Existential Psychology

In this video I provide a (very) brief overview of existential psychology and how knowledge of our own mortality may play a role in shaping behaviors and societies. Don’t forget to subscribe to the channel to see future videos! Have … Read More

The Socio-Cognitive Approach to Personality

In this video I outline some of the major ideas for a socio-cognitive approach to personality, which emphasizes the role of cognition and the social world. I describe the importance of schema, Kelly’s “personal constructs”, Mischel’s “person variables”, and the … Read More

Genes and Personality

In this video we take a basic look at how to understand the role of genes on personality and how evolution may shape traits and select for a range of variance in a trait rather than extremes. Don’t forget to … Read More

What Causes Trait Differences?

In this video we consider why traits might differ between people, beginning with the possible role of biological systems. Hans Eysenck suggested that introverts and extraverts differed in their levels of cortical arousal, resulting in different needs for stimulation that … Read More

Traits and Behavior

In this video I describe the relationship between scores on trait assessments and actual behaviors. As Walter Mischel demonstrated, the correlation between trait scores and behaviors is fairly low, but it’s important to keep in mind that traits describe tendencies, … Read More

The Five Factor Model or “Big Five”

In this video I briefly describe the Five Factor Model or Big Five, which considers five main dimensions of personality: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. This model comes from the work of Robert McCrae and Paul Costa, … Read More

Which Personality Traits Matter?

In this video I describe several approaches to narrowing down personality traits into a manageable number of ways of thinking about how people differ. These include Gordon Allport‘s hierarchy of cardinal dispositions, central traits, and secondary traits, the use of … Read More

Trait-Based Assessment of Personality

In this video I describe a nomothetic approach to personality using universal trait dimensions. Comparisons between people allow us to place them on a dimension for a number of possible traits. Unlike the infinite possible responses of projective techniques, responses … Read More

Racial Differences in IQ

In this video I consider racial differences in average IQ scores. This controversy reached a peak with the publication of “The Bell Curve” by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray in 1994. This led to publication of several papers on race … Read More