Personality

Psychology

Lecture 1 – Introduction
Warming up

• Use three words/ phrases that describe your personality

• Go to www.menti.com and enter the code 79 52 98 3

OR

• https://www.menti.com/1f5ea0c0
 We are personality psychologists.

Share a lay theory about personality.

With a theory, we seek to do the following …

1. Derive universal principles and mechanisms that can

explain a significant range of personality phenomena

2. Define a realm of personality phenomena and derive

falsifiable hypotheses about them

3. Modify the theory with data – all theories are wrong

4. Put the theory into practice

All models are wrong, but some are useful
George Box
Common issues in personality theories

• Measurement and operationalization of personality

• Static, dynamic, psychodynamic …

• Human universals – developmental trajectory; genetic

blueprint; common taxonomy

• Explain individual differences – how do universal

mechanisms lead to these differences?

• Predictions – life outcomes

 Personality: psychological qualities that contribute to
an individual’s enduring and distinctive patterns of
feeling, thinking, and behaving

The psychological quality differs across theories.

You’ll expect their explanations to be stable though.

Childhood
Mike’s action
experience
Psychological
qualities (e.g.,
personality
constructs)
Mabel’s action Contextual cues
• Philosophy of reductionism

• Units of Analysis [structure]

• Atoms, sub-atoms, energy
• Traits (height, skin color, self-esteem)
• Types (physique, coping style)
• Psychic energy
• Zodiac signs
• Skull shape

Personality theory of people’s physique–

Are plump people more cheerful than slender people?
 Hierarchy of personality units

• Hierarchy

• Superordinate traits à subordinate traits

• Latent traits à observable traits

• General motivational forces à Specific motivated behaviors

Extraversion is a big term

What behaviors/ subordinate traits does it encompass?
A system/ network view on personality
 Theories focus on different processes

• People act and change – personality theories

explain such a process

• Motivation (Tension reduction, self-actualization)

• Unconscious vs. conscious forces

• Behavioral learning history

• Biological mechanisms (neurochemical

imbalance)

• Emotional experiences (shame vs. pride;

vicarious learning)
How does the personality emerge?

• Developmental pattern (a fixed pattern shared by all

people, as in a stage theory?)

• Genetic determinants (e.g., temperaments, genetics)

• Environmental determinants (e.g., culture, social class,

birth order)
Is genetic personality diagnosis possible? Some say yes!
Personality theories develop from/ for/ with
psychotherapies

• To understand people in trouble

• Theorists who were also therapists: Sigmund Freud, Carl

Rogers, George Kelly

• Theories direct the interpretation of problems and the

therapeutic approach

• A good theory is one that leads to positive outcomes

Some issues

• What is human nature?

• Animals
• Animals that think
• God’s creation
• Information-processing units
• Rational economic model
• AI created by aliens
• New gods that define their own meanings
• …
Some issues

• Are we free, or are we programmed beings?

• What if we can program a machine behavior of

which is indistinguishable from real people?

• Consistency vs. variability

• Levels of consistency
• behavior [lower consistency]
• higher-level traits/ distal influences (higher
consistency)

• Person-situation problem/ interaction

Some issues

• Conscious or unconscious influences on personality

• Studies on subliminal priming

• Past, present or future

• Psychoanalytic theory emphasizes the influence of the unconscious

mind and the past

• Other theories emphasize the influence of conscious self-experiences

(e.g., Carl Rogers) and future orientation of people (e.g. George Kelly)
• You can that science?

• Reductionism – As in natural sciences, some theorists

believe it is important to reduce personality into its
components

Reducing substances into Reducing personality into DNAs

subatomic level
Constructs are not physical matters

• Where is your ego?

• Where is your
conscientiousness?

• What is your moral

conscience?
WHAT IS GOING TO BE COVERED IN THIS COURSE?

• Psychoanalytic theory (Lecture 2)

• Phenomenological theories (Lecture 3)

• Trait perspective (Lecture 4, 5, 6)

• Biological perspectives (Lecture 7)

• Behavioral perspective (Lecture 8)

• Cognitive perspective (Lecture 8)

• Social-cognitive theory (Lecture 9)

 COMPATIBILITY TEST

• People have free will Yes/ No

• People are animals Yes/ No

• People are born to be good/ bad Good/ Bad

• Unconscious forces play a major role in personality Yes/ No

• There is an objective reality/ Reality depends on the Objective/
interpretation of people Subjective
• Personality is stable/ malleable Stable/ Malleable

• I think, therefore I am Yes/ No

 Phenomenological

Social Cognitive
Psychoanalytic

Behavioral
Biological
COMPATIBILITY
perspective do TEST

Cognitive
Which you

Trait
affiliate with?

