LECTURE 4: CHAPTER 4 PERSONALITY TRAITS The Idea of a Trait What is a Trait?

?  Personality psychologists consider traits as internal dispositions that are stable over time and across situations  Traits are typically conceived in bipolar terms; they are couched in language of opposites (e.g. one is either highly friendly or highly unfriendly)  Different traits are generally seen as additive and independent; different traits combine as independent ingredients to form the personality  Traits usually refer to broad individual differences in socioemotional functioning  Overall, personality traits refer to individual differences between people in characteristic thoughts, feelings, and behaviors  Traits are typically viewed to reside in a person in some sense as general, global, and stable dispositions  Traits are viewed as comparative dimensions and ones position on a trait continuum is always relative to the positions of others  Personality traits typically refer to consistencies in thought, feeling and behavior associated with social interaction and the socioemotional aspects of life  There are 4 different positions that have been staked out over the years o First position traits literally exist in the central nervous system called neuropsychic structures (casual mechanism in human functioning) o Second position traits exist as dispositions that exert a significant impact on behavior (casual mechanism in human functioning) o Third position act-frequency approach; traits are language categories of discrete behavioral acts; they dont influence behaviors, instead they are behaviors o Fourth position traits do not exist in any objective sense, instead they are convenient fictions that people invent in their efforts to understand social life  The four positions contradict each other in many ways o Contradiction between first and fourth positions logic tells us that traits cannot be neuropsychic structures that cause the behavior of actors if at the same time they are convenient fictions in the minds of observers  Most contemporary personality psychologists view traits are dispositions but they acknowledge that traits line up with certain predictable behaviors A Brief History of Traits  Personality traits have been found in ancient texts (Genesis)  Most ancient system for personality traits is attributed to Galen who developed the theory of the four humors o Blood sanguine personality; bold, confident, robust in temperament o Black bile melancholic personality; depression, anxious, pessimistic, brooding

o Yellow bile choleric personality; restless, irritable, angry o Phlegm phlegmatic personality; aloof, apathetic, cold, sluggish  Galen maintained that a balanced and ideal temperament resulted from a harmonious mixture of the four humors  Kant recast the temperaments along dimensions of activity o Cholerics = strong activity; phlegmatics = weak activity o Sanguines = strong feelings; melancholics = weak feelings  Eysenck recast the four temperaments sprang along two superordinate traits o Extraversion o Neuroticism  Kretschmer and Sheldon developed theory of constitutional psychology o They argued that the bodys constitution was associated with particular personality characteristics o Person with round, soft body with overdevelopment of fat and underdevelopment of bone and muscle is an endomorph (easygoing, affable, very desiring of social approval and oriented towards relaxation and comfort) o Person with thin and bony body with underdevelopment of fat and muscle is an ectomorph (restraint, privacy, introversion, and self-consciousness) o Person with relatively muscular physique is a mesomorph (aggressive, dominant, adventurous, courageous) o Constitutional psychology never focused much on women  The first scientific studies of traits were conducted by Galton who also proposed that important individual differences in personality could be gleaned from language  Allport defined a trait as a neuropsychic structure having the capacity to render many stimuli functionally equivalent and to initiate and guide equivalent forms of adaptive and expressive behavior  Allport insisted that trait labels were more than sementic conveniences  Traits are among the more important causal factors in human behavior; we can infer the existence of traits from observing behavior  By rendering different stimuli functionally equivalent traits account for consistency in human behavior  Existence of a particular trait in a persons life may be ascertained from 3 kinds of evidence: frequency, range and intensity  Common traits are dimensions of human functioning upon which man different people are likely to differ  Personal dispositions are traits that are special characteristics of given individuals and is an instrument for depicting that individuals uniqueness  Personal dispositions can be broken down into varieties o Cardinal disposition general trait; many people may not have any at all or 1-2

   

o Central dispositions wide range of dispositions that are characteristic for a certain person on a regular basis; 5-10 o Secondary dispositions limited and less critical to overall personality; narrower and central; person may have many of these For Cattell, personality was is defined in terms of behavioral prediction Cattell defined personality as that which permits a predictions of what a person will do in a given situation He focused his research attention on common traits Cattell distinguished among 3 sources of data on trait o L-data (life data) info pertaining to a persons real-life behavior; e.g. public records o Q-data (questionnaire data) self-ratings on personality traits and self-report scores on questionnaires o T-data (test data) observations of an individual in a controlled assessment situation Cattell employed factor analysis to derive a complex classification scheme for traits Cattell produced surface traits (elements of behavior that tended to cluster together) Surface traits are observable in behavior Surface traits can be reduced to source traits

