Introduction to Personality

Ceri Sims

(Funder, 2010, p. 743)

Personality psychologists are concerned with the consistent patterns of thoughts, feelings and behaviours that differentiate people from each other. Personality traits form the conceptual bedrock of personality psychology. Without traits, people would be inconsistent and unpredictable. We would have no means of deciding whom to choose as our best friends, work alliances or business leaders because people would be behaving randomly. Some differential psychologists also call themselves trait theorists. Adopting the position of a trait theorist usually goes beyond the assumption that people have enduring dispositions that predict their behavioural patterns. It also assumes that there are a limited and small set of core traits that can be measured using psychometric methods involving the construction and validation of questionnaires and personality tests. The continuing appeal of this approach is threefold; first, it has generated a wealth of research; second, it has expanded our conceptualisation about the personality characteristics that describe people throughout the world; third, it enables quantifiable measurement of personality traits that can be used to predict various important facets of human functioning. These measurements include happiness, marital success, job performance and longevity.

Explanations of human personality have a long tradition of theorising that stands outside the mainstream of trait approaches. Furthermore, modern perspectives, such as positive psychology, recent conceptual leaps in cognitive psychology and the emergence of modern psychodynamic viewpoints, are offering alternative ways of conceptualising and measuring people’s characteristics and each has a different focus. In fact, having a variety of theoretical perspectives is valuable for understanding something as vital to humanity as personality. Not surprisingly, we still await the discovery of that single grand theory that can tell us everything we need to know about how a person’s feelings, thoughts, actions, interactions, motives and preferences make up his or her complete personality. Therefore, while each approach has its merits and limitations, it is quite reasonable to ‘sit on the fence’ and not feel any obligation to choose one perspective as being the right one. Indeed, in this chapter, the point being made is that it is advisable to consider that there may be both conscious and unconscious routes to personality development; that examining one’s motivation for growth and development need not contradict those views that focus on people’s conflicts within the psyche; and that measuring one’s traits as behavioural patterns does not negate the importance of exploring and understanding both the cognitive processes and neurological activities underlying those patterns. Moreover, just because many theorists and researchers of differential psychology concentrate on knowing more about those important human traits that appear to be universal, this does not undermine the significance of examining how the broader culture and experience can account for wide inter-individual differences. Major life experiences and deliberate self-development can promote intra-individual changes in people’s personality traits at different phases across their lives. Thus, each of the different perspectives has something useful and important to offer in aspiring towards a complete picture of the multifaceted psychological constituents that make people different from each other and that define who they are as unique individuals.

Culture and personality research is the comparative study of the connections between individuals (their behavior patterns and mental functioning) and their environments (social, cultural, economic, political). This broad field could be assigned a more compact label such as psychosocial studies or broken down into disciplinary components such as psychological anthropology, cross-cultural psychology and trans-cultural psychiatry. I prefer culture and personality because, as the original term for this interdisciplinary area, it emphasizes the continuity between the pioneering work of its founders some 40 years ago and the conception of the area presented in this book. The important questions they identified in the borderlands between psychology, psychiatry, and the social sciences remain the defining characteristics of the field and set the course for contemporary theory and research.

The terms culture and personality have acquired such diverse meanings in common speech and scientific discussion that it is necessary to indicate at the outset what I mean by them and related terms. In anthropology, culture is an omnibus term designating both the distinctively human forms of adaptation and the distinctive ways in which different human populations organize their lives on earth. Humans are seen as having a common set of adaptive goals, many of which they share with other animals, but as having the unique capacity to achieve them through acquired behavioral characteristics (patterns of culture) that can vary widely from one population to another. At this level of discourse, culture is often defined against the background of the physical and biological environment to which a human population must adapt in order to survive. But culture can also be seen as constituting an environment for members of a population, and it is in this sense that the term is used here. The individuals in a human population do not adapt directly and simply to their physical and biological environment but to the cultural (or sociocultural) environment that includes means for their individual survival and guides their adaptation along established channels. I use the term culture

When we meet someone for the first time, we often form immediate impressions based on very limited information. Perhaps the clothes they are wearing, the way they talk or even the firmness of their handshake will start to form a picture in our mind about what this person might be like. If we continue to get to know the person, it is more likely that we will adapt our first impressions and begin to base our estimation of the person on his or her more consistent and enduring ways of behaving. So personality refers to the unique characteristics that determine and influence how people act and behave.

