This document provides an overview of personality from several perspectives: 1. It defines personality and discusses major theories including Freud's psychosexual stages, trait approaches, and Bandura's social cognitive theory. 2. Trait theories such as Cattell's 16 factors and Eysenck's three factors are evaluated, with evidence supporting a five factor model of openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. 3. Cross-cultural research finds common personality dimensions across cultures, though some perspectives on traits differ between individualistic and collectivistic cultures. 4. Social cognitive theory emphasizes reciprocal determinism between personal factors, environment, and behavior, highlighting concepts

1. CHAPTER 12:
WHAT DOES PERSONALITY LOOK
LIKE?
• Theory of psychosexual development
• Personality assessment
• Trait approach to personality
• Social cognitive theory

2. What is Personality?
• Child (1968, p. 83):
• “the more or less stable, internal factors that make
one person’s behavior consistent from one time to
another, and different from the behavior of other
people would manifest in comparable situations.”
• Personality is:
• Stable
• Internal
• Consistent
• Different

3. • Personality is the particular combination
of emotional, attitudinal, and behavioral
response patterns of an individual.
Different personality theorists present
their own definitions of the word based on
their theoretical positions
• Personality is made up of the
characteristic patterns of thoughts,
feelings and behaviors that make a person
unique, arising from within the individual
and remaining fairly consistent throughout
life.

4. What is Personality?
• It is generally assumed that personality consists of various
traits, which are “broad, enduring, relatively stable
characteristics used to assess and explain behavior”
(Hirschberg, 1978, p. 45).
• The most popular answer to the question of how many
personality traits humans possess is five.
• Why do individual differences in personality traits exist?
• Perhaps the most obvious answer is that they depend on
each individual’s experiences in life.

5. Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)
• Theory of Psychosexual Development:
• Experiences children have during the first 5 years of
life are very important.
• Personalities develop during this period.
• According this theory, children pass through five
stages:
• Oral stage
• Anal stage
• Phallic stage
• Latency stage
• Genital stage

6. Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)
• There can be serious consequences if a child is
frustrated by receiving insufficient gratification or
excessive gratification at a given stage.
• Either could lead to fixation, in which basic sexual
energy remains attached to that stage during
adulthood.
• When adults experience major problems, they will
show regression, with their behavior resembling how
they behaved when they were a child.

7. Psychosexual Development

8. Evaluation
• Freud put forward the first systematic theory of
personality.
• Adult personality depends in part on the
experiences of early childhood.
• At least some of the personality types suggested
by Freud do seem to exist.
• The notion that individuals with certain types of
personality are more vulnerable than others to
the development of mental disorders is both
powerful and convincing.

9. Personality Assessment
• Four major kinds of personality tests have been
developed:
• Self-report questionnaires
• Ratings
• Objective tests
• Projective tests

10. Personality Tests
• Reliability: the test produces consistent results.
• Validity: the test measures what it is supposed to be
measuring.
• Concurrent validity: the test scores are correlated with a
relevant external criterion or measure of the underlying
construct the test is supposed to be measuring.
• Standardization: giving the test to large,
representative samples of people so the significance
of an individual’s score can be evaluated.

11. Questionnaires
• Most popular way of assessing personality.
• Easy to use.
• Individuals know more about themselves than do other people.
• Problem: individuals may fake their responses.
• Social desirability bias.
• Lie scale.
• Consensual validity involves comparing two kinds of
information:
• Self-report questionnaire scores obtained from participants.
• Ratings of those participants by those who know them well for the
same aspects of personality.

12. Ratings
• Observers provide information about other
people’s behavior.
• Rate different types of behaviors.
• The problem of interpretation.
• Observation takes place in one context.
• This method typically possesses good reliability.

13. Objective Tests
• Measuring behavior under laboratory conditions with the
participants not knowing what the experimenter is
looking for.
• Example:
• Ask participant to blow up a balloon until it bursts as a measure
of timidity.
• The extent to which people sway when standing on tiptoe as a
measure of anxiety.
• Free from deliberate distortion.
• Have low reliability and validity.

14. Projective Tests
• Participants are given an unstructured task to
perform:
• Devising a story to fit a picture.
• Describing what can be seen in an inkblot.
• Rorschach Inkblot Test (see next slide).
• The Thematic Apperception Test.
• Such tests are generally low in both reliability
and validity.

15. An Example of a Rorschach Inkblot

16. Trait Approach
• For many years, there was a major controversy
between two groups of personality researchers.
• In one group (Cattell), it was assumed that many personality
traits resemble each other, because there is no reason to
assume that personality is tidily organized into unrelated
traits.
• In the other group (H.J. Eysenck), it was assumed that
major personality traits are unrelated or independent of
each other. In more technical terms, traits should NOT
correlate or be associated with each other.

17. Cattell’s Trait Theory
• Fundamental lexical hypothesis:
• Each language contains words describing all of the main personality
traits.
• Allport and Odbert (1936):
• Identified 4500 words used to describe personality, which were
reduced to 160 trait words.
• Cattell (1946):
• Added 11 traits from the personality literature in psychology,
producing a total of 171 trait names, which were claimed to cover
almost everything of importance in the area of personality.

18. Cattell’s Trait Theory
• Cattell still found himself with an unwieldy number of
personality traits.
• He used findings previous studies to identify traits that
resembled each other.
• He eliminated more traits, leaving him with 35 traits.
• These were called surface traits, because they were easily
observable.
• Cattell carried out rating studies in which raters assessed
people they knew well.
• These studies suggested that there are about 16 source traits,
which are basic traits underlying the surface traits.

