Personality

This is Unit Ten of Psychology: personality. Personality is the enduring pattern of thoughts, feelings and behaviors that distinguishes one person from another — and there are four completely different traditions explaining it, which this unit takes in order. The first explains personality through what a person cannot see about themselves. The second explains it as an accumulated history of what got reinforced. The third through conscious experience and self-concept. And the fourth measures. The measuring tradition contains an error entry worth arriving prepared for. Personality is dimensions, not types. A trait varies continuously across people by degree, and treating it as a set of discrete categories is a mistake — which is a direct verdict on a great many popular personality instruments. And the unit closes on measurement itself, including the effect that explains why a vague description of anybody feels specifically accurate about you. By the end you will be able to do five things. One: name Freud's three structures and what each does. Two: say what a defense mechanism is, and name three. Three: say why personality is dimensions rather than types. Four: name the five factors and what each describes. Five: say what the Barnum effect explains.

Two entries opening the unit. A definition with two requirements in it — enduring, and distinguishing — and then the first of four traditions, which explains all of it through material the person has no access to.

The definition.

Psych 1091 Personality

The enduring pattern of thoughts, feelings and behaviors distinguishing one person from another. Enduring rules out a mood; distinguishing rules out anything everybody does.

The first tradition.

Psych 1093 The Psychodynamic Perspective

Explaining personality through unconscious conflict and early developmental experience. Both halves are inaccessible to the person — which is what makes the tradition hard to test.

Three entries. A model of the mind as three parts that want incompatible things — and the middle one has the job of getting anything done at all while the other two pull in opposite directions.

The first.

Psych 1095 The Id

The unconscious source of basic drives, seeking immediate gratification without regard to consequence. No sense of what is possible, and no sense of what is permitted.

The second.

Psych 1097 The Ego

Mediating between the first structure's demands and reality, delaying gratification to what is achievable. It is the one that has to negotiate.

The third.

Psych 1099 The Superego

Holding internalised moral standards and producing guilt when they are violated. The demands are as absolute as the first structure's and point the other way.

Four entries. When the three structures conflict, the result is anxiety — and the mediating structure has strategies for reducing it, all of which operate without the person's knowledge. Three of them are named here.

The category.

Psych 1101 Defense Mechanisms

Unconscious strategies the mediating structure uses to reduce anxiety arising from internal conflict. Unconscious is the defining feature — a deliberate strategy is something else.

The first.

Psych 1103 Repression

Excluding threatening thoughts or memories from conscious awareness. The most general of the three, and the one the others depend on.

The second.

Psych 1105 Projection

Attributing one's own unacceptable impulses or feelings to another person. The feeling stays and its owner changes.

The third.

Psych 1107 Rationalization

Constructing acceptable explanations for behavior whose real motives are threatening. The explanation is sincere — that is what separates it from an excuse.

Four entries. Freud's developmental claim, and then three theorists who kept the psychodynamic frame and replaced what sits inside it — each one substituting a different central motive.

The stages.

Psych 1109 Freud's Psychosexual Stages

Five childhood stages, with conflict at any of them shaping adult personality. A developmental theory in which the formative period is entirely early.

The first successor.

Psych 1111 Adler and Inferiority

Striving to overcome felt inferiority, and the desire to belong, as the central motives. A different engine in the same chassis.

The second.

Psych 1113 Jung's Collective Unconscious

A collective unconscious containing archetypes — universal symbolic patterns shared across humanity. It makes the unconscious partly common rather than entirely personal.

The third.

Psych 1115 Horney's Basic Anxiety

Personality developing from strategies for managing the basic anxiety of childhood insecurity. Which relocates the formative material from drives to relationships.

Three entries on the second tradition. Personality as the accumulated result of a reinforcement history — Unit Five, applied to a whole person — and then a model where influence runs in three directions at once rather than one.

The approach.

Psych 1117 The Learning Approach to Personality

Personality as the accumulated set of behaviors a person's reinforcement history has produced. Unit Five's mechanism, scaled to a lifetime.

Three-way influence.

Psych 1119 Reciprocal Determinism

Behavior, personal factors and environment each continuously influencing the other two. Which removes the question of whether a person shapes their situation or the situation shapes them.

One belief.

Psych 1121 Locus of Control

The degree to which somebody believes outcomes result from their own actions rather than from outside forces. A belief about causation that predicts behavior.

Three entries on the third tradition. It works with what a person can report rather than what they cannot — self-concept, and the gap between who somebody thinks they are and who they would like to be.

The approach.

Psych 1123 The Humanistic Approach

Explaining personality through conscious experience, self-concept, and the drive toward realising one's potential. Conscious throughout, which is the direct opposite of the first tradition.

The condition.

Psych 1125 Unconditional Positive Regard

Acceptance of a person that does not depend on their meeting conditions of worth. Unconditional is doing the work — the presence of any condition changes what it is.

The measure.

Psych 1127 Congruence and the Ideal Self

The degree of overlap between a person's self-concept and their ideal self. A gap between the two is the quantity this tradition works with.

Two entries on what arrives rather than develops. A pattern of emotional reactivity present from early infancy — before any experience could have produced it — and then what twin and adoption studies find about the traits built on top of it.

