Personality - Nature and Concept

The enduring configuration of characteristics and behavior that comprises an individual’s unique adjustment to life, including major traits, interests, drives, values, self-concept, abilities, and emotional patterns.

  • Many people confuse personality with character, which implies a person has been evaluated as possessing positive qualities, not just described

Psychologists regard personality as a person’s unique long-term pattern of thinking, emotions and behavior

  • Personality traits are the stable qualities that a person shows in most situations

  • Personality type refers to people who have several traits in common. For example: Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung proposed that people are introverts or extroverts

  • Self concept consists of all your ideas, perceptions, stories and feelings about who you are. It is the “mental picture” you have of your own personality

  • Self-esteem (self-evaluation)

    • High: confident, proud, and self-respecting
    • Low: anxious and unhappy

  • Personality theory is a system of concepts, assumptions, ideas and principles proposed to explain personality

Trait Approach

  • currently the dominant method for studying personality
  • Trait theorists seek to describe personality with a small number of key traits or factors. More than 18,000 English words refer to personal characteristics
  • Trait theorists often think of traits as biological predispositions, a hereditary readiness of humans to behave in particular ways
  • Traits can be used to predict behavior

Allport

  • Gordon Allport (1961)

Types

  1. Common traits are characteristics shared by most members of a culture

  2. Individual traits that describe a person’s unique qualities

  3. Cardinal traits are so basic that all of a person’s activities can be traced to the trait. Eg: Abraham Lincon’s personality was dominated by cardinal trait of honesty. According to Allport very few humans have cardinal traits

  4. Central Traits are the basic building blocks of personality. A surprisingly small number of central traits can capture the essence of a person

  5. Secondary Traits are more superficial personal qualities, such as food preferences, attitudes, political opinions, musical tastes, etc.

Cattell

  • Raymond B. Cattell (1906-1998)
  • Cattell directly studied traits of a large number of people to answer the questions “How can you tell whether a personality trait is central or secondary”
  • Cattell began by measuring visible features of personality, which he called surface traits
  • Soon Cattell noticed that some of these surface traits clustered together so often that they seemed to represent a single, more basic trait. He called these deeper characteristics, or dimensions source traits (or factors). They are the core of each individual’s personality.
  • To look for connections among traits, he used factor analysis, a statistical technique used to correlate multiple measurements and identify general underlying factors.
  • Cattell (1973) identified 16 source traits which (as per him) are needed to fully describe personality
  • Source traits are measured by a test called Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire (16PF) that can produce a trait profile