The sort of experience described above is the focus of this particular chapter; the implications of individual personality, the process of perception and how we form attitudes hold much relevance for organizational life.

There is much debate centred on whether personality is inherited (nature) or developed in response to environmental conditions (nurture). Which side of the debate would you support, and why?

All individuals are unique, but although we are all different, we all share several things. Research into personality has provided a fascinating wealth of material about which there remains controversy and debate. This chapter will attempt to provide a snapshot of the varying explanations of personality to whet the reader's appetite.

The study of personality dates back to the Middle Ages, when the first examples of personality theory suggested that personality was linked to our physiological make-up and the balance of our bodily fluids. People were characterized as having a cheerful, energetic and lively personality if they had a greater amount of blood, while those with a higher level of phlegm were said to be typically calm and placid. Those with a lot of ‘black bile’ were classified as gloomy individuals, and those with more yellow bile were said to be aggressive and hasty. This sort of approach to personality attempted to provide a classification or typology system in which every individual could fit. Since then, other researchers, such as Sheldon (1954), have attempted to produce typologies of personality, using bodily shape as an indicator of personality type, with the mesomorph (athletic, muscular people), endomorph (plump, rounded people) and ectomorph (thin, fragile people) being the main indicators.

Relatedly and, given their specific performance roles, the individual performer experiences particular personality states and manifests certain personal actions. These experiences form a distinct pattern of functioning, that will vary, somewhat, given time, situation, and circumstance.

Personality has been the subject of theory development and research for many decades, across a range of disciplines (Reville, 1995). This has occurred most notably in personality psychology and social psychology and also to a lesser degree in sport psychology (Allen et al., 2013).

What is psychology?

Sarah E. Hampson Oregon Research Institute, USA

1. The construction of personality
2. The origins of the constructivist approach to personality
3. The actor in personality construction
4. The observer in personality construction
5. The self in personality construction
6. The structure of constructed personality
7. The dynamics of personality construction
8. Summary and conclusions
9. Further reading
10. References

Learning about personality psychology can be a bewildering instead of an enlightening experience. The typical introductory personality textbook is an anthology of theories in which many different ways of viewing human nature are advanced. Indeed, the gamut of theory in personality is probably wider than for any other aspect of psychology. Personality theories can be grouped according to their underlying similarities (e.g., into trait theories, psychodynamic theories, or phenomenological theories) but within these broad categories there is still much room for variation.

However, one feature common to the majority of personality theories is the emphasis on the individual. The underlying assumption is that the appropriate unit of analysis for personality psychology is the person. Every individual "has" a personality that can be described, perhaps measured, and maybe even changed, by working with the person to whom this personality "belongs". This chapter proposes a different view in which several perspectives on the person are taken into account. According to the constructivist approach, personality is constructed in the course of social interaction from a person's self-presentation, the perception of this presentation by an audience, and self-awareness. These three components of constructed personality will be referred to as the actor, the observer, and the self-observer.

The goal of this chapter is to introduce the reader to the richness and variety of personality psychology by viewing personality as a social construction. The constructivist approach is a metatheory (a theory about theories) of personality. Psychology has tended to study the contributions of the actor, observer, and self-observer as separate fields of inquiry. The actor has been studied in personality psychology, the observer in social psychology, and the self in social and clinical psychology. In this chapter, these three topics will be integrated under one theoretical umbrella. Thus, the constructivist approach provides a framework for the multitude of personality theories, as well as for aspects of social psychology that have been studied independently and yet are closely related to personality psychology.