As you've probably noticed, people differ. But how can we determine and describe the ways that people differ? While you've undoubtedly used the word personalitypersonalityThe characteristic patterns of thought, emotion, and behavior that make each person unique and relatively consistent across situations. before, we're going to have to dig deeper than just saying someone has a “great” personality. We can think of personality as a unique and characteristic pattern of thinking, feeling, and behaving that is consistent across situations. Just as we saw with intelligence testing, it's important that personality testing allows us to distinguish between people. Behavior patterns in which people don't vary can't tell us much, so we want to identify aspects of personality which vary between people but are stable over time and across many situations. These aspects will allow us to make predictions about people's thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.

Modern psychologists aren't the first to consider the ways in which people differ and the analysis of personality goes back thousands of years. In addition to wondering about the ways in which people can differ, some people have wondered how we can measure those differences. We've already seen approaches to measuring one particular traittraitA stable, enduring characteristic that predisposes a person to behave consistently across situations. (intelligence) and much of what we've learned about testing will apply to the measurement of other traits.

There are two main ways to study personality: a nomothetic approach (from the Greek nomos - “law”) focuses on finding universal laws that apply to all people to identify the aspects of personality that everyone has. An idiographic approach focuses on studying a person's particular peculiarities or the unique aspects of that single individual (you can think of studying their idiosyncrasies to remember idiographic).

Hippocrates (460-370 BC) suggested that personality had biological roots and that our physical bodies influenced our ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving. Hippocrates believed that we were influenced by 4 humors; blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm. This idea was applied by Galen (129-216 AD), who suggested 4 main personality types based on high level of a particular humor: sanguine (blood), phlegmatic (phlegm), choleric (yellow bile), and melancholic (black bile).

While this way of thinking has faded, the idea that biology can be used to predict personality has remained. When phrenologists like Franz Josef Gall were measuring bumps and dents in the skull, they were hoping that these physiological measurements could be used to assess or even predict something about personality.

Modern ways of approaching physiological measurements no longer focus on humors or skull shapes, but do still consider how biology might influence our behavior, our thinking, and how we respond to the world. Is there something about your genes, your nervous system, or your brain structure that drives your personality? Before we get to these modern approaches, however, let's consider the history of personality psychology in the past 150 years or so, beginning with the theories of psychology's most famous figure, Sigmund Freud.

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) was a medical doctor specializing in nerve disorders who began to wonder whether some ailments were connected to psychological factors rather than physiological factors. This line of questioning led Freud to consider the possible causes of mental illness. Much of Freud's work was theoretical and was based on his own experiences, in addition to the experiences of his patients, most of whom were members of the upper-class in Vienna, where Freud lived for most of his life.

Freud believed that our thoughts and behaviors were heavily influenced by the unconsciousunconsciousThe part of the mind containing thoughts, memories, and desires that are outside conscious awareness but influence behavior.. This was a repository of our hidden desires, wishes, and fears which were kept out of conscious awareness in order to avoid the anxiety these thoughts and feelings would provoke. Freud believed that when these unconscious forces conflicted with our conscious thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, the resulting anxiety could cause mental illness. By collecting clues about the contents of the unconscious, one could better understand conflicts and anxiety could be reduced.

This investigation of the unconscious could be done through a number of methods such as dream interpretation and free association, a practice in which a patient was encouraged to speak without restraint; no thought was considered too embarrassing or too trivial. Freud also suggested that a parapraxis (from Greek para - “contrary” and praxis - “action”) or “slip of the tongue” (also called a Freudian slip) could reveal aspects of the unconscious. By analyzing the contents of dreams, thoughts, and errors, Freud believed that a therapist could understand the forces of the patient's unconscious, then work to resolve conflicts.

Freud proposed a structural organization of personality with three main components; the ididIn Freud's theory, the unconscious reservoir of basic drives and impulses operating on the pleasure principle., the egoegoIn Freud's theory, the rational mediator between the id, superegosuperegoIn Freud's theory, the internalized moral standards and ideals derived from parental and cultural values., and reality — operates on the reality principle., and the superego.

The id was the raw animal drives of the personality. These included drives for food, sex, and aggression, which were driven by libido, the psychic energy of the mind. This psychic energy came in two forms, Eros (the life instinct) with drives toward survival (hunger, sex, etc.) and Thanatos (the death instinct) with drives toward death (such as aggression). The id operates on the pleasure principle, meaning that it is driven solely to maximize pleasure. Essentially, the id follows the rule “if it feels good, do it”.

This type of pleasure-maximizing drive might help us to survive and procreate, but it isn't the only rule to live by. We can't just run around eating, fighting, or mating whenever and wherever we please. This is where the ego comes in. The ego's role is to restrain the drives of the id in order to maintain relationships and integrate into society. The ego operates on the reality principle, which is to balance the id's drives with the realities of social life.

The last structure of Freud's personality construct is the superego. The superego contains all of the messages from parents, teachers, and others about who we should be. The superego represents the ideal person who is perfectly moral and virtuous. We can never reach this societal ideal, but the superego urges us to try, though our inevitable failure may cause guilt, shame, and anxiety.

To remember these three personality structures and how they interact, imagine the following scenario. You've arrived at a friend's house where you're planning a surprise birthday party. A rushed and busy day has meant that you haven't had a chance to eat and you're feeling rather ravenous. Before your friend is due to arrive, you find yourself in the kitchen, alone with a pristine chocolate cake.

In this situation, your id is basically saying “EAT IT! You're hungry, it will taste amazing, just do it!” Your ego, on the other hand, is considering the effects of this behavior on your social standing and relationships. After all, what would the consequences be if your friend found you stuffing your face with her birthday cake? Your ego suggests that you manage to wait just a little while longer, then you can have your cake and maintain your friendship too. Rather than relying on the animal drives of the id or the pragmatic propositions of the ego, your superego pushes for the most virtuous of responses. How could you enjoy even the thinnest slice of cake when you know that elsewhere others are truly starving? How could you celebrate when there are people suffering in this world? The superego might suggest you take that cake down to the nearest soup kitchen and give it to those who are most in need.

