Thinking About Psychology

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Thinking About Psychology

The Science of Mind and Behavior 3e

Charles T. Blair-Broeker & Randal M. Ernst

PowerPoint Presentation Slides by Kent Korek

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Trait and Social-Cognitive

Perspectives on Personality

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Module Overview

• The Trait Perspective

• The Social-Cognitive Perspective

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Trait

• Aspects of personality that are

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Personality

• An individual’s characteristic pattern

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Social-Cognitive Perspective

• A perspective stating that

understanding personality involves

– considering how people are affected

by a particular situation,

– by what they have learned, – by how they think and

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The Trait Perspective

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Ancient Greek Traits

• Ancient Greeks classified four

personality traits

– Sanguine (cheerful)

– Melancholic (depressed) – Choleric (irritable)

– Phlegmatic (unemotional)

• Felt these were caused by humor (body fluids)

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The Trait Perspective:

Identifying Traits

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Gordon Allport (1897-1967)

• American

psychologist and trait theorist who

researched the idea that individual

personalities are unique.

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Gordon Allport (1897-1967)

• Stressed importance of

studying mentally healthy people

• Resisted the idea of finding “personality

law” that would apply to everyone

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Raymond Cattell (1905-1998)

• English psychologist who

researched whether some traits predicted others; he

• proposed 16 key

personality dimensions or factors to describe

personality.

• Each factor was measured on a continuum

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Hans Eysenck (1916-1997)

• German psychologist

who researched the

genetically influenced dimensions of

personality,

• including introversion

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The Trait Perspective:

The “Big Five” Traits

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The “Big Five” Traits

• Conscientiousness

• Agreeableness

• Neuroticism (emotional stability vs. instability)

• Openness

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The Trait Perspective:

Testing for Traits

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Personality Inventories

• Questionnaires (often with true-false or

agree-disagree items) on which people respond to items designed to gauge a range of feelings and behaviors;

• used to assess selected personality traits.

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Validity

• The extent to which a test measures

or predicts what it is suppose to test.

• Personality inventories offer greater validity than do projective tests (e.g. Rorschach; used by proponents of the humanistic perspective).

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Reliability

• The extent to which a test yields

consistent results, regardless of who gives the test or when or where it is given.

• Personality inventories are more reliable than projective tests.

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MMPI

• Minnesota Multiphasic Personality

Inventory (MMPI)

• The most widely researched and clinically

used of all the personality tests;

• originally designed to identify emotional

disorders (still considered the most

appropriate use), this test is now used for many other screening purposes.

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MMPI-2

• Revised and updated version of the MMPI • Assesses test takers on 10 clinical scales

and 15 content scales

• Sometimes the MMPI-2 is not used as it was intended.

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The Trait Perspective:

Evaluating the Trait

Perspective

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Evaluating the Trait Perspective

• Does not take into account how the

situation influences a person’s behavior • Doesn’t explain why the person behaves

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The Social-Cognitive

Perspective

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Albert Bandura (1925-

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• Psychologist who developed the

social-cognitive perspective and

• believed that to understand personality one

must consider the situation and the person’s thoughts before, during, and after an event.

• People learn by observing and modeling others or

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The Social-Cognitive

Perspective:

Interacting With Our

Environment:

Three Influences

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Reciprocal Determinism:

Three Factors Shape Personality

• The mutual influences between

personality and environmental factors.

• An interaction of three factors: – Thoughts or cognitions

– The environment

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The Social-Cognitive

Perspective:

Personal Control

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External Locus of Control

• The perception that

chance, or forces beyond a your control,

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Internal Locus of Control

• The perception that you

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Learned Helplessness

• The hopeless feelings when an animal

or human can’t avoid repeated bad events.

• Martin Seligman studied dogs that were unable to escape a painful stimulus and eventually stopped trying to escape.

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Optimistic Explanatory Style

• When something goes wrong the person explains the problem as:

– Temporary and not their fault

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Pessimistic Explanatory Style

• When something goes wrong the person tends: – to blame themselves and

– to catastrophize the event

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Martin Seligman (1942-

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• American psychologist who researched

helplessness early in his career before turning his interest to optimism;

• he has been the primary proponent of

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Positive Psychology

• A movement in psychology that focuses on

the study of optimal human functioning and the factors that allow individuals and communities to thrive.

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The Social-Cognitive

Perspective:

Assessing Behavior in

Situations

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Assessing Personality

• Social-cognitive perspective would stress putting people into simulated

actual conditions to determine how they would behave

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The Social-Cognitive

Perspective:

Evaluating the

Social-Cognitive Perspective

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Social-Cognitive View

• Draws on learning and cognitive

research

• Fails to consider the influence of