   

 Cattell formed the first hierarchical model for trait organization  Traits can be subdivided into 3 functional categories o Dynamic traits sets individual into action to accomplish a goal o Ability traits effectiveness with which the individual reaches a goal o Temperament traits stylistic aspects of response as speed, energy and emotional reactivity  Psychological individuality could be well described in terms of 16 source traits, one of them being intelligence o Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire (16PF) 187 questions  For Cattell the proof of a trait measures value was its ability to predict behavior  To enhance behavioral prediction Cattell combined scores on different traits into a specification equation which weighted each trait according to its relevance for a given behavioral situation  To predict behavior with any degree of precision, the personality psychologist should obtain precise measures on a host of internal and external variables o Personality traits o Temporary states and roles o Situational factors

 Eysenck employed factor analysis to reduce the traits to a reasonable number of dimensions

 He believed that the resultant trait factors obtained from factor analysis should be independent of one another; factors should be arranged so they are uncorrelated or orthogonal to one another  Eysencks big 3 supertraits are o Extraversion-introversion - deal with personality characteristics within a normal range of functioning (similar to humors) o Neuroticism - deal with personality characteristics within a normal range of functioning (similar to humors) o Psychoticism functions associated with psychotic and psychopathic behavior  Longitudinal studies show that individual differences in extraversion-introversion and neuroticism are highly stable over long periods of time especially in adulthood  Eysenck theorized that individual differences in extraversion-introversion are linked to the activity of the brains reticular activating system which itself is implicated in the modulation of arousal  Individual differences in neuroticism might arise from differences in the workings of the brains limbic system The Big Five and Related Models  Galton first proposed the Lexical hypothesis which states that personality descriptions can be found most readily by examining a languages lexicon or words of dictionary  Allport and Odbert went through the English unabridged dictionary and found all the words relating to traits. They found 18,000 and they used 4,500 from those  Cattell reduced the 4,500 to 171 by grouping and eliminating and developed 30-40 clusters of terms and used them for self-report rating scales  The ratings of personality groups can be grouped into 5 basic categories (The Big Five or Five-Factor Model) o Extraversion o Neuroticism o Openness to experience o Agreeableness o Conscientiousness  One of the criticisms for the 5 factor model is that it doesnt specify how particular traits that reside within each of the 5 domains relate to one another o An approach to this is to arrange the descriptors into a circle (interpersonal circumplex) o The interpersonal circumplex is a a circular array of variables organized around the 2 axes of dominance and love o 180 degrees from each other means the words are opposite in meaning; 90 degrees to each other means the words are unrelated  Wiggins developed the circumplx model of traits which bisects the circular space with axes of agency and communion which corresponds to dominance and love  Wiggins wanted agency and communion to be part of the big five model

 Digman factor analyzed correlations from studies and came up with 2 superfactors (Big Two) o Socialization (agreeableness, conscientiousness, and neuroticism) o Growth of the self (extraversion and openness to experience) Measuring Traits Constructing a Trait Measure  Most popular methods to assess traits are self-report questionnaires and rating scales  Personality psychologists endorse and construct approach to test construction  Construct approach begins with a clear definition of the trait of interest embedded in a larger personality theory  After defining the trait, they would write items, which are the test questions or statements (yes-or-no questions)  Adding up all the points would produce a total trait score  In order to prevent yea-sayers and nay-sayers some of the questions must be asked in reverse form  The item pool (the test) would be administered to large number of individuals and examined. A statistical analysis would be performed such as the item analysis or a factor analysis  Finally, the extent to which the trait predicts the behavior would be examined  Convergent validity - evidence for positive associations between different measures of the same trait; the 2 measures converge on the same trait  Discriminant validity trait measure doesnt correlate with measures of other traits Criteria of a Good Measure  Construct validity extent to which a test measures what it says it measures; it is a scientific process  It is the process of simultaneously validating a test and the construct that the test it is measuring  Process of construct validity begins with the construct itself which is embedded in a larger theory of personality functioning  Psychologists design a measure of the construct and observes the extent to which the measure itself produces empirical results that conform to the theory  Each new empirical finding with a personality test contributes to the nomological network for the constructs o Nomological network interlocking system of empirically supported propositions that constitute the theory of a given construct; propositions specify how test performance should be related to particular nontest behaviors  Construct validity thus refers to the extent to which empirical support has been gathered for the propositions contained in the constructs nomological network o Constructs that have generated large amounts of support for propositions is said to have greatest degree of construct validity