This chapter is a bit heavy on Freudian vocabulary, so many students wonder why they have to memorize all these terms that are no longer used in modern psychology or psychiatry. Researchers no longer spend much time talking about ids or egos, yet these words remain fundamental for discussing early psychoanalysis. While all these terms may seem like a foreign language, it probably wasn't Freud's intention to create a separate lexicon. Bruno Bettelheim (1903-1990) has suggested that a great deal of Freud's legacy has been misinterpreted because of these very terms. We must remember that Freud lived nearly his entire life in Vienna and all of his writing was in German. The psychoanalytic terms we see (which have been translated into Latin or occasionally Greek) feel disconnected from daily life, but this wasn't the case in the original German Freud used. The “ego” was Ich, literally “I”, the “superego” Über-Ich would be the “over-I”, while the “id” was Es, literally “It”, a neuter pronoun used for referring to children. Bettelheim has suggested that these German terms had deeper emotional connections that have been lost in translation, resulting in a version of psychoanalysis which is missing some of its essence.

Freud believed that early childhood experiences were fundamental for the formation of personality and that these effects rippled through to our adult lives. Our different personalities could be explained through the vicissitudes of early life and the ways we adapted to childhood conflict. Freud proposed a theory of personality development based on stages, which we needed to move through in a step-wise fashion. Each stage was based on a focus of pleasure known as an erogenous zone and a potential conflict which needed to be resolved. Failure to move through a stage properly could result in a fixationfixationIn Freud's theory, being stuck at a developmental stage due to unresolved conflicts, leading to related adult personality traits.; a sticking point in development which would shape future behavior until it was resolved.

The first stage in Freud's model is the Oral Stage, lasting from birth until about 12-18 months of age, during which the focus of pleasure is the mouth. Babies explore their world by putting just about anything in their mouths; sucking, biting, or chewing whatever they can. Freud believed this represents the potential anxiety of whether they will be fed adequately or not, and a fixation develops in a child who is either under or over-fed. This oral fixation could then reveal itself in later behaviors focused on the mouth and pleasure. Cigarette smoking, obsessive gum-chewing, overeating, eating disorders, or talkativeness would indicate to a psychoanalyst that a patient had experienced conflict during the oral stage.

The next stage is the Anal Stage, from about 18 months to 3 years of age, during which the focus of pleasure is the anus and the expulsion or retention of feces. During this stage children take pleasure in controlling their bowel movements and conflict has the potential to influence behavior related to cleanliness and order. Anal-retentive types (yes, this is where the term comes from) would become excessively neat and orderly in later life, while anal-expulsive types took such pleasure in producing feces that they would become disorderly and messy, though also taking more pleasure in creativity and productivity. Freud would have found a perfect example of the anal-expulsive type in the artist Mary Barnes, who suffered from schizophrenia. While institutionalized, she spent her time “painting” with her own feces, until she was given paints as a way to express her creativity.

If things haven't gotten weird enough for you yet, following the Anal Stage is the Phallic Stage, lasting from age 3 to about age 5. During this period, the focus is on the penis, or lack thereof. During this stage, a boy develops sexual desire for his mother, but thanks to some guy named “Dad”, the boy can't have mom all to himself. So the boy harbors unconscious wishes to murder his father. This is known as the Oedipus complexOedipus complexFreud's proposed conflict during the phallic stage in which a child develops sexual feelings toward the opposite-sex parent., named after the Greek myth of the tragic hero destined to kill his father and marry his mother. Since dad is bigger and stronger, the boy fears that he will detect this patricidal desire and punish him with castration. This castration anxiety keeps the boy from acting on his latent sexual desire and instead he learns to be like dad. If he can't have mom to himself, he can learn from dad and someday find a girl of his own (ideally one just like mom). This process of learning to be like dad was called identification, and Freud believed this was how a boy learned his gender role and sexual behavior.

A girl, on the other hand, notices that she lacks a penis, resulting in penis envy. She also experiences a latent sexual desire for her father and a wish to kill her mother, who she blames for her apparent castration. This was referred to by Carl JungCarl JungFreud's student who broke with him to propose the collective unconscious and archetypes. as the Electra Complex, though Freud disagreed with this label (perhaps rightly so, since Electra's story doesn't involve desire for her father, but rather a desire for revenge after his death). Just as boys resolve their fears and desires by learning to be like dad, Freud believed that girls overcome their anxiety and penis envy by identifying with their moms and thus learning proper gender roles and sexual identities. Freud believed that problems and unresolved conflicts during the phallic stage resulted in homosexuality, sexual fetishes, or confused gender identity or gender role behaviors.

Following these torrid affairs of the phallic stage, children move into the rather boring Latency Period, lasting from age 6 until puberty. This period is characterized by dormant sexual desires and Freud didn't really think much was happening at this point. During this time children's personalities are setting like a jello mold that has been mixed by early experience, and now is sitting in the fridge solidifying.

After this uneventful latency period, puberty carried children to the final stage of psychosexual development, the Genital Stage, where the focus of pleasure is still the genitals but now includes a desire for mutual sexual gratification rather than just personal pleasure. This compels people to seek out sex and intimate relationships, and to show concern for the welfare of others.

In Freud's approach to understanding personality, anxiety plays a fundamental role. We all experience conflict between the id, ego, and superego, and this conflict necessarily creates anxiety. Freud categorized three main types of anxiety: reality anxiety came from objective dangers in the environment, neurotic anxiety related to fears of losing control over the id, and moral anxiety came from fears of past or future immoral behavior.

Even if this anxiety isn't causing mental illness, Freud believed it's still there for all of us. As a result, we need ways of coping with this ever-present anxiety and so we develop defense mechanismsdefense mechanismsUnconscious strategies the ego uses to reduce anxiety by distorting reality., unconscious strategies for managing and reducing anxiety. Here are a few examples of possible defense mechanisms, some of which you may have heard in everyday use. Many of these come from Freud's writing, though some were later added by his daughter, Anna Freud.