19. Cattell’s Trait Theory
• Cattell 16 Personality Factor Questionnaire (16PF).
• Based on Cattell’s assumption that personality traits are
often associated or correlated with each other, so many of
his 16 factors are closely related.
• In spite of its massive popularity, it provides an inadequate
assessment of personality.
• All systematic factor analyses of this test have shown that it
doesn’t measure anything like 16 different personality traits.
• Key problem is that several factors are very similar.

20. Evaluation
• Cattell’s notion of using the fundamental lexical
hypothesis to assist in uncovering all the main personality
traits is a valuable one.
• Cattell’s attempt to combine information from several
methods (questionnaires, ratings, objective tests) was
thorough and systematic.
• There are only about eight different personality traits in
the 16PF, and so Cattell’s main questionnaire is badly
flawed.
• Cattell’s approach was not very theoretical or explanatory.

21. H.J. Eysenck’s Trait Theory
• H.J. Eysenck (1944) argued that the best strategy is to focus
on a small number of independent personality traits or
factors, all of which are entirely separate from each other.
• Extraversion: Those scoring high on extraversion (extraverts) are
more sociable and impulsive than those scoring low (introverts).
• Neuroticism: Those scoring high on neuroticism are more anxious
and depressed than those scoring low.
• Psychoticism: Those scoring high on psychoticism are aggressive,
hostile, and uncaring.
• According to H.J. Eysenck (1982, p. 28), “genetic factors
contribute something like two-thirds of the variance in major
personality dimensions.”

23. Evaluation
• It has proved more useful to identify a small
number of unrelated or uncorrelated personality
traits than a larger number of correlated ones.
• Extraversion and neuroticism are major
personality traits or factors.
• H.J. Eysenck made a thorough attempt to
explain the mechanisms underlying individual
differences in his three personality factors.

24. Five Factor Theory
• The Big Five
• McCrae and Costa (1985) identified the following
five factors:
• Openness (curious, imaginative, creative).
• Conscientiousness (hard-working, ambitious,
persistent).
• Extraversion (sociable, optimistic, talkative).
• Agreeableness (good-natured, cooperative, helpful).
• Neuroticism (anxious, insecure, emotional).

25. Evidence
• The assumption that the Big Five are all independent of
each other and so are uncorrelated has been tested.
• The evidence indicates that this assumption is incorrect.
• Costa and McCrae (1992) reported that the factors of
neuroticism and conscientiousness correlated −.53 with
each other, and that extraversion and openness
correlated +.40.

26. Evaluation
• The Big Five personality traits have been obtained
repeatedly in self-report and rating data making it
dominant in personality research.
• Genetic factors are of importance in determining
individual differences in all of the Big Five factors.
• Each of the Big Five factors predicts important real-
world behavior.
• Some of the Big Five factors correlate with each
other, and thus are not independent.

27. Cross-Cultural Perspectives
• Studies have focused on Western cultures.
• Detailed analyses of scores on the Eysenck
Personality Questionnaire in 34 countries suggested
that the same three personality factors were clearly
present in all of them (Barrett et al., 1998).
• McCrae et al. (2005) collected rating data for the Big
Five personality factors in 50 cultures. The same five
factors within the same overall structure were found in
nearly all of the cultures studied.

28. Cross-Cultural Perspectives
• The new approach involves using indigenous personality
measures as well as standard Western measures.
• Cheung and Leung (1998) Chinese Personality Assessment
Inventory.
• It has often claimed that we should distinguish between
individualistic (personal responsibility) and collectivistic
cultures (group obligations).
• Norenzayan, Choi, and Nisbett (1999):
• Western cultures regard personality traits as stable.
• East Asians regard traits as much more flexible and changeable.

29. Social Cognitive Theory
• Albert Bandura argued that we need to consider
personal factors, environmental factors, and the
individual’s own behavior.
• Triadic reciprocal causation: personal factors, the
environment, and behavior all influence each other.

30. Self-Efficacy
• Bandura (1977):
• The ability to cope with a particular task or situation
and achieve the desired outcome.
• An individual’s sense of self-efficacy in any given
situation is determined by four factors:
• The individual’s previous experiences in that situation.
• Relevant vicarious experiences.
• Verbal or social persuasion.
• Emotional arousal.

31. Evidence
• Dzewaltowski (1989):
• Self-efficacy measures predicted success in an exercise
program.
• Stajkovic and Luthans (1998):
• Self-efficacy strongly associated with work-related
performance.
• Caprara, Barbaranelli, and Pastorelli (1998):
• The amount of self-efficacy predicted academic
achievement, but the Big Five factors did not.

32. Self-Regulation
• Bandura (1986):
• The use of one’s cognitive processes to regulate and
control one’s own behavior.
• The use of self award if a given standard is achieved.
• Processes involved:
• Self-observation
• Judgmental processes
• Self-reaction

33. Evidence
• Kitsantas (2000):
• People using self-regulation strategies generally
perform better than those who make less use of them.
• Overweight students who didn’t lose weight used
fewer self-regulation strategies.
• Overweight students who didn’t lose weight also had
lower levels of self efficacy.
• See next slide.

34. Evaluation
• Much human behavior is motivated by self-
reinforcement
• Previous theories de-emphasized the role of
internal factors.
• Numerous factors influence self-regulation.
• Theoretically, how does one decide when
external reinforcement is needed and when it is
not?

35. The End