5 Steps to a 5 AP Psychology, 2010-2011 Edition (54 page)

George Kelly’s Personal Construct Theory

Of the primarily cognitive theories of personality, the personal-construct theory of engineer and psychologist George Kelly is the best known. He thought that, like scientists, we all try to make sense of our world by generating, testing, and revising hypotheses about our social reality, called
personal constructs
. We develop personal constructs, for example, when we consider how someone is similar to or different from someone else. Our personal constructs are a set of bipolar categories we use as labels to help us categorize and interpret the world. For example, our personal constructs can include happy/unhappy, energetic/inactive, selfish/generous, etc. We apply our personal constructs to all of the situations we are in, and revise them when they are not accurate. Our pattern of personal constructs determines our personality. Kelly developed a Role Construct Repertory Test to determine the constructs a person uses. People who use few constructs tend to stereotype others. People who use too many tend to have difficulty predicting other people’s behavior.

Albert Bandura, Julian Rotter, and Walter Mischel blended behavioral and cognitive perspectives into their theories of personality that stress the interaction of thinking with learning experiences in a social environment, now called social cognitive (social-learning) theories. Although he started his career as a strict behaviorist, Albert Bandura thinks that Skinner’s operant conditioning theory is inadequate to explain personality.

Albert Bandura’s Social Cognitive Theory

Bandura thinks that we learn more by observational learning than by operant conditioning. He explains behavior using his concept of
reciprocal determinism
, which states that the characteristics of the person, the person’s behavior, and the environment all affect one another in two-way causal relationships. The person includes personality characteristics, cognitive processes, and self-regulation skills. The person’s behavior includes the nature, frequency, and intensity of actions. The environment includes stimuli from the social or physical environment and reinforcement contingencies. For example, if we are fun-loving, we select environments that we believe will be entertaining, and because we think a particular environment will be entertaining, it may impact both how we act in that environment and how we view it.

According to Bandura, self-efficacy is the major factor in how we regulate our lives.
Self-efficacy
is our belief that we can perform behaviors that are necessary to accomplish tasks, and that we are competent. When we have high self-efficacy, we think that we can master situations and produce positive results. This affects how much we are willing to take risks and try new things. Our self-efficacy can be high in one area and low in another, for example in academics and sports. In North America and Western Europe, our societies foster an independent view of the self characterized by
individualism
, identifying oneself in terms of personal traits with independent, personal goals. Bandura has extended his theory to behavior of the individual in groups.

Collective efficacy
is our perception that with collaborative effort, our group will obtain its desired outcome. Some recent research studies indicate that high self-efficacy appears to be more beneficial in individualistic societies, such as North American and Western European societies, and high collective efficacy seems to be more beneficial in collectivistic societies, such as Asian societies, for achievement of group goals. Asian countries (including Japan, China, and India) foster an interdependent view of the self
characterized by
collectivism
, primary identification of an individual as a member of a group (family, school, company, community) and goals of the group as one’s own goals.

Julian Rotter’s Social-Learning Theory

The key concept of Julian Rotter’s social learning theory is
locus of control
, the degree to which we expect that a reinforcement or outcome of our behavior is contingent on our own behavior or personal characteristics, as opposed to the degree to which we expect that a reinforcement or outcome of our behavior is a function of luck or fate, is under the control of others, or is unpredictable. Those with an internal locus of control think they control and are responsible for what happens to them—for example, their hard work gets rewarded. In contrast, those with an external locus of control believe that what happens to them is due to fate, luck, or others—for example, people get promotions because they know the right people. Our locus of control has a major impact upon our personalities because it influences both how we think about ourselves and the actions we take.

Walter Mischel’s Cognitive–Affective Personality System

Walter Mischel studied with Julian Rotter, then was Albert Bandura’s colleague. Building on Rotter’s and Bandura’s theories, Mischel developed a cognitive-affective personality system (CAPS). According to CAPS, interaction among five factors and characteristics of the situation account for our individual differences, as well as differences in our own behavior across different situations. The five factors are: our encoding strategies, our expectancies and beliefs, our goals and values, our feelings, and our personal competencies and self-regulatory processes. We develop unique
behavioral signatures
, consistent ways of responding in similar situations that characterize our personality.