RepressionRepressionThe most fundamental defense mechanism — pushing threatening thoughts or memories out of conscious awareness. is the process of burying anxiety away in the unconscious. When conflict occurs, it is pushed beneath the surface and out of awareness. “Out of sight, out of mind” would be an apt description, though it's not so much out of mind as in a part of the mind that is inaccessible. Repression is a fundamental strategy because it is the technique that helps to fill the unconscious with all its wishes, desires, and fears.

RegressionRegressionReverting to behavior characteristic of an earlier stage of development under stress. is a defense mechanism of reverting to a previous stage of development, presumably one in which the person felt comfortable and didn't experience anxiety. Freud believed that this could be seen when anxiety causes an adult to engage in behaviors like thumb-sucking, watching cartoons, or whining and acting childish. Regression was even used as a therapeutic technique in psychoanalysis, as patients were encouraged to regress to the stage that was believed to have formed unconscious conflict so that the therapist and patient could work to resolve it.

Reaction FormationReaction FormationExpressing the opposite of one's actual unacceptable impulse. - “Every action has an equal and opposite reaction” might be appropriate here, as this defense mechanism involves behaving in the opposite manner of the behavior causing anxiety. A common example would be the suggestion that strongly homophobic individuals are acting this way because of their own latent feelings of homosexual attraction. Rather than accepting these feelings, reaction formation causes them to condemn the feelings and speak out in hatred of homosexuality.

RationalizationRationalizationOffering acceptable-sounding explanations for unacceptable behavior or thoughts. involves creating a logical excuse for one's behavior which ignores the true underlying explanation. So a person who smokes because of an unconscious oral fixation might rationalize her smoking as being a strategy to help her socialize.

Intellectualization involves focusing on academic analysis and study of an area relevant to the person's anxiety. For instance, after Joe is cut from the basketball team he obsesses over studying game strategies and biomechanics in order to distract himself from the emotions he feels.

DisplacementDisplacementRedirecting emotions (usually anger) from the original source to a safer substitute target. refers to redirecting anxiety away from the real threat and onto a less-threatening object or situation. For instance, after being berated by a teacher for unsatisfactory work, John displaces his anger and aggression away from the teacher and onto another child on the playground, pushing him and calling him names.

Denial is an unconscious refusal to admit to the reality of a situation causing anxiety. In the case of a marital relationship, one spouse may unconsciously overlook any evidence of an affair, even though it seems quite obvious to other observers. Or you may choose denial rather than admitting that your parents have a sex life which includes favorite positions and erotic fantasies.

ProjectionProjectionAttributing one's own unacceptable thoughts or feelings to others. refers to projecting one's own fears and anxieties onto other people. This might be seen when a husband with a roving eye accuses his wife of flirting with other men or if your unconscious dislike of a classmate causes you to insist that the classmate hates you.

SublimationSublimationChanneling unacceptable impulses into socially acceptable activities. refers to a redirection of sexual or aggressive energies onto pursuits which are more socially acceptable. So rather than getting into fist fights, a writer sublimates his aggression into violent characters or an artist sublimates his sexual desires into stunning visual displays.

I think that the ready application of these defense mechanisms helps to reveal the appeal of Freud. We can see that it's rather easy and fun to create these ad-hoc explanations for people's behavior. We needn't worry ourselves with statistical analysis, predictive power, or possible gene/environment interactions in shaping behavior. We can create seemingly logical explanations for a wide variety of behaviors, even though we can't really prove that any of this is actually happening at the unconscious level.

This is part of Freud's legacy in that he made psychological issues approachable and applicable for many people. Because these ideas were based on his casual observations of common behaviors, it's not hard to apply them to other commonly-occurring behaviors. Those versed in Freudian terminology are suddenly armed with labels for talking about the intellectualization of their professors, the sublimation of sculptors, and the projection of political pundits.

Freud influenced the next generation of psychiatrists, many of whom adopted the notions of unconscious influences and the importance of early experiences on personality development. These Psychodynamic or Neo-Freudian theorists continued Freud's work in attempting to understand mental illness, though they disagreed with many of Freud's original ideas.

Alfred AdlerAlfred AdlerNeo-Freudian who emphasized social factors and the inferiority complex as drivers of personality. believed that Freud was overly focused on sexual and aggressive drives and felt that Freud failed to fully incorporate the importance of social tensions on personality development. Adler believed that our early social interactions influenced the development of complexes such as an inferiority complex or on the positive side, a strive for superiority.

Karen Horney (before you embarrass yourself in class, it's pronounced Horn-eye) found Freud's approach male-centric, particularly the suggestion that all females experienced penis envy as a part of their normal psychological development. Horney suggested that males experience womb envy because they are unable to bring life into the world, which drives them to compensate by dominating and disparaging women.

Perhaps the most famous of Freud's followers was Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) though he eventually split from Freud and disagreed with Freud's emphasis on sexual and aggressive drives. Jung preferred to focus on aims and aspirations and he emphasized conflict within an individual rather than conflict with society or reality. Jung proposed that our personal unconscious also contained a collective unconscious, which included the symbols, myths, and memories inherited from our ancestors. Jung believed that this collective unconscious influenced everyone and could be seen in shared mythology, fears, and symbols. These include archetypes, which are universal images and motifs that exist in everyone but may vary in form. These would include representations of devils, heroes, tricksters, or sages which can be seen across many cultures, though their specific manifestations may differ. You can probably come up with several examples for particular archetypes by considering characters from Star Wars or your favorite Disney cartoons.

How can we assess personality? How can we measure the differences between people, and how can we use these differences to predict behavior?

If you ever looked up at the clouds as a child (or even as an adult) and allowed your imagination to run wild with what you were seeing, you've done something similar to a projective testprojective testA personality assessment using ambiguous stimuli (like inkblots) that participants interpret, presumably projecting unconscious feelings.. Projective tests are attempts to tap into a person's characteristic ways of interpreting or assessing ambiguous stimuli, with the assumption that this reveals aspects of personality. These types of assessments can be regarded as idiographic, meaning that they attempt to uncover the fine details of a single individual's personality (though it would be impossible to describe all aspects). Idiographic approaches are about individuals and don't necessarily aim to make comparisons between people.