 Reliability consistency of a particular personality measure o Test-retest reliability assesses a tests consistency overtime o Split-half reliability a tests internal consistency is assessed by correlating scores on half of the test with half scores from a corresponding test  Utility test that provides practical info that can be used for specific purposes is preferred over one that cannot  Psychologists argue that trait measures should be as free as possible from social desirability bias o A good trait measure should not be influenced by a persons desire to present a favorable or desirable faade Trait Inventories  Psychologists use personality inventories which contain many trait scales  Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) has been the most widely used personality measure  MMPI condenses questions that may be asked in an interview onto paper-pencil questions  There are 10 different scales with 550 statements with options of true or false  MMPI was originally designed for clinical diagnostic instrument  The scores assist in distinguishing psychopathologies  It was constructed by placing various items in different groups and determining which item was endorsed most = criterion-key method  Criterion-key method assumes that a valid scale will consist of items that people whom clinicians have diagnosed regardless of the content of those items and theory  MMPI has been criticized for weak reliability and validity so psychologists developed an MMPI-II  California Psychological Inventory (CPI) was designed to asses broad range of traits for normal people  It was administered to thousands of normal people making a pool of true/false items grouped into 20 scales  These scales show high reliability unlike the MMPI  Criticism with CPI is that many scales overlap and show correlations with each other  Others argue that it taps into common folk concepts of personality o Fold concepts categories of personality that arise naturally out of human interactions  Recent works with CPI has revealed 3 vectors (dimensions) that underlie the specific folk-concept scales o Vector 1 interpersonal orientation o Vector 2 norms and values o Vector 3 ego integration

 Vector 1 and 2 can be crossed to produce 4 lifestyles o Alphas interpersonally involved and rule respecting; do best in leadership and managerial roles (high on vectors 1 and 2) o Betas responsible and more detached and internalized but still rule accepting; function well in subordinate support positions (low on vector 1) o Gammas interpersonally engaged but rebellious or dismissive or rules; adept at creating change o Deltas seek escape from interpersonal world and reject its norms and values; work best in alone fields  Another inventory is the Personality Research Form (PRF)  It contains 320 true/false items making up 20 scales  The scales show much less overlap and have high validity Self-report inventories have been developed to assess the Big Five traits The NEO-PI-R consists of 240 items Each of the Big Five traits are into 6 sub traits called facets Each person receives a score on each of the 6 facets for each of the 5 traits, resulting in an individual profile of 30 scores  Trait and facet scales show good test-retest reliability and split-half reliability      Multidimensional Personality Questionnaire (MPQ) provides scores on 11 scales which are grouped into 3 large factors Personality Traits and Personality Disorders  Personality disorder lasting pattern of behavior and inner experience that markedly deviates from a persons culture and that indicates problems  Lack of impulse control and chronic deficiencies in interpersonal functioning; long term patterns of behavior  American Psychiatric Association has identified 10 different personality disorders  DSM-IV groups the 10 disorders into 3 clusters o Cluster A odd and eccentric patterns of thinking  Schizoid, Schizotypal and Paranoid o Cluster B erratic and impulsive social behavior  Histrionic, Narcissistic, Antisocial, and Borderline o Cluster C highly anxious emotional and interpersonal styles  Dependent, Avoidant, and Obsessive-Compulsive  Schizoid personality disorder is the rarest disorder of personality o Marked by extreme isolation o Split off from normal social relations and little interest in close relationships o Impervious to praise or criticism from others o Emotionally detached and cold