From infancy.

Psych 1129 Temperament

The biologically based pattern of emotional reactivity and self-regulation present from early infancy. Early enough that experience cannot be the explanation.

What the studies find.

Psych 1131 Twin and Adoption Studies of Personality

Substantial heritability for major traits, with a large role for non-shared environment. Non-shared — the environmental influence is mostly what siblings do not have in common.

Two entries, and the second is a verdict on a whole industry. A trait varies continuously by degree across people. Treating personality as a set of discrete types is named as an error — which puts most popular personality instruments on the wrong side of a numbered entry.

The unit.

Psych 1133 Traits

A characteristic pattern of behavior varying continuously across people by degree. Everybody has some of every trait, and the question is how much.

And the error.

Psych 1134 The Type Error

Treating personality as a set of discrete types rather than as continuous dimensions. A type assigns you to a box; a dimension gives you a position — and the evidence supports positions.

Four entries, and they are a sequence of narrowing. The trait vocabulary of a language is enormous, and each of these is an attempt to reduce it to something workable — ending at five, which is where the field currently sits.

The first.

Psych 1136 Allport's Trait Levels

Cardinal traits dominating a life, central traits characterising a person, and secondary traits appearing situationally. A reduction by level of importance rather than by count.

The second.

Psych 1138 Cattell's Sixteen Factors

Factor analysis used to reduce the trait vocabulary to sixteen underlying source traits. A statistical reduction — the method decided the number.

The third.

Psych 1140 Eysenck's Dimensions

Personality reducing to a small number of broad dimensions, initially two. A much stronger reduction, and the direction the field went.

And where it settled.

Psych 1142 The Five Factor Model

Personality described along five dimensions — openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. Five is where the reductions converged, from several directions.

Six entries. Each of the five dimensions in turn, and then an entry on what changes across cultures — which is the expression and the emphasis rather than the dimensions themselves.

The first.

Psych 1144 Openness

The tendency toward curiosity, imagination and receptiveness to new experience and ideas. About what a person is drawn toward rather than what they are capable of.

The second.

Psych 1146 Conscientiousness

The tendency toward organisation, persistence and reliability in pursuing goals. It is the dimension that predicts the widest range of outcomes.

The third.

Psych 1148 Extraversion

The tendency toward sociability, assertiveness and seeking stimulation from the social environment. Unit Nine's arousal theory, appearing as a trait.

The fourth.

Psych 1150 Agreeableness

The tendency toward cooperation, trust and concern for others' wellbeing. Three components, and they do not always move together.

The fifth.

Psych 1152 Neuroticism

The tendency toward experiencing negative emotions such as anxiety, sadness and irritability. A tendency toward experiencing them, which is not the same as having a disorder.

And culture.

Psych 1154 Culture and Personality

Personality expression and the traits a culture emphasises vary between individualist and collectivist contexts. The expression varies, which is a narrower claim than the dimensions varying.

Five entries. Two families of instrument, and then the effect that undermines the whole enterprise unless it is controlled for — because a description vague enough to fit anybody reads as specifically accurate to almost everybody.

The first family.

Psych 1156 Self-Report Inventories

Measuring personality through standardised questions the person answers about themselves. Which inherits Unit One's self-report problem in full.

One instrument.

Psych 1158 The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory

A widely used self-report inventory developed for clinical assessment, with built-in scales detecting inconsistent or distorted responding. It answers the previous entry's problem by measuring the responding itself.

The second family.

Psych 1160 Projective Tests

Presenting ambiguous stimuli on the assumption that responses reveal unconscious material. The assumption is stated as an assumption, which is the correct handling.

One instrument.

Psych 1162 The Rorschach

Symmetrical inkblots, with responses scored on content, location and determinants. A scoring system exists — which is a separate question from whether the scores mean anything.

And the effect.

Psych 1164 The Barnum Effect

The tendency to accept vague, broadly applicable personality descriptions as specifically accurate about oneself. It means a person's agreement with a description is close to worthless as evidence that it is right.

Two entries closing the unit. A procedure for producing a trait profile that ends by stating what the profile does not predict — and then one person explained by all four traditions, with attention to what each can actually be tested against.

Watch a profile get scored.

Psych 1166 Scoring a Five Factor Profile

Converting item responses to dimension scores, comparing them to norms, and stating what the profile does and does not predict. The last step is the one that keeps the previous topic's effect out.

The capstone. One person, four theories.

Psych 1168 One Person, Four Personality Theories

Explaining one person's consistent pattern from psychodynamic, learning, humanistic and trait perspectives, then comparing what each can be tested against. Four explanations, ranked by what could refute them.

Five things you can now do. You can name Freud's three structures — one wanting immediate gratification, one negotiating with reality, one holding internalised standards — and say what each does. You can say what a defense mechanism is, and name three: excluding threatening material from awareness, attributing one's own impulses to somebody else, and constructing sincere explanations for threatening motives. You can say why personality is dimensions rather than types — a trait varies continuously by degree, so a person gets a position rather than a box. You can name the five factors and what each describes: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism. And you can say what the Barnum effect explains — that a description vague enough to fit anybody reads as specifically accurate, which makes agreement worthless as evidence.