Perhaps the most famous projective test is the Rorschach Inkblot TestRorschach Inkblot TestA projective test using symmetrical inkblot images — participants describe what they see., developed in 1918 by Swiss psychiatrist (and Brad Pitt doppelgänger) Hermann Rorschach. Adapting his childhood hobby of dripping ink onto a blank sheet, folding it in half, then unfolding it to reveal an abstract symmetrical pattern, Rorschach created ambiguous stimuli which were open to interpretation. Rorschach believed that by analyzing responses to these patterns, a psychiatrist could uncover the unconscious influences and elements of a patient's mind. For example, recurrent thoughts of weapons, violence, or harm might serve as an indication of an aggressive personality.

Sample image from Rorschach's test (public domain)

See all 10 original images at www.psychexamreview.com/rorschach

A few decades later, Henry Murray created a similar type of projective assessment, known as the Thematic Apperception TestThematic Apperception TestA projective test using ambiguous scenes that participants create stories about. or TAT. Rather than having participants identify ambiguous stimuli, Murray's test focused on explaining ambiguous situations. In a set of 10 TAT cards, subjects would see characters in ambiguous situations then explain what was happening, who the characters were and how they were related, and why they were behaving the way they were. Murray believed that the situations and relationships described could reveal motives, concerns, and a characteristic way of viewing the social world. Repeated themes of success, failure, competition, jealousy, aggression, or sexuality could be interpreted as representations of the viewer's personality.

(While it would be nice to show a sample from the TAT here, images from Murray's original test are still under copyright by the Harvard University Press and may not be shared publicly).

While projective techniques may sound promising for understanding how someone views the world, there are a number of problems associated with their use. First and foremost is whether stated views represent wishes, motives, or preferences. Even if we assume they do, it's still unclear whether these reveal how a person is or how they want to be seen. We may wonder whether some respondents create bizarre narratives because those actually come to mind easily, or whether the respondents are just bored with the task or are trying to be unique or funny.

Given that there are infinite possible narratives, truly standardized scoring for these types of tasks is impossible and the same traits could be expressed in innumerable ways. Likewise, similar answers might be given for different underlying reasons and it's not clear how an examiner might reliably tell the difference or whether another examiner would reach the same conclusion.

This brings us to another major problem, the interpretation of responses by the examiner. Might a consistent pattern of interpretations reveal more about an examiner than it does about her patients? Freud is frequently lampooned for seeing themes of sex and aggression everywhere and this should remind us that these interpretations may speak volumes more about Freud than about any of his patients.

Rather than relying on a subjective assessment of projective responses, a trait-based approach to personality attempts to identify characteristics of people in a much more direct manner. These assessments choose particular traits which are deemed to be relevant for understanding personality then questions are aimed at assessing those particular traits.

These assessments tend to be nomothetic (rather than idiographic) which means that they look for universal trait dimensions that all people have as a way of organizing people into groups or classifications. Nomothetic assessments provide information about where people stand on certain dimensions rather than attempting to describe the nuances of one person's personality.

Given that these assessments have a limited number of questions and limited possible answer choices, many people can receive identical results, but this doesn't imply that their personalities are truly identical. We also have to consider that attempting to measure traits automatically invokes comparison. The results of these assessments aren't really about particular individuals as much as points of comparison for how people can differ. For instance, high extraversionextraversionThe Big Five trait reflecting sociability, assertiveness, and positive emotionality. necessarily involves a comparison to other people in order for it be considered “high”.

The trait-based approach frequently relies on self-reports; asking people to answer questions about themselves. Of course, assessing ourselves can be difficult, since our point of view may be biased or we may not be able to provide an accurate view of ourselves even if we try. The report we give of ourselves may be more of a report on who we think we are, not who we actually are. After all, do conceited people realize they are conceited?

A self-report may have a tough time collecting information for traits with negative connotations. If you recall the concept of face validity from the previous chapter, now we see that it's not always something we want to have. Sometimes we don't want a question to look like it's measuring what it actually measures. If I want to measure a negative or potentially embarrassing trait, I don't want to be obvious because then people may give me socially desirable answers instead of honest ones. The statement “I frequently mistreat others” might appear to be a good measure of callousness (and thus would have face validity), but that doesn't mean that the responses I get will actually be useful, because most people, even callous ones, will probably report that this statement does not describe them.

One way of getting around this problem is to insert questions designed to catch faking. For example, if someone agrees with the statement “I never feel angry” we might question their honesty for other answers, because everyone gets angry at times. This question is there to help us find out about honesty, not anger. For measurement of some traits with negative connotations we can also use an implicit assessment which attempts to assess a trait in an indirect way that is difficult for the participant to conceal.

When it comes to determining the accuracy of a personality assessment, we might think we could just ask people how well the assessment describes them. This straight-forward approach runs into problems, however, because we can't always trust people's subjective perceptions of accuracy.

This was demonstrated in a study published by Bertram Forer in 1949. Forer gave feedback from a personality assessment to participants, who were asked to rate the accuracy of the statements in describing their personalities. Participants rated their assessments as highly accurate, only to discover that they had all received the same generic personality descriptions. This tendency to find personal meaning in vague assessments is known as the Forer Effect, though it's also frequently referred to as the Barnum Effect. This is a reference to P. T. Barnum saying “we have something for everyone” though perhaps it could apply to another quote frequently attributed to Barnum: “there's a sucker born every minute”.

We should keep this effect in mind for all personality assessments, as people may be prone to agree with results regardless of actual accuracy. This effect can also be used to explain how supposed-psychics and fake fortune-tellers are able to use vague descriptions and hazy predictions to swindle victims. People find personal relevance in these stock statements, making them more likely to believe that the “seer” is really seeing something.