Cognitive and social-learning theories are criticized for overlooking the importance of emotions in our personalities and not recognizing unconscious motivation.

Trait and type theorists try to describe basic behaviors that define personality and to create instruments that measure individual differences in order to understand and predict behavior. They assume that we each have relatively stable personality characteristics or dispositional attributes, called traits or types. A
trait
is a relatively permanent characteristic of our personality that can be used to predict our behavior. Although some distinguish between traits and types by considering traits to be continuous dimensions and types to be discontinuous categories into which people fit, this distinction is not always clear. For example, Eysenck’s theory can be considered either a trait or type theory because his personality types result from the interactions of trait dimensions. Important trait/type theorists include Gordon Allport, Hans Eysenck, Raymond Cattell, Paul Costa, and Robert McCrae.

Gordon Allport’s Trait Theory

After meeting with Freud when he was beginning his career, Gordon Allport decided that psychoanalysis was too concerned with symbols and unconscious motivations. Allport conducted idiographic research that focused on conscious motivation and personal traits. His trait theory proposed three levels of traits. A
cardinal trait
is a defining characteristic, in a small number of us, that dominates and shapes all of our behavior. Mother Theresa is the most cited example of a person whose life focused on altruism—benefiting others, even to her own detriment. A
central trait
is a general characteristic, between 5 and 10 of which shape much of our behavior. For example, cheerfulness and shyness can be central traits. A
secondary trait
is a characteristic apparent in only certain situations. For example, being uncomfortable in confined spaces can be a secondary trait. Our unique pattern of traits determines our behavior.

Hans Eysenck’s Personality Dimensions

Another trait/type theorist, psychologist Hans Eysenck, tried to reduce description of our personalities to three major genetically influenced dimensions, which everyone possesses to varying degrees. He used
factor analysis
, a statistical procedure that identifies common factors among groups of items, to simplify a long list of traits into his three dimensions:
extroversion
(also
extraversion
),
neuroticism
, and
psychoticism
. Extroversion measures our sociability and tendency to pay attention to the external environment, as opposed to our private mental experiences.
Neuroticism
measures our level of instability—how moody, anxious, and unreliable we are—as opposed to stability—how calm, even-tempered, and reliable we are.
Psychoticism
measures our level of tough-mindedness—how hostile, ruthless, and insensitive we are—as opposed to tender-mindedness—how friendly, empathetic, and cooperative we are. Twin studies indicate a hereditary component to these three dimensions.

Raymond Cattell’s 16 Personality Factors

A trait theorist who conducted nomothetic research, Raymond Cattell, wanted to find out how traits are organized and how they are linked. Through the use of surveys and records, Cattell studied features of
surface traits
, visible areas of personality. He found that many surface traits were either absent or present in clusters in people, indicating that they represented a single more basic trait. Using factor analysis, Cattell developed a list of 16 basic traits. He considered these more basic traits
source traits
, underlying personality characteristics. Cattell’s
Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire
, also called the 16 PF, yields trait profiles that enable psychologists to get a picture of our personality.

The Big Five Personality Factors

Many personality psychologists considered Eysenck’s three dimensions to be too few to describe personality, but Cattell’s 16 to be too many. More recently, trait psychologists Paul Costa and Robert McCrae have developed a five-factor model of personality, nicknamed, “The Big Five.” In cross-cultural studies, the same five factors have been identified in trait ratings. The Big Five Theory includes the traits of openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.

These can be more easily remembered by using their acronym OCEAN.

Psychologists use a wide variety of techniques to measure personality, including interviews, direct observation and behavioral assessment, projective tests, and personality inventories. Psychologists, human resources specialists, and others use two types of interviews that both involve obtaining information about personal history, personality traits, and current psychological state.
Unstructured interviews
involve informal conversation centered on the individual, whereas
structured interviews
involve the interviewer posing a series of planned questions that the interviewee answers. The person being interviewed not only provides verbal answers, but also nonverbal information with his/her facial expressions, tone of voice, gestures, and posture. Diagnostic interviews, college interviews, and employment interviews are often structured, but can be unstructured. While interviews can supply essential information about personality, they have limitations resulting from the interviewer’s preconceptions, attempts at deception by the interviewee, and the halo effect. