Chapter 15: Personality Humanistic Perspective • Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers Abraham Maslow’s Self-Actualizing Person • Self-actualization – according to Maslow, the ultimate psychological need that arises after basic physical and psychological needs are met and self-esteem is achieved o The motivation to fulfill one’s potential. o He studies healthy, creative people in history; such as Abe Lincoln Carl Rogers’ Person-Centered Perspective • Believed that people were basically good and endowed with self-actualizing tendencies. • A growth-promoting climate consists of 3 things: o Genuineness Being open with own feelings, dropping facades, and being transparent. o Acceptance Unconditional positive regard – an attitude of total acceptance toward another person. o Empathy By sharing and mirroring our feelings and reflecting our meanings. • Self-concept – all our thoughts and feelings about ourselves, in answer to the question “who am I?” o If positive, we tend to act and perceive the world positively. • The individualism encouraged by humanistic psychology can lead to self-indulgence, selfishness, and an erosion of moral restraints. • Humanistic psychology fails to appreciate the reality of our human capacity for evil.
The Trait Perspective •
•
• •
Trait – a characteristic pattern of behavior or a disposition to deal and act, as assessed by self-report inventories and peer reports. o People’s characteristic behaviors and conscious motives. o Coined by Gordon Allport Psychologist William Sheldon classified people by body type. o Endomorph: relaxed and jolly o Mesomorph: bold and physically attractive. o Ectomorph: high strung and solitary. Not much evidence supports this idea. Myers-Briggs Type Indicator – A test that offers the people who take it with labels for the certain type they are. Hans and Sybil Eysenck believe we can reduce many of our normal individual various to 2 or 3 genetically influenced dimensions. o Extraversion-introversion o Emotional stability-instability
Extraverts seek stimulation because their normal brain arousal is relatively low. (biology influences) Our genes have much to say about the temperament and the behavioral style that help define our personality (more so than how we were raised) • Personality Inventory = a questionnaire (often with true false or a scale with disagree agree questions) on which people respond to items designed to gauge a wide range of feelings and behaviors. o Used to assess selected personality traits. o Most extensively researched and widely used is the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) o Good way of developing a personality inventory. • The MMPI is Empirically derived meaning it is a test developed by testing a pool of items and then selecting those that discriminate between groups. • In contrast to the subjectivity of the projective tests favored by psychoanalysts, personality inventories are scored objectively. o Objectivity does not guarantee validity • Self-report personality tests are the most widely used method of assessing traits. The Big Five Factors • Gordon Allport • The “Big Five” Personality Factors Trait Dimension o Emotional Stability o Extraversion o Openness o Agreeableness o Conscientiousness • If a test specifies where you are on the five dimensions, it is said much of what there is to say about your personality. • Big five factor test is currently our best approximation of the basic trait dimension. o In adulthood the Big Five traits are quite stable. o Heritability usually runs about 50% or a bit more for each dimension. o Big Five describe personality in other cultures reasonably well.
•
The Barnum Effect – people fall for things that are good, make sense to themselves, and seem accurate. o Palm readings, astrology, Horoscopes. Evaluating the Trait Perspective • Our behavior is influenced by the interaction of our inner disposition with our environment. • Person-situation controversy – do people act differently according to whom they are with or where they are? o Most people recognize their traits as their own and have a very similar personality their whole life.
• •
o Walter Mischel has pointed out that people do NOT act with predictable consistency. Pointed out that people’s scores on personality tests only mildly predict their behavior. o Your average outgoingness, happiness, or carelessness over many satiations IS predictable. o Bottom Line: Traits exist. We differ. And our differences matter. In unfamiliar situations we may hide our traits as we attend carefully to social cues. o But in informal situations we allow our traits to emerge. At any moment the immediate situation powerfully influences a person’s behavior, especially when the situation makes clear demands.
The Social-Cognitive Perspective •
Albert Bandura proposed the Social-Cognitive Perspective. o Views behavior as influences by the interaction between persons (and their thinking) and their social context. o Believe we learn many of our behaviors through conditioning or by observing others and modeling our behaviors after theirs. o What we think about our situations affects our behavior. Reciprocal Influences • Bandura called the process of interacting with our environment reciprocal determinism. o The interacting influences between personality and environmental factors. Children’s TV-viewing habits (past behavior) influence their viewing preferences (personal factor), which influence how television (environmental factor) affects their current behavior.