One frequently used self-report is the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPIMMPIMinnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory — a widely used self-report questionnaire for assessing personality and psychological disorders.), first published in 1943 and most recently updated as the MMPI-2-RF in 2008. This inventory lists several hundred statements about the self, to which a subject responds with either True or False, depending on how well the statement matches his sense of self. Rather than attempting to determine which traits cause people to differ, the MMPI works in reverse. In a technique known as criterion keying, this assessment is given to groups of people who are known to differ in some way, then responses are analyzed to show how these groups differ in their self-assessments. By giving the inventory to people who have already been diagnosed with a particular disorder, researchers can look for patterns of responses which can then be associated with that disorder. In this way, usefulness comes not from what the specific response patterns are, but that they differ for different groups of people.

For example, by giving the inventory to a group of people known to be depressed and comparing their responses to a group of people who have not been diagnosed with depression, researchers may be able to find characteristic differences between the groups, which could then be helpful for identifying depression in the future. This approach can be problematic, however, as it assumes that existing diagnoses are accurate and that different disorders have distinct patterns, which may not always be the case. Nevertheless, the MMPI can provide useful points of comparison for how people differ. The inventory contains 338 statements designed to assess 10 main sub-scales such as Masculinity/Femininity, Depression, and Paranoia, in addition to statements designed to assess the likelihood a subject is over- or under-reporting or trying to “fake bad” or “fake good”.

The number of personality traits that might be assessed is staggering. In 1936 Gordon Allport and Henry Odbert analyzed the dictionaries of the day and found over 18,000 words that could be used to describe someone's personality. Allport and Odbert then worked to sort these terms for synonyms, creating a list of possible traits. Allport proposed that trait terms could represent cardinal dispositions, central traits, or secondary traits. Cardinal dispositions characterized just about everything a person did and therefore revealed most about personality. Central traits influenced many thoughts or behaviors, while secondary traits influenced only a few.

Which traits should we consider important? Answers may vary. For instance, in the 1940s, to understand the rise of fascism, some psychometricians were interested in the possibility of a trait they called authoritarianism, which referred to a tendency for obedience to authority, conformity, and political conservatism, though interest in exploring this trait has waned in recent decades. Rather than proposing traits that might be important and then examining those, another approach involves examining many traits and letting statistics tell us the most important ones.

This approach involves factor analysis, a statistical technique we saw used by Charles Spearman to investigate intelligence in the previous chapter. Factor analysis involves collecting data for a number of items, then calculating the correlations between each of those items. When a group of items are all highly correlated, this suggests that they can be represented by a single label, called a factor.

In the case of personality, many of the terms used to describe people go together. People rated as kind are likely to also be rated as compassionate or loyal but probably not also rated as rude. If we find that scores for kindness, compassion, empathy, and loyalty are all highly correlated, we might consider that these represent a single factor we could label “agreeablenessagreeablenessThe Big Five trait reflecting warmth, cooperation, and trust.”.

Based on this type of factor analysis, Raymond Cattell proposed 16 traits for categorizing people (including intelligence), which he referred to as source traits. Cattell created an assessment of these traits known as the 16PF test, a version of which is still used today for workplace and career guidance, clinical diagnosis, and relationship counseling.

Hans Eysenck took this approach further and believed that personality could be summarized into two main dimensions: Introversion/Extraversion and NeuroticismNeuroticismThe Big Five trait reflecting emotional instability and tendency to experience negative emotions., which assesses a person's level of emotional stability or instability (though in 1976 he and his wife Sybil Eysenck proposed a third dimension of Psychoticism which assessed things like hostility, impulsiveness, and lack of empathy).

Eysenck's initial 2-dimensional model for personality suggested that a large number of traits could be seen as the combination of a person's level of introversion and level of neuroticism. For example, a person with a high level of neuroticism might express this instability in the form of moodiness if introverted but as aggression if extraverted. The combination of these two dimensions creates 4 main quadrants for traits, which can be likened to the 4 personality types of Galen (melancholic as high neuroticism/low extraversion, choleric as high neuroticism/high extraversion, sanguine as low neuroticism/high extraversion and phlegmatic as low neuroticism/low extraversion).

Cattell's analysis reduced thousands of trait terms into 16 factors, though this could be considered a bit too long of a list, while Eysenck's two (or three) dimensions might not be quite enough to describe all the differences between people. Today, most researchers look at 5 traits. These traits are based on the NEO-PI-R assessment developed by Robert McCrae and Paul Costa, and are known as the The Big FiveBig FiveThe five broad personality dimensions — OpennessOpennessThe Big Five trait reflecting curiosity, creativity, and openness to new experiences., ConscientiousnessConscientiousnessThe Big Five trait reflecting organization, self-discipline, and goal-directed behavior., Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism (OCEAN). (or the Five Factor Model).

Each of these traits actually refers to a dimension, with everyone falling somewhere along a continuum from low to high. While there is a great deal of evidence supporting the existence of these five factors, there's still some disagreement over which labels should be used, as the name a factor is given has connotations that may inadvertently emphasize or downplay some measures related to the factor.

The Big Five are:

Openness to Experience – This factor relates to curiosity, willingness to try new things, intelligence, and perhaps imagination.

Conscientiousness – This factor refers to a person's tendency to follow through and get things done, though it also relates to things like organization, sense of responsibility, and carefulness.

Extraversion – As discussed above, extraversion refers to how outgoing a person is, though it may also include things like social dominance, confidence, sociability, and spontaneity.

Agreeableness – This factor refers to how well someone gets along with others as well as a willingness to cooperate or compromise in order to maintain good social relationships.

Neuroticism – As mentioned in Eysenck's dimensions, neuroticism refers to emotional instability and anxiety.

The big five traits can be remembered with the mnemonic OCEAN (or if you prefer, CANOE). If each person has some score on each of these 5 dimensions, then we could think of an individual's particular combination of these traits and how these combinations interact with one another as that individual's unique personality profile. Changes in one trait could influence the expression of other traits, creating a wide variety of personality possibilities.

