Psychology
Personality in Psychology
Personality in psychology refers to the unique pattern of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that make up an individual's character. It encompasses traits, attitudes, and behaviors that are relatively stable over time and across different situations. Psychologists study personality to understand how it develops, influences behavior, and impacts various aspects of an individual's life.
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7 Key excerpts on "Personality in Psychology"
- Nick Haslam, Luke Smillie, John Song(Authors)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- SAGE Publications Ltd(Publisher)
- ‘Personality’ is a complicated concept that has had several distinct meanings over the course of history. Within psychology, however, it refers to individual differences in psychological dispositions: that is, enduring ways in which people differ from one another in their typical ways of behaving, thinking, and feeling. These differences often reflect core features of who we are as persons, and are central to our self-concepts.
- This understanding of personality often excludes individual differences in intelligence and cognitive ability, although these are also of interest to many personality psychologists.
- In addition, personality psychologists are interested not only in individual differences, but also in the underlying causes or dynamics that explain these differences between people.
- Personality can be loosely distinguished from character (morally-relevant dispositions having to do with self-control, will, and integrity) and temperament (biologically-based dispositions that often involve emotional expression and are present early in life).
- Within psychology, the study of personality is distinctive for its focus on human individuality and its concern for the person as a functioning whole. It differs from social psychology, a neighbouring subdiscipline, by emphasizing the contribution that the person’s internal dispositions make to behaviour, rather than the contribution of the person’s external situation or context.
Further readingMajor reference works
For students wishing to obtain a more thorough and advanced review of personality psychology, the following major handbooks may be of interest:Corr, P. J., & Matthews, G. (2009). The Cambridge handbook of personality psychology. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.John, O. P., Robins, R. W., & Pervin, L.A. (Eds.) (2010). Handbook of personality: Theory and research
eBook - ePub- Donald Pennington(Author)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
Getting you to think about how we use the word ‘personality’ in everyday life has probably led you, correctly, to regard the idea of a definition of personality as rather difficult to achieve. Certainly, any definition, to be of use to psychologists, will have to be at a general, abstract level to encompass such a high degree of diversity. Let us consider a number of definitions offered by highly influential personality psychologists.• Personality is that which predicts what a person will do in a given situation … it is concerned with all the behaviour of the individual, both overt and under the skin (Raymond Cattell).• Personality is the more or less stable and enduring organisation of a person’s character, temperament, intellect and physique, which determines his unique adjustment to his (or her) environment (Hans Eysenck).• Personality is the dynamic organisation within the individual of those psychophysical systems that determine his unique adjustments to his (or her) environment (Gordon Allport).These three definitions have five aspects in common and have been taken from an article that appeared over 40 years ago (Sanford, 1963). First, there is an emphasis on the idea that each person has a unique personality. Even identical twins, who have exactly the same genetic make-up, have different personalities – although they probably also have more in common than unrelated people (Plomin, 1994). Second, there is an assumption that accurate knowledge of a person’s personality will allow prediction of their future behaviour to be made. Third, personality is concerned with the whole person in terms of behaviour, thought and feelings. Fourth, the personality of an individual helps them, to a greater or lesser extent, to adjust to their environment. Different people may adjust well and be successful in their work and personal lives. Others may adjust less well and experience mental problems, such as anxiety and stress, as a result. Finally, personality is said to be ‘dynamic’, by which is meant that whilst stable and enduring it is also subject to change over the life of a person. For example, research has shown that as people get older they become more conservative and less socialist in their political outlook (Eysenck and Eysenck, 1985).
eBook - ePubPsychology at the Turn of the Millennium, Volume 2
Social, Developmental and Clinical Perspectives
- Lars Backman, Claes von Hofsten(Authors)
- 2002(Publication Date)
- Psychology Press(Publisher)
Yet other interests focus on the properties of the mind and on the experiences that allow individuals to play a proactive role in nurturing nature, in selecting and transforming the environments they encounter, and ultimately in charting their own lives (Bandura, 1999, 2001; Caprara & Cervone, 2000). Thus personality is conceived as an integrated proactive system whose development and functioning results from various subsystems operating with different degrees of interdependence, and through continuous and reciprocal interactions with the environment (Bandura, 1986, 1999; Caprara, 1996; Caprara & Cervone, 2000; Cervone & Shoda, 1999; Magnusson, 1999; Magnusson & Stattin, 1998). Multiple biological and psychological structures, behavior, and the environment all operate as interacting determinants of what personality is at any moment within a network of reciprocal causation. As the relative influence of one or another personality determinant varies in different individuals, activities, and circumstances, individual development and functioning results in a continuous restructuring of the whole system and its subsystems within the boundaries set by biological and social constraints. According to this view the primary goal of personality psychology is to explain how feelings and cognitions resulting from the interaction of individuals with the environment get organized into mental structures which reveal themselves in coherent patterns of purposes and behaviors.COMPETING APPROACHES TO PERSONALITY
Throughout much of its history, personality psychology has been concerned with individual differences in observable variations in styles of behavior, affect, and cognition traceable to a more limited number of dispositional constructs, able to encompass the variety of phenotypic expressions of individuality and to capture the consistent individual differences that are observed.As people exhibit stable patterns of experience and action that distinguish them from one another, traits have been posited to account for the tendencies to exhibit one versus another class of responses across different settings. As traits are differentially relevant across situations and their expression is differentially sensitive to social contexts, various traits attest to the consistency of personality in various degrees depending upon their generalizability (across individuals), pervasiveness (across situations), and stability (across time). This has led dispositional theorists to conceive personality as a hierarchical organization and to focus on high-level traits (e.g., extraversion) which organize lower-level tendencies (e.g., sociability) which in turn supervise lower-level behavioral habits (e.g., talkativeness) (Eysenck, 1970).
