lies in ruling out other causes

Traits as descriptive summaries of attributes of a person; no assumption about internality, nor is causality assumed

Argue that we must first identify and describe important individual differences and subsequently develop casual theories to explain them

Designed to identify which acts belong in which trait categories

involves identifying which aces are most central or prototypical of each trait category

Securing information on actual performance of individuals in their daily lives

-Does not specify how much context should be included in the description of the trait-relevant act

- Seems applicable to overt actions, but what about failures to act or covert acts not directly observable?

-May not successfully capture complex traits

-Atheoretical

nothing within approach provides guide to which traits are important or explanation for why individuals differ in frequency of act performance over time

- Helpful in making explicit the behavioral phenomena to which most trait terms refer

- Helpful in identifying behavioral regularities

- Helpful in exploring the meaning of some traits that are difficult to study, such as impulsivity and creativity

• - lexical approach
• - statistical approach
• - Theoretical approach

Starts with lexical hypothesis: All important individual differences have become encoded within the natural language over time

Trait terms are important for people in communicating with others

Synonym frequency

Cross-cultural universality

Many traits are ambiguous, metaphorical, obscure, or difficult

Personality is conveyed through different parts of speech (not just adjectives), including nouns and adverbs

Starts with a large, diverse pool of personality items


Goal of statistical approach is to identify major dimensions of personality

Identifies groups of items that covary or go together, but tend not to covary with other groups of items

Provides means for determining which personality variables share some property or belong within the same group

Useful in reducing the large array of diverse traits into smaller, more useful set of underlying factors

Factor loading: Index of how much of a variation in an item is “explained” by a factor

Cautionary note: You only get out of factor analysis what you put in; thus, researchers must pay attention to the initial selection items

• Starts with a theory, which then determines which variables are important
• Example: Sociosexual orientation

Strengths coincide with strengths of a theory, and weaknesses coincide with the weaknesses of a theory

- Model of personality based on traits that Eysenck believed were highly heritable and had psychophysiological foundation

- Three traits met criteria: Extraversion-Introversion (E), Neuroticism-Emotional Stability (N), Psychoticism (P)

High scorers like partiers, have many friends, require people around to talk to, like playing practical jokes on others, display carefree, easy manner, and have a high activity level

High scorers are worriers, anxious, depressed, have trouble sleeping, experience array of psychosomatic symptoms, and over-reactivity of negative emotions

High scorers are solitary, lack empathy, often cruel and inhumane, insensitivity to pain and suffering of others, aggressive, penchant for strange and unusual, impulsive, and has antisocial tendencies

- Super traits (P, E, N) at the top

- Narrower traits at the second level

- Subsumed by each narrower trait is the third level—habitual acts

- At the lowest level of the four-tiered hierarchy are specific acts

- Hierarchy has the advantage of locating each specific, personality-relevant act within increasingly precise nested system

- Heritability: P, E, and N have moderate heritabilities, but so do many other personality traits

- Identifiable physiological substrate

Many other personality traits show moderate heritability

Eysenck may have missed important traits

Believed that the true factors of personality should be found across different types of data, such as self-reports and laboratory tests

Some personality researchers have failed to replicate the 16 factors

Many argue that a smaller number of factors captures important ways in which individuals differ

- Started with the lexical assumption

- Argued that trait terms specify different kinds of ways in which individuals differ: Interpersonal, temperament, character, material, attitude, mental, and physical

- Wiggins was concerned with interpersonal traits and carefully separated these out

- Defined “interpersonal” as interactions between people involving exchanges

love and status

Provides an explicit definition of what constitutes “interpersonal” behavior

Specifies relationships between each trait and every other trait in the model (adjacency, bipolarity, orthogonality)

Alerts investigators to “gaps” in work on interpersonal behavior

Interpersonal map is limited to two dimensions—other traits may have important interpersonal consequences

• 1. Surgency or Extraversion
• 2. Agreeableness
• 3. Conscientiousness
• 4. Emotional Stability
• 5. Openness/Intellect

lexical and statistical approach