Despite being considered separate factors, some of these traits may appear to be related to one another. Maybe how socially outgoing someone is indicates how open she is to new social experiences, or maybe this extraversion relates to previous positive experiences which resulted from her agreeableness. This may cause us to wonder whether these traits really could be distilled into just 2 or 3 factors.

We may think that just 5 traits is too few and that something is lost when personality is considered in such limited terms. This is true in the sense that scores on these 5 dimensions can't really be used to tell us about specific behaviors of an individual. This is a tradeoff we make in sacrificing a high level of detail and accuracy in order to create assessments that are easy to use for large numbers of people.

Recall the triangle we drew for the hypothetical construct of intelligence, looking at actual behaviors (grades, income, etc) and then responses to assessments (test scores) and then analyzing whether there was a relationship between these behaviors and assessment results. This same triangle should be considered for any personality trait we measure. We should wonder how well assessments compare with actual behavior. Do people who score as introverted actually spend more time alone, or do they just report that they do?

To address this, Walter Mischel worked to identify correlations between trait assessment results and actual behaviors. In his controversial book Personality and Assessment, Mischel reported that the average correlation for traits and behaviors was only about 0.3 (Mischel, 1968). This weak correlation surprised many people and made them wonder whether trait assessments tell us much about an individual's behavior. But perhaps we shouldn't expect too much. Remember that traits aren't really intended to tell us about specific behaviors, and moreover, Mischel's correlations were for single traits. Our behavior is a complex amalgamation of all of the big five (or perhaps more) traits simultaneously, occurring in some situational context. With this in mind, we might not expect to ever find a strong correlation between a single behavior and one single trait.

More recent research on personality traits and behavioral tendencies has used a technique known as experience sampling. Participants in these types of studies are given pagers (or more recently, smartphone apps) which randomly buzz several times per day, prompting the participants to record what they are doing. By repeatedly measuring actual behaviors and then comparing them to personality inventories, researchers can get a clearer picture of how well assessments represent actual behavioral tendencies, such as seeing if people who are open to experience actually spend more time trying new things.

There are some other criticisms of the trait perspective and perhaps the most important of these is that traits don't tell us anything about how personality works. Traits can describe how people differ, but can't describe what those differences mean in terms of intrapersonal functioning or how a person processes information, makes decisions, and chooses behaviors. The trait-based perspective can be accused of using circular logic to evade providing explanation. We can say Jill scores highly on conscientiousness because she is very neat and well-organized but when we ask why she is neat and well-organized our only answer is that she is high in conscientiousness. In order to dig deeper on how these traits function and why people differ, we'll have to include other perspectives.

If we accept that there are trait dimensions, where do these traits come from? Why do people differ in their levels of conscientiousness, neuroticism, or agreeableness? Are these differences the result of genes, biological processes, upbringing, or different ways of thinking about the world? As with any topic in psychology, there are different approaches to answering these questions. We should remember that none of these approaches is THE approach to understanding personality and each offers a new perspective. Each of these perspectives is not necessarily intended to be a complete explanation, but another piece of the puzzle.

Earlier we saw that Eysenck's two dimensions of extraversion and neuroticism mapped onto Galen's 4 personality types and while Eysenck certainly didn't believe in humors, he suggested that there may be underlying biological links to personality traits. Rather than humors, we might consider how our modern understanding of hormones and neurotransmitters could be used to understand personality differences. Eysenck suggested a somewhat counter-intuitive notion that introverts had higher levels of cortical arousal, meaning that they were already over-stimulated and therefore didn't need much stimulation from the environment. Extraverts, on the other hand, might have lower levels of cortical arousal, causing them to seek out more stimulation from the environment. This fits with evidence that introverts are better at vigilance tasks and are also less likely to use stimulant drugs and more likely to use depressants, suggesting a kind of self-medication to keep their cortical arousal at a manageable level. Further research has suggested the existence of two opposing systems which may relate to sensation-seeking and emotional stability.

The Behavioral Approach System (BAS) is a reward-seeking system related to dopamine pathways and greater activity in the left prefrontal cortex in responding to incentives and rewards. The Behavioral Inhibition System (BIS) represents an opposing force, involving serotonin and GABA pathways and greater activity of the right prefrontal cortex. This system is more reactive to punishments and is related to anxiety, aversion, disgust and fear. Each individual may have different levels of activity and responsiveness for each of these systems and this may be responsible for traits such as extraversion or neuroticism.

Twin studies can examine whether personality traits are inherited and allow us to estimate heritability for certain traits. Heritabilities for each of the big 5 personality traits tend to range from around 0.3 to 0.6 (Bouchard & Loehlin, 2001) meaning that while genes play a role in personality, environment may play an equal or greater role.

One area of genetic involvement relates to the biology of the nervous system mentioned above, with genes possibly influencing receptors for neurotransmitters like dopamine or levels of hormones like testosterone. Another piece of evidence for the role of genes on personality can be seen in differences between very young children. Infants show immediate differences in their temperament, which refers to their activity levels, sociability, and emotionality and the early emergence of these differences suggests that that these traits might be inherited.

Thinking of personality as variations in the nervous system which are inherited like physical traits opens the possibility for questioning whether animals also have personalities. Pet owners often accept that a dog or a cat has its own unique personality, but a trait like extraversion can also be observed in an animal such as a monkey or even an octopus. We can consider the possible evolutionary advantages of certain traits such as how agreeableness or aggression might aid a species' survival. We can also see how evolutionary forces could stabilize traits, as extreme traits in either direction may not be desirable. For example, extremely low sociability would be undesirable because there are times we must interact with others, on the other hand, extremely high sociability would also be undesirable because there are inevitably times when we are forced to be alone.

A socio-cognitive perspective on personality considers how people construct schema, or sets of cognitions, which guide behavior. George Kelly suggested that people all have personal constructs of how the world works and he emphasized that all events are open to multiple interpretations. The internal cognitive processes for how a person perceives, interprets, and recalls experiences may play an important role in that person's behavior and personality. A cognitive approach considers how schema, memory, information processing, and interpretation of situations all play a role in the personality that is expressed.