eBook - ePub- Robert Hogan(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Psychology Press(Publisher)
1What Is Personality Psychology? Defining the Key Issues and ConceptsPersonality psychology concerns the nature of human nature. It answers three general questions: (a) How and in what ways are we all alike; (b) how and in what ways are we all different; and (c) why do we (as individuals) do what we do? Why should anyone be interested in personality psychology? There are three reasons. The first is pragmatic: Because other people are the most consequential, helpful, and dangerous parts of the environment in which we live, it seems sensible to have some understanding of these (often) dark forces. Second, without a theory of some sort, it is difficult to make sense out of the world. All of us have more or less well articulated theories of human nature, but these theories are almost surely in need of some maintenance and even repair. We need to understand personality to make sense of the personal, business, and political worlds in which we live. Third, true change depends on understanding how the world works. If we want to improve our lives, relationships, careers, business organizations, or societies, we need as accurate a view of human nature as we can devise.This volume has two overarching goals. The first is to present a relatively systematic perspective on personality, based on many years of reading, research, and reflection. The second is to use this perspective to understand managers and business organizations. In my view, the success or failure of organizations, ranging in complexity from the family to the multinational corporation and the modern nation-state, depend crucially on the personalities of the persons in charge of the organizations. In a sense, then, this is a book about organizational theory from a blatantly reductionist perspective—I want to explain the dynamics of organizations in terms of the personalities of the key actors. Most people who work in and try to manage real organizations understand how important it is to have the right person in the right job, and this understanding is a tacit acknowledgment of the significance of personality.
eBook - ePubPersonality, Design and Marketing
Matching Design to Customer Personal Preferences
- Gloria Moss(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
The first section in this chapter compares the viewpoint that traits are an inclusive set of dispositions shared by all people against a different viewpoint that an individual’s underlying traits are exclusive to only that particular person. The mainstream trait approach largely adopts the former perspective, and this is compared to the view of personality as being essentially idiosyncratic rather than comparable across every one of us. In the second section, the comparison is made between psychodynamic perspectives (that tend to focus on unresolved early life experiences and the unconscious mind) and cognitive theories (that examine the largely consciously accessible thinking habits that make people who they are). The third section addresses the issue of the role of biology versus experience on personality, examining evidence of inherited temperamental differences between individuals and discussing how experience and nature interact in the development of personality across the lifespan. The fourth section of the chapter discusses a set of theories and research about personality that can be subsumed under the umbrella of positive psychology. Historically, personality theorists have often also been clinicians with an interest in personality pathology. Positive psychology strays from this tradition by considering the overarching driving force of human nature as leaning towards healthy personality development and flourishing.Are there universal personality traits or are people unique?
