Transcript≤2.9 Part 1
Good morning, everyone. I’m going to talk to you this morning about personality, and in particular, about how it is defined and measured. To start with, we’ll look at three different theories … trait theory, social cognition and humanism. I’ll talk about trait theory first, and outline some of the ways traits are measured. After that, I’ll describe the social cognitivist and then the humanist approaches to personality, then I’ll give you a summary of the major differences between the three theories. At the end, I’ll talk briefly about genes, environment and personality.
But before we begin, I have a little story to tell you
… I once worked for a small company that was looking for a new person to work in their human resources department. The company put a psychometric test (a test that creates a personality profile) on its website for potential candidates to complete. Based on this test, they invited several people for interview and offered the position to the person who seemed to have the best qualifications and personal qualities for the job. However, about a month after the new person started work, it became obvious that he didn’t get on with anyone else in the team. Well … in staff meetings, which were fairly light-hearted affairs … the manager noticed that the new person wasn’t joining in at all. So she started to keep an eye on how he related with the rest of the team in other situations. And, in the end, … she realized that he simply had no sense of humour.
Of course, the point of that story is that scientific
tests can’t find out everything about a person’s character. Other factors … for example, relating to people in different situations, will also affect their behaviour.
So, to get back to the main topic – trait theory. What
exactly is a trait? Well, it’s a pattern of behaviour that’s consistent enough for us to be able to say that a person has a tendency to act or react in a certain way. For example, being optimistic is a trait, or always looking on the bright side is a trait. Trait theorists believe that we all have fairly constant aspects of our personality which aren’t very likely to change.
OK, first of all, let’s take a few moments to
consider how trait theory developed. The main trait theorists are Allport, Eysenck and Cattell. Allport’s focus was different from that of the other two, although as we shall see when we discuss the main differences between their approaches.
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
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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 the 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.
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.
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