• People have free will ✕ ✓ ✕ ✓ ✓

• People are animals ✓ ✕ ✕/✓ ✓ ✓ ✕ ✕

• People are born to be good/ bad B G ✕ ✕

Unconscious forces play a major
✓ ✕ ✕ ✕
•
role in personality
• Objective reality vs. subjective
interpretation of experiences
SI OR OR SI SI

• Personality is stable/ malleable S M S S/M M M M

• I think, therefore I am ✕ ✓ ✕ ✕ ✓ ✓
Course outline (self-enroll in PSYC2019)

• Assessment components

• Tutorials

• Tests

• Teaching mode
“Data, data, data, I can’t make bricks without clay”

Sherlock Holmes
Data in personality psychology

• “LOTS” of data

• L-data – life history/ life record [marriage, crime]

• O-data – observers [friends, parents, peers]

• T-data – experiments/ standardized testing [reaction time]

• S-data – self-report data [questionnaires filled by the self]

The data of personality psychology
• “LOTS” of data

• Different types of data provide different levels of

information, at different quality

• Data may not agree with each other

• S-data vs. O-data

• T-data vs. [S-data + O-data]

Can you tell the personality of a professor
from their students’ comments?

• Subject 1
• They “tried” to be funny
• Mean, harsh, and horrible; fire them
• Boring

• Subject 2
• They are humorous and make statistics funny and relatable
• Very engaging and enthusiastic about teaching
Submission guideline of
Journal of Research in Personality

“In addition to encouraging substantively and

theoretically novel papers, JRP encourages submissions
that use strong and innovative methodologies, such as
longitudinal studies, diary studies, experiments, or
quasi-experiments, as well as those that use non-self-
report data (e.g., other reports, implicit methods,
narratives [Henry: what about brain data?]). To
broaden the base of published research, JRP further
encourages studies that include non-college students
as participants.”
How could one measure impulsivity as the
LOTS?
Fixed and flexible measures
• Fixed – the same measures are administered to all subjects;
scores are computed in the same way [nomothetic data]

• Is it possible to cover all personality issues in a questionnaire

(construct underrepresentation)?

• Are all items relevant to any person’s personality (construct

overrepresentation)?
I greet my neighbours every day.
 Fixed and flexible measures
• Flexible – unstructured personality tests, revealing the
unique personality of people [idiographic data]

• Instead of assessing participants on a fixed set of values, ask them

what values are most important to them

• I greet everyone in the street; it’s awkward not to!

Which way is a better way to understand a person?

Talking to this person in an unstructured way

Reading this person’ self-report questionnaire responses (what most research

psychologists do)
Personality theory and assessment

• A personality theory informs the issue of interest, which

then guides the format of assessment

• Psychoanalytic – Dream analysis [S-data or O-data?]

• Behaviorism – Effect of learning on behavior [T-data or L-data?]

• Construct theory – Personality built on unique, unshared construct

systems [S-data or O-data?]
Psychometric issues - reliability

• Classical test theory

X=T+E

• T – true score
• X - observed score
• E – random error term that has a mean of 0 and doesn’t correlate with T

• And we get

𝜎!" = 𝜎#" + 𝜎$"

Psychometric issues - reliability

• Reliability expresses the relative influence of true score (T)

and random error (E) on observed score (X)
• Reliable test – much is due to T
• Unreliable test – much is due to E

𝜎"#
𝑟!! = #
𝜎!

• Ways to derive this an estimate of this ratio

• Correlations between items of the same scale (internal reliability)
• Correlations between raters or instances of tests (inter-rater, test-
retest reliability)
Psychometric issues - validity

• Validity – the extent to which observations reflect the construct of

interest (ξ)

1 λ
E X T ξ

S
• Using this diagram, it can be shown that validity cannot exceed
reliability. A test cannot be more valid than how reliable it is (i.e., you
cannot have a valid but unreliable test).
 Example 1 – Climb-a-tree test

Ability of interest – Survival skills in a savanna

Is it a reliable test (same results across time and interpreter?)?

Is it a valid test (does it reflect the ability of interest?)?
 Example 2 – Inkblot test

This Photo by Unknown Author is licensed under CC BY-SA

Theory – The pattern you see will reveal the inner conflict in your personality

Is it a reliable test (same results across time and interpreter?)?

Is it a valid test (does it show the inner conflict?)?
Why are psychometric properties important?

• Personality tests often used as part of employment,

promotion, or admission decisions

MBTI

https://www.vox.com/2014/7/15/5881947/mye
rs-briggs-personality-test-meaningless
• Ch.1,2
BPsych students – let’s talk