 Schizotypal Personality Disorder o Detached interpersonal style o Eccentric beliefs and behaviors o Odd speech habits, refusal to make eye contact persistently, bizarre clothing o Strange thinking  Paranoid Personality Disorder o Distrustful and suspicious of others o Hostile and combative o Excessively jealous o Has difficult time establishing intimacy, trust, and mutuality in relationships  Histrionic Personality Disorder o Flamboyant dress, sexually seductive behavior o Highly emotional, self-centered, superficiality o Desperate, shallow, and short-lived o Women tend to show this more often than men but not too much; men express this through a macho style  Narcissistic Personality Disorder o Grandiosity o Lack of empathy, need for excessive admiration o In their mind, they are the most brilliant beautiful and gifted  Antisocial Personality Disorder o Most dangerous personality syndrome o Engage in criminal activity, lack of remorse, show little care about others o Tendencies rise early in adolescence and begin to subside after age 30  Borderline Personality Disorder o Instability o Swing from anger/rage to depression, anxiety, guilt, and shame, and back again o Intensely bored and empty o Change their identities from one moment to the next o When others offer them love, they reject their offerings and belittle the people whose care they desire  Dependent Personality Disorder o Highly submissive and passive style o Persistent need to be taken care of by others; excessive clinging o Unable to make decisions on their own o Continually look to others for nurturance and support o More common among women than men  Avoidant Personality Disorder o Fears criticism and feels profoundly inadequate in social situations o Rarely expresses his/her opinions o Expect worse from people so they shy away from social interaction  Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder o Maladaptive behaviors connected to control, orderliness, and desire for perfection o Inflexible concern for rules, regulations, and details

o Elevate rules over social life o Very difficult to engage in emotionally authentic and productive relationships with other people o Well organized; workaholics  A person doesnt have to show all the criteria listed in the DSM-IV description to be diagnosed with the disorder, but he/she must show many of them o The more they show, the stronger the diagnosis  Symptoms to begin to show themselves in early adult life  Seriously impaired individuals show characteristics from more than one of the 10 types  Personality disorders may be seen as extreme expressions of dispositional personality traits  Dependent personality disorder may be seen as a combination of a high neuroticism and agreeableness  Individuals with antisocial personality disorder show high neuroticism, high extraversion, and very low agreeableness and conscientiousness  Individuals that would be diagnosed with borderline personality disorder through interviews and questionnaires designed to assess BPD directly to show Big Five trait profiles that were very similar to what the clinical experts suggested borderline patients should show  Personality disorders typically involve very negative feelings such as anxiety fearm sadness which themselves constitutes the core neuroticism  The 2 disorders that are not hypothesized to involve high neuroticism are schizoid and obsessive-compulsive personality disorder  Personality traits are effective in sketching out broad consistencies in psychological individuality  Personality disorders may involve extreme variations in general personality traits but they may also involve other things not readily included in trait scores  Personality disorders may involve unique combinations of dispositional traits, characteristic adaptations, and internalized life stories The Controversy Over Traits  Unlike behavior, traits cannot be directly observed  It doesnt matter what particular trait the scale is designed to measure, because what the score on the test gives you is a measure of response style rather than the trait itself  A favorite criticism of traits is that they are labels designed to stereotype and even discriminate against people  Labels were discriminatory against those people whose problems in living were deemed mental illness by an oppressive society; labels served to control people and keep them in place  Many argue that traits are sugar-coated stereotypes  Most critical critique ever levied against traits was the problem of generality vs specificity

 Ideally, traits refer to relatively general tendencies in behavior; assumption of trait theories is that people do indeed show some general consistency in their behavior over time and across situations  If behavior is more specific to the situation then the entire concept of trait comes into question  Because behavior is more situationally specific than cross-situationally general, Mischel maintained that personality trait measures are not particularly useful in the prediction of behavior Mischels Critique  Concept of trait implies that behavior is cross-situationally consistent  Mischel argues instead that human behavior is much more situationally specific than the concept of trait would suggest  Mischel said that behavior is shaped by the exigencies of a given situation o He believed it is a myth that people act in consistent ways across situations  Mischel showed the correlations between personality-trait scores and actual behavior in particular were generally low  Individual differences in moral behavior were not consistent across situations: children who cheat on one particular test dont necessarily cheat on another o There is no such thing as an honest or dishonest child, only honest or dishonest behavior displayed in a given situation  Mischel argued that personality traits exist nowhere but in the mind of the observer  Fundamental attribution error a general tendency to overemphasize traits and underemphasize situations when explaining the causes of other peoples behaviors o Trait psychologists when predicting behavior commit the same fundamental attribution error o Personality traits therefore are no more than convenient but misleading labels about the person  Schweder suggested that our ratings of personality traits are probably based more on our knowledge of how words go together than on our observation of real behaviors  Each person develops their own implicit personality theory set of associations in the persons mind regarding intercorrelation of traits  Thus, traits are convenient categories for our perceptions rather than real characteristics of the persons we perceive  Defenders of traits argue that Mischel had misinterpreted many trait theories, reviewed the literature in an unfair way and overlooked many studies that supported crosssituational consistency  A doctrine of situationism threatened viability f the trait concept 1. Behavior is highly situation-specific, not cross-situationally specific 2. Individual differences are attributed to measurement error rather than internal dispositions 3. Observed response patterns can be causally linked to stimuli present 4. The experiment is the most appropriate method for discovering stimuli-response links

