This is an English summary of the book Personality psychology, third edition (Blue book with donuts on it). It contains the literature you need to know for the exam on June 25, 2021.
The summary is fairly easily written and the most important concepts have been highlighted. You can learn well w...
Features of personality make people different from one another and these features usually
take form of adjectives. Adjectives that can be used to describe characteristics of people are
called trait-descriptive adjectives.
Personality is the set of psychological traits and mechanisms within the individual that are
organized and relatively enduring and that influence his or her interactions with, and
adaptions to, the intrapsychic and social environments.
Personality traits are characteristics that describe ways in which people are different from
each other. Traits describe the average tendencies of a person.
Research on personality traits asks four questions:
- How many traits are there?
- How are the traits organized?
- What are the origins of traits?
- What are the correlations and consequences of traits?
Psychological traits are useful for at least three reasons:
1. They help describe people and help understand the dimensions of difference
between people (describing).
2. They help explain behavior (explaining).
3. They can help predict future behavior (predicting).
Psychological mechanisms are like traits, except that the term mechanism refers more to
the processes of personality. Most mechanisms have three essential ingredients: inputs,
decision rules and outputs. A psychological mechanism may make people more sensitive to
certain kinds of information from the environment (input), may make them more likely to
think about specific options (decision rules) and may guide their behavior toward certain
categories of action (outputs).
Our traits and psychological mechanisms are not activated at all times.
Within the individual means that personality is something a person carries with him or
herself over time and from one situation to the next.
Organized means that the psychological traits and mechanisms, for a given person, are not
simply a random collection of elements. Rather, personality is organized because the
mechanisms and traits are linked to one another in a coherent fashion.
Psychological traits are relatively enduring over time, particularly in adulthood and are
somewhat consistent over situations.
In the definition of personality, an emphasis on the influential forces of personality means
that personality traits and mechanisms can an have effect on people’s lives. Personality
influences how we act, how we view ourselves and how we think about the world and
interact with others. The feature of personality is perhaps the most difficult to describe,
because the nature of person-environment interaction is complex.
,2
Selection describes the manner in which we choose situations to enter. We select from what
life offers us, and these choices are a function of personality.
- Evocations: the reactions we produce in others, often quite unintentionally.
- Manipulations: the ways in which we intentionally attempt to influence others.
An emphasis on adaptation conveys the notion that a central feature of personality concerns
adaptive functioning – accomplishing goals, coping, adjusting and dealing with challenges
and problems we face as we go through life.
In addition to our psychical and social environment, we have an intrapsychic environment.
This means ‘within the mind’. We all have memories, dreams, desires, fantasies and a
collection of private experiences that we live with each day.
Personality can be analyzed at three different levels:
- Like all others (the human nature level): need to belong, capacity for love
- Like some others (the level of individual and group differences): variation in need to
belong, men more physically aggressive than woman (group difference)
- Like no others (the individual uniqueness level): Someone’s unique way of expressing
anger of curiosity.
Nomothetic research typically involves statistical comparisons of individuals or groups,
requiring samples of subjects on which to conduct research. This is typically applied to
identify universal human characteristics and dimensions of individual group differences.
Idiographic research typically focuses on a single subject, trying to observe general
principles that are manifest in a single life over time.
Six domains of knowledge about human nature
1. Dispositional domain (traits the person is born with or develops).
Deals centrally with the ways in which individuals are disposed to behave, and why these
dispositions differ from one another. The central goal is to identify and measure the most
important ways in which individuals differ from one another.
2. Biological domain (biological events).
The core assumption is that humans are first and foremost, collections of biological systems
and these systems provide the building blocks for behavior, thought and emotion. Refers to
three areas of research: genetics, psychopsychology and evolution.
3. Intrapsychic domain (conflicts within the person’s own mind)
Deals with mental mechanisms of personality, many of which operate outside of conscious
awareness. Predominant theory here is Freud’s classical grand theory of psychoanalysis.
4. Cognitive experiential domain (personal and private thoughts, feelings, desires,
beliefs and other subjective experiences)
Focuses on cognition and subjective experience such as conscious thoughts, feelings, beliefs
and desires about oneself and others. Also included in this domain is intelligence.
5. Social and cultural domain (social, cultural and gendered positions in the world)
The assumption is that personality is not something that merely resides within the heads,
nervous systems and genes of individuals. Rather, personality affects, and is affected by the
social and cultural context.
6. Adjustment domain (the adjustments that the person must take to the inevitable
challenges of life)
, 3
Refers to the fact that personality plays a key role in how we cope with, adapt and adjust to
the ebb and flow of events in our day-to-day lives.
Theory fulfils three purposes in science:
- Provides a guide for researchers
- Organizes known findings
- Makes predictions
There are five scientific standards for evaluating personality theories:
- Comprehensiveness
Does the theory do a good job of explaining all of the facts and observations within its
domain? Theories that explain more empirical data within their domains are generally
superior to those that explain fewer things.
- Heuristic value
Does the theory provide a guide to important new discoveries about personality that were
not known before?
- Testability
Does the theory render precise enough predictions that personality psychologists can test
them empirically?
- Parsimony
Does the theory contain few premises and assumptions or many? Theories that require
many premises and assumptions to explain a given set of findings are judged to be poorer
than theories that can explain the same findings with fewer premises and assumptions.
- Compatibility and integration across domains and levels
Consistent with what is known in other domains; can be coordinated with other branches of
scientific knowledge.
In the view of the authors an ultimate grand theory of personality psychology will have to
unify all six domains (of knowledge about human nature).
Chapter 2 Personality, assessment, measurement and research design
page 20-31
When deliberating between two people, you might want to know what they say about their
values and attitudes – through a self-report. You might want to know about what others say
about their strengths in dealing with foreign leaders – through an observer report. You also
might want to place the candidates in a more controlled situation and see how each
performs – to acquire test data. Furthermore, you might want to know about certain events
in their lives – life history data.
- Self-report data can be obtained through a variety of means, including interviews
that pose questions to a person and questionnaires. The most obvious reason is that
individuals have access to a wealth of information about themselves that is
inaccessible to anyone else. Unstructured questions: open-ended, Structured
questions: true or false). Limitation: people are not always honest.
- Observer-report data can be obtained through observing. An advantage is that
observers may have access to information not attainable through other sources. A
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