Walter Mischel suggested person variables including competencies, encoding strategies, personal constructs, expectancies, values, and plans which all play a role in building personality. We use schema to structure our knowledge and inform our decisions and actions, and these schema influence behavior and personality. Our schema are built up from our experience with the world and influence how we see others, our sense of gender roles, social situations, relationships, and emotions.

We also have a self-schema, which may be larger and more complex than most other schema. Like any other cognition, our self-schema is subject to bias. We may selectively remember aspects of ourselves that fit our pre-existing schema, and we may show bias in our recall or twist our recollections of events. Most people show a self-serving bias, recalling their achievements and successes while forgetting their failures, which may play an important role in the development of self-schema.

If we accept that situations influence behavior and we have scripts or schema we follow in certain situations, we may wonder just how much personality comes from the person and how much comes from the situation the person is in. How do we make sense of the fact that Jim is quiet and withdrawn in class but outgoing and sociable at parties? Is his personality really changing or is this a case where situation dominates? The socio-cognitive approach recognizes this difficulty, acknowledging that we can't assess personality in all situations in order to solve this person-situation controversy.

But just because we can't predict behavior in all situations doesn't mean it isn't worth describing personality anyway. Even when we speak non-scientifically about personality, we don't limit ourselves to strict rules. Instead, we have a tendency to use verbal hedges because we intuitively recognize that situations matter. Rather than only using blanket statements like “John is shy” or “Jennifer is aggressive”, we tend to allow flexibility in our everyday assessments by adding context like “John is shy around new people” or “Jennifer is aggressive when confronted”.

Another perspective on why people differ has to do with existence itself. Regardless of our own traits, we cannot escape death and our present existence is all we can be sure of. This means that we must each have our own unique way of dealing with existence, often referred to using the German word dasein; “being in the world”.

How we respond to this existential crisis may create our personality, and how we deal with the angst created by the knowledge of certain death may explain some of the differences between us. The awareness of death causes us to engage in terror management as we are forced to define the meaning of our lives. This is generally done in the context of our social and cultural environment as we attempt to figure out our own value and how we fit into the larger framework of existence.

Death is unavoidable, and when people are reminded of this fact (known as mortality salience), they have a tendency to cling to their cultural values to affirm their own worth within their society. I remember seeing and experiencing this myself, following the 9/11 terrorist attack on the United States. The sudden death of thousands of innocent civilians didn't cause Americans to reflect on America's flaws or consider how their country's values might be perceived negatively elsewhere. Instead this event caused most people to wave flags, affirm their national pride, and sing a declaration that each was “proud to be an American”.

This isn't meant as a criticism of these behaviors, but a recognition of how reminders of mortality can pull the knit of a society's fabric tighter and further entrench its views. Rather than searching for the existence of traits like authoritarianism, we could consider how mortality salience may play a role in the escalation of wars, as the greater and greater threat of death causes each side to dig in more deeply and further commit to values which may have initiated the conflict. In a more positive light, this tendency to cling to cultural values in the face of death could encourage bravery, perseverance, and unflinching devotion to a meaningful cause.

Beginning in the 1950s and 60s psychiatrists began to shift their focus away from the doom and gloom of repressed anxiety as the driving force of human behavior. Instead, humanistic psychiatrists considered the more positive forces that influenced thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Abraham Maslow focused on people's innate drive to satisfy needs and find their potential. Maslow believed that rather than being victims of early childhood experiences, people had personal choice and a drive for self-actualizationself-actualizationMaslow's term for the full realization of one's potential — the highest level of his hierarchy of needs.; a longing to reach their fullest potential.

Carl Rogers believed that we struggled with incongruence between the real self we actually are and the ideal self; the version of the self that we want to be. Reducing this incongruence by working to be the best version of ourselves would allow us to become fully-functioning. Rogers felt we could be held back by conditions of worthconditions of worthRogers' term for the belief that love and acceptance depend on meeting others' expectations., or certain conditions we thought needed to be met before we could accept ourselves or feel appreciated by others. Rogers suggested that all people needed unconditional positive regardunconditional positive regardRogers' concept of accepting and valuing a person completely, without conditions — a key ingredient of effective therapy., a feeling of acceptance regardless of the specifics of their thoughts and behaviors. He felt that therapists should always strive to provide this positive regard for their patients (whom he referred to as clients to reduce stigma) rather than criticizing behaviors. We'll see more of the humanistic approach in the next chapter on motivation and emotion, and then again when considering approaches to the treatment of mental disorders.

We should also take some time to consider the self itself. How do we view ourselves and how might this reflect or influence our personality traits and our behaviors?

If you recall the section on bias, you might remember the Wobegon Effect (also known as illusory superiority) which is the tendency for most people to believe they are above average (a statistical impossibility). This also relates to self-serving bias, which is to remember times when we succeed and ignore or forget our failures. This may be driving our tendency to see ourselves as capable and may help to keep our self-esteem high. It can be problematic in relationships, however, as we tend to see ourselves as more important and valuable than we actually are. When individuals are asked to estimate their contributions to the completion of a group project or when members of a couple are asked to estimate things like what percentage of the housework they do, totals usually surpass 100% (such as each person claiming to do 60% of the work), meaning that individuals have a tendency to believe they are contributing more than they actually are.

George Kelly proposed personal constructs, mentioned previously, which are ways we understand the traits and behaviors of others. By asking people to describe others they know and how these people differ, one can see which traits a person focuses on when trying to understand the social world. This could reveal how the person values certain traits, revealing more about the person than those being described. We also have our own constructs for ourselves; ideas about how we think, feel, or behave, and the sum of all these ideas can be referred to as our self-concept.

Albert Bandura, who we previously learned about for his Bobo Doll study on observational learning, proposed that personality could be understood through 3 factors which all influenced each other through a process known as Reciprocal Determinism. Bandura suggested that we have an initial biological predisposition for certain traits and behaviors and this predisposition influences which environments we find appealing. These environments then further influence our behaviors and the development of a trait.