 Situations rather than traits drive and shape human behavior  Behavior is a function of a person in interaction with the environment interactionism Aggregating Behaviors  According to Mischel, traits do not work well in the prediction of behavior because behavior itself is not consistent  For Epstien, the problem of cross-situational consistency in human behavior is aggregation  Psychologists get as close as they can to a pure measure of a trait, minimizing measurement error by constructing tests with multiple items by aggregating the test items o The more items a test has, the more reliable it will be  A single measure of behavior is highly to be unreliable, unrepresentative, and saturated with error  Overall, the trait measures are sound; it is the single measures of behavior that are at fault  Trait scores should predict consistent trends in behavior across different situations and over time  Research from Epstein showed that reliability of measures increases as the number of occasions upon which the measures are taken increases  The greater the degree of aggregation over time, the higher the reliability of the measure and the closer we get to a pure, stable, and representative estimate of behavior  Aggregated items must hang together conceptually and/or empirically  Critics of aggregation argue that it bypasses rather than resolves the problem of crosssituational consistency in behavior  When researchers aggregate behaviors across different situations, they fail to show how a particular trait score predicts behavior  Aggregation works better across certain situations than others  Moskowitz examined behavioral manifestations of dominance and friendliness in six different lab conditions o 2 conditions involving same-sex friends o 2 situations involving male stranger o 2 situations involving a female stranger  The greatest degree of convergence between self-ratings and observer ratings on dominance and friendliness occurred in the situations with friends  There is less consistency seen with strangers situations Interactionism  Modern interactionism is captured in four basic postulates o Actual behavior is a function of a continuous process of multidirectional interaction or feedback between the individual and the situation he/she encounters o Individual is an intentional, active agent in this interactional process

o On the person side of the interaction, cognitive and motivational factors are essential determinants of behavior o On the situation side, the psychological meaning of situations for the individual is the important determining factor  Mechanistic interactionism interaction affect as it appears in certain statistical procedures o A persons trait constitutes one independent predictor, the situation constitutes a second independent predictor, and the interaction between the trait and situation constitutes a third predictor o The dependent variable (outcome to be predicted) is some form of measurable behavior  A significant effect for the trait-situation interaction indicates that there exists a statistical tendency for the trait to be associated with the behavior when a particular level of the situation is involved and that there exists a tendency for the situation to be associated with the behavior when a particular level of the trait is involved  Romer, Gruder and Lizzadro designed a study to identify the 2 types of college students likely to show helping behavior; altruist or receptive giving  Altruists helped more in the no-compensation condition and receptive-giving students showed the reverse pattern exhibiting higher levels of helping when compensated  Reciprocal interactionism more fluid or complex pattern in which person. Situation, and behavior continually and reciprocally influence one another  Emmons offered 2 alternative models of reciprocal interaction o Choice of situations people select situations and avoid others on basis of certain personality traits and needs o Affect congruence people experience greater positive affect and less negative affect in situations congruent with their personality characteristics  People flourish in their work environments when there is a good fit between their personality traits and the characteristic of the environment  Lack of congruence between traits and work situations lead to dissatisfaction, unstable career paths, and lowered performance levels  Second kind of consistency: consistency in variation  Mischel says that people change their behavior from one situation to the next in consistent ways  An if and then relationship is conditional; if certain conditions are satisfied then a particular result will occur o If a particular situation occurs then a particular behavioral response is expressed