When Allport published his psychological study
of traits in 1936, he found 18,000 words in the English dictionary to describe personal qualities. Yes, that’s right, 18,000! Now, Allport’s interest in personality focused on the uniqueness of each individual, which means he took an idiographic approach to personality. That’s spelt I-D-I-O-G-R-A- P-H-I-C. So, although he accepted that people could be compared by their common traits, he was more concerned with describing individuals.
In contrast, Eysenck and Cattell took a
nomothetic approach, which means they focused on discovering which traits were common to all the individuals in a particular group. They both aimed to produce scientifically reliable research using the technique of factor analysis. Factor analysis is a statistical method for identifying patterns in large numbers of responses to questionnaires. But I should mention that although Eysenck and Cattell took a similar approach, they differed in important ways. While Eysenck used factor analysis to produce a simple two-dimensional model of personality, Cattell used a multivariate method of factor analysis because he thought personality was more complex, and that many traits interacted with each other. So, on one hand, it could be argued that two dimensions … extroversion and introversion … are enough to create a framework for classifying personalities. Whereas, on the other hand, Cattell concluded that there were sixteen basic personality traits.
However, it’s true to say that, in spite of Cattell’s
research, the more recent five factor model has become the most widely accepted. This model includes the traits known as the Big Five: extroversion, neuroticism (or introversion), agreeableness, conscientiousness and openness to experience. It is a popular model, and is used nowadays as the basis for many psychometric tests, like the one I mentioned earlier.
Well, that leads me quite neatly on to my next
point … which is how we measure personality. The most widespread method of measuring personality is with carefully designed questionnaires which include questions based on the Big Five personality factors. In order to establish clusters, or patterns, in the responses, some of these questions will overlap, or correlate, with each other. For example, we would expect a person to give the same answer to questions like, ‘Do you like to study alone?’ and ‘Do you find it difficult to concentrate when you study with friends?’ The answers are then scored on a scale for each of the personality factors.
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In terms of practicality, trait theory helps us to
classify people quite quickly, predict what they’re going to do and understand why. From the point of view of staff selection, personality questionnaires are easy to administer. Increasingly, we find them being used in job applications, career advice, aptitude assessments and social networking sites.
A word of caution, though … relying on self-
reporting psychometric tests to assess personality can have serious disadvantages. For instance, people may give the answer they think will give them the highest score; they may misunderstand or misinterpret the question, or the questions may be ambiguous. And on top of that, the data collected on questionnaires can be grouped and interpreted in lots of different ways, which can result in a completely inaccurate picture. Fortunately, there are other ways of profiling personalities. One of these is to collect information about someone from others who know them, and who can describe their performance or behaviour in the past. And another is by direct observation of how they behave when they’re asked to perform specific tasks or take part in a simulation. But, even with these methods, there must be a set of criteria against which to measure behaviour and the Big Five are still the most informative to date.
So far, I’ve been talking about how personality
is defined and measured according to trait theory. But now, I’m going to move on to talk about the social-cognitive and humanist approaches to personality.
Unit 9, Lesson 9.2, Exercise C≤2.10
Part 2 Let’s turn now to social cognitive approaches to personality. In contrast to trait theory, which, as we’ve seen, assumes that we have fairly set patterns of behaviour, social cognitivism claims that our personalities are formed by the dynamic interaction of the individual with their environment. So, social cognitivism conflicts with trait theory because it questions the consistency of our behaviour. It argues that, as the environment changes, so does a person’s behaviour. For example, just going on holiday can turn us into ‘different people’. If we work in a very formal office that discourages us from showing our fun-loving side, our colleagues might think we were rather dull. So, if they met us relaxing on the beach, they would hardly recognize us. Depending on our circumstances, our personalities can seem entirely different. I’m sure you have had that experience yourselves …
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