Most definitions of the term ‘traits’ mention that they are consistent and stable patterns of thoughts, feelings and behaviours that differentiate people from each other. Therefore it is safe to say that we can think of the collection of individual traits that one possesses as being the linchpin of one’s personality. The major difference between different factions of personality researchers and theorists is whether to identify a set of universal traits against which people can be compared or whether to focus on a person’s own underlying personality traits as particular to his or her own unique psychological make-up. Psychologists who call themselves trait theorists are usually interested in the former, identifying dispositions that apply to everyone to some extent. This is also known as the nomothetic approach to measuring personality. The idiographic approach, by contrast, emphasises the uniqueness of individual features as being most important. Those who use idiographic methods regard the underlying traits of individuals as being specific to their own set of personal experiences, values and attitudes. On the whole, it is humanistic, psychodynamic and social-cognitive researchers who choose this latter approach.Trait theorists are concerned with ways of measuring a person’s underlying dispositions or traits or are interested in assessing differences in a set of core trait dimensions in order to predict individual differences in a variety of outcomes. Research has been extensive in this regard, examining the relationship between personality traits and various measures of life choices, social roles, achievement levels and areas of satisfaction, ranging very widely from examples such as personality influences on healthy lifestyles (e.g. Hampson et al., 2006; Ozer and Benet-Martinez, 2006) and personality characteristics in the use of online social networking sites (Correa, Hinsley and De Zuniga, 2010) to examining the traits of Mount Everest climbers (Egan and Stelmack, 2003). The assumption is that we can identify a small set of universally important traits that can be measured in everyone when making predictions about outcomes. This perspective also adopts particular methods of investigation and measurement. One such method has been the lexical approach, which assumes that the trait terms appearing frequently in natural language across cultures are just those terms that are candidates for a universal taxonomy of personality traits. For example groundbreaking research in the 1930s by Allport and Odbert (1936) discovered 17,953 trait terms in the English dictionary, from which 4,500 stable traits were identified, which included adjectives such as aggressive, honest and i ntelligent
eBook - ePubCompanion Encyclopedia of Psychology
Volume One
- Andrew M. Colman(Author)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
The emphasis on the actor in past personality psychology is the result of the view that personality in some sense "resides" within the individual. This view has been pursued through biological, psychodynamic, and trait theories. This position is most easily appreciated in a biological approach to personality, such as Eysenck's (see Eysenck, 1967, 1991). The idea that personality has a biological substrate is as old as the ancient Greek theory of the four humours. According to Eysenck, personality may be reduced to three biologically based dimensions of individual variation: extraversion, neuroticism, and psychoticism.In his biological theory of extraversion, Eysenck (1967) claimed that differences in degrees of extraverted behaviour are the result of functional differences in a particular structure in the brain. Specifically, he related extraversion to the ascending reticular activating system, which is a part of the brain known to be associated with cortical arousal. He theorized that introverts are characteristically more aroused than extraverts, and that the same stimulus will produce a greater increase in arousal for introverts than for extraverts. This difference in biology translates into the introvert's behavioural tendency to avoid stimulation (e.g., to prefer a quiet dinner to a noisy party), and the extravert's stimulus-seeking behaviour (e.g., to prefer adventurous activities to staying home with a good book). Evidence for this particular biological basis of extraversion is, however, inconclusive. Nevertheless, there have been significant advances since the mid-1980s in our understanding of the genetics of personality. As a result of large-scale twin, adoption, and family studies, it is now widely concluded that about 50 per cent of the variance in self-report personality measures may be accounted for by heredity (Loehlin, Willerman, & Horn, 1988).The investigation of the biological basis of personality and its genetic determinants is just one approach to the study of the actor. There are many other approaches that do not investigate biological or genetic determinants. Hypothetical personality structures – such as Freud's id, ego, and superego, or Cattell's 16 personality factors (Cattell, Eber, & Tatsuoka, 1970) – are postulated to be located within the individual, even though they are not identified with any particular biological substrate. The range of conceptualizations of the structure of personality is partly the result of a diversity of opinion as to what the basic unit of analysis for personality should be.
eBook - ePubPersonality and Intelligence at Work
Exploring and Explaining Individual Differences at Work
- Adrian Furnham(Author)
- 2008(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
- Cognitive or biological-based traits are measured. For instance, some “traits” or personality dimensions are quite clearly conceived of in cognitive terms, e.g. belief systems such as conservatism (Wilson, 1973) or attributional styles. These cognitive traits refer to the way people perceive the world, or attribute the cause of their own or others’ behaviour. On the other hand, some traits, e.g. extraversion (Eysenck, 1967) or sensation-seeking (Zuckerman, 1979), are conceived of in biological terms such that the person’s behaviour is a function of biological differences. Both approaches seem equally popular.
- “Normal” and “Abnormal” traits can be measured. For instance, some traits are clearly conceived of in terms of abnormal behaviour like depression, psychopathy or hypochondriasis, which measures some aspect of “abnormal” behaviour that, though valid and indeed at times quite relevant to work-related behaviours, seem less useful than “normal” traits, because many working people do not exhibit these traits to any degree. This is, however, not true of neuroticism, which is very common.
- Dynamic vs. Stylistic traits. This is the distinction made between Freudian/neo-Freudian ideas (such as the oral or anal personality, which supposedly measure deep-seated, possibly unconscious, needs and fears) and stylistic traits, which do not presume the same aetiology (in childhood) or processes. To date, however, very few Freudian personality tests have been applied to the workplace save perhaps Kline’s (1978) work on the oral and anal personality.
The basic tenet of this “classic personality theory” approach is to measure personality as the independent variable and see how it correlates with some (often rather arbitrarily chosen) work-related behaviour. In criticism of this approach, it should be pointed out that:
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