Biological disposition (inherent trait)

Behavior and its consequences

Environment (some situations encourage particular traits to emerge or develop)

For example, imagine that Sam is naturally introverted and finds busy environments overstimulating. He would then be driven to seek out solitary situations, such as reading in the library. His preference for the library would then encourage him to be more withdrawn, because he isn't learning how to reach out to others. When placed in a social situation Sam may feel uncomfortable because he doesn't have much experience interacting with others. This discomfort might cause him to retreat back to the familiarity of the book stacks, further entrenching this pattern.

In contrast, imagine that Sam's classmate Charles is naturally predisposed to being extraverted and thus seeks out social stimulation. His early experiences are positive and because others now see him as outgoing, he's more likely to be invited to social situations and parties, further developing his comfort in these environments and the ease with which he can meet new people.

When it comes to getting what we want, it may not be enough to know what we need to do, we also need to believe that we are capable of doing it. Bandura suggested the idea of self-efficacyself-efficacyBandura's concept of a person's belief in their ability to succeed at a specific task. or efficacy expectancy, which refers to our own beliefs in our ability to do the things we want to do. We may see ourselves as incapable of certain behaviors (such as getting along well with a group of strangers) and this feeling of competence will influence the environments we seek out and how we interpret the consequences of our behaviors.

A closely related idea to self-efficacy is the notion of locus of controllocus of controlThe degree to which people believe they control their own outcomes (internal) vs. outside forces control them (external). proposed by Julian Rotter. Rotter suggested that people tend to either see themselves as having control (internal locus of control) or they see things as being outside of their control and dependent on others, the environment, or fate (an external locus of control). Perhaps not surprisingly, a strong internal locus of control tends to be associated with higher levels of success and happiness. You can think of the difference between an internal and external locus of control as the difference between a person who believes “I always make things happen” versus one who believes “things always happen to me”.

Daryl Bem has suggested that our own self-perception is heavily influenced by the behaviors we see ourselves doing. Just as we form opinions of others based on our observations of their behavior, so we also form ideas about ourselves based on observations of our own behaviors. Rather than thinking that our thoughts about ourselves dictate our behaviors, we should consider that our behaviors can influence how we think about ourselves.

For instance, a person repeatedly interacting with others (even while feeling shy) may change her perception that she is shy because her behavior no longer matches this perception. Her behavior is no longer demonstrating shyness, and as a result this trait may no longer be seen as a part of her self-concept. As we'll see in the next chapter on emotion and motivation, there is also evidence that our behaviors can influence our emotional states, rather than our emotional states always dictating our behaviors. There seems to be growing support for the notion that “fake it 'til you make it” is a strategy that can help us to make changes in our personalities and our emotional states.

Lastly, we have an evaluation of the self, known as self-esteem. This assesses how positively or negatively people feel about the self. While high self-esteem is associated with higher achievement and lower levels of depression, it's hard to say that self-esteem is causing these relationships, since greater achievements could lead to increases in self-esteem.

Chances are that some readers out there are asking this very question. How could I write a chapter on personality psychology without mentioning the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)? If you've ever expressed your interest in personality or psychology in general, chances are you've had someone tell you their results from the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator or ask you about your type. Given what we've learned about personality in this chapter, perhaps we can more easily dissect the problems with the MBTI and understand why it doesn't receive much attention (other than criticism) from most personality researchers.

Even though the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is one of the most widely-used personality assessments today (taken by over 2 million people each year), it is not highly-regarded by most researchers and it is mostly used for career and leadership-training purposes. The MBTI was developed by Isabel Briggs Myers and her mother, Katharine Briggs, neither of whom were trained psychometricians, and it is a self-report which consists of forced-choice questions, meaning that the respondent must choose only one of two options, not both. Responses are used to label personality type using 8 different letters. These letters correspond to Introversion or Extraversion (I or E), Sensing or iNtuition (S or N), Thinking or Feeling (T or F) and Judgment or Perception (J or P), and a person is either one letter or the other, and cannot be both. This results in a total of 16 possible letter combinations representing 16 personality types.

There's an important reason why a trait-based approach uses dimensions, rather than types. While dimensions place people along a spectrum, a typology such as the MBTI places people into categories. This means that for something like extraversion, the MBTI only identifies two kinds of people; introverts and extraverts, a fairly broad categorization. This means that the difference between two individuals who receive the same letter (highly introverted and slightly introverted) can be greater than the difference between two individuals who fall on either side of the cutoff point and thus receive different letters (slightly introverted and slightly extraverted). This also reduces reliability, as people who score near the middle will frequently receive a different type with each testing (one study has estimated as many as 50% of respondents receive a different type indication on a second test).

The MBTI paints people with rather broad brushstrokes, allowing them to fill in the details themselves. As we've seen, this type of general feedback may encourage the Barnum Effect and may explain why so many people rate MBTI feedback as accurate. If we're feeling especially critical, we may wonder if the MBTI provides a kind of modern-day astrology, bathed in the glimmering light of what appears to be science. Like astrological signs, the MBTI types provide a convenient way of simplifying the world and its people, fitting them into neat boxes that supposedly allow us to understand them.

While it's possible that the MBTI has some useful applications, results are often taken out of context and used to make predictions about skills and behaviors that the test is not designed to make. The appropriateness (and ethical implications) of its widespread use by career-counselors and corporations (for job placements and leadership purposes) should be more carefully considered to ensure that capable individuals are not kept out of certain positions on the basis of their types. We should think of all personality assessments as tools for assessing personalities, not people. So while the MBTI provides a way of thinking about how people vary, it certainly can't tell us all the ways that people can vary from one another.

The perspectives on personality and the self discussed in this chapter aren't comprehensive and other factors are involved in patterns of behavior. In the following chapter, we'll focus on emotion and motivation and further examine humanistic perspectives. We'll also consider how biological drives, motives, and self-regulation may influence a person's unique pattern of behavior.

In light of each of the perspectives above, we also have ways of thinking about mental illness. Could some disorders be extremes of certain personality traits, disruptions of biological systems, or maladaptive cognitive schema? We'll return to these ideas when we look at mental illness, including personality disorders.