•
Different people choose different environments. o You choose your environment and it then shapes you. • Our personalities shape how we interpret and react to events. • Our personalities help create situations to which we react. o Behavior emerges from the interplay of external and internal influences. • At every moments our behavior is influences by our genes, our experiences, and our personalities Personal Control • Personal Control – our sense of controlling our environment rather than feeling helpless. • Julian Rotter o External Locus of Control – the perception that chance or outside forces beyond one’s control can determine one’s fate. o Internal Locus of Control – the perception that one controls one’s own fate. Those who have Internal Locus are better off.
•
Martin Seligman o Learned Helplessness - the hopelessness and passive resignation an animal/human learns when unable to avoid repeated aversive events. Dogs strapped into a harness preventing them from leaping over to the other side where there is no chock makes them lay down and accept the pain Uncontrollable bad events Perceived lack of controlGeneralized helpless behavior Happy are those who choose their own path. • Success requires enough optimism to provide hope and enough pessimism to prevent complacency. • Most college students perceive themselves as less likely than their average classmate to developing a drinking problem. This is an example of unrealistic optimism. • Positive Psychology – the scientific study of optimal human functioning; aims to discover and promote strengths and virtues that enable individuals and communities to thrive. o Positive subjective well-being o Positive character o Positive groups, communities, and cultures. Assessing Behavior in Situations • Social-cognitive researchers explore the effect of differing situations on people’s behavior patterns and attitudes. • It is much better to assess someone by watching them perform similar tasks to what they are interviewing for than pencil-paper techniques. o Predicts the success of applicants better. o A person’s past behavior patterns best predict future behavior. Evaluating the Social-Cognitive Perspective • More than other perspective, it builds from psychological research on learning and cognition. • Critics say it focuses so much on the situation that it fails to appreciate the person’s inner traits.
Exploring the Self •
Possible selves o Include your visions of the self you dream of becoming to the self you fear becoming. • Underlying this research is an assumption that the self, as organizer of our thoughts, feelings, and actions, is a pivotal center of personality. • Spotlight Effect – overestimating others’ noticing and evaluating our appearance, performance, and blunders. Self-Esteem • Self-esteem – one’s feelings of high or low self-worth. o Those with low self-esteem do not necessarily see themselves as worthless, but they seldom say good things about themselves.
o High self-esteem will make you more successful and better off in life • “Stigmatized” have faced discrimination and lower status, yet maintain their self-esteem: o They value the things at which they excel. o They attribute problems to prejudice. o They compare themselves to those in their own group. • Self-serving bias – our readiness to perceive ourselves favorably. o People accept more responsibility for good deeds than for bad, and for success than for failures. Students criticize the exam they did poorly on, not the lack of studying. o Most people see themselves as better than average. • Finding their self-esteem threatened, people with large egos may do more than put others down; they may react violently. • All of us some of the time, and some of us much of the time, do feel inferior. • Humans function best with modest self-enhancing illusions. Culture and the Self • Individualism – giving priority to one’s own goals over group goals, and defining one’s identity in terms of personal attributes rather than group identifications. o Strive for personal control and individual achievement o America is an individualistic country. o Me. o Many, often temporary or casual relationships. (confrontation acceptable) o “The squeaky wheel gets the grease” o Report greater happiness than in collectivist cultures. • Collectivism – giving priority to the goals of one’s group (often one’s extended family or work group) and defining one’s identity accordingly. o Cut off from family and friends, a collectivist might experience a greater loss of identity. o Asians o Us. o Few, close and enduring relationships. (harmony valued) o “The Quacking duck gets shot” o Shy in new groups because they are away from their strong attachments made in previous groups.
The Modern Unconscious Mind •
• •
Many now think of the unconscious not as seething passions and repressive censoring but as cooler information processing that occurs without our awareness. The unconscious involves: o The schemas that automatically control our perceptions and interpretations. o The parallel processing of different aspects of vision and thinking. o The emotions that activate instantly, before conscious analysis. Recent history has supported Freud’s idea that we defend ourselves from anxiety. Terror-management theory – proposes that faith in one’s worldview and the pursuit of self-esteem provide protection against a deeply rooted fear of death.
o Death anxiety motivates contempt for others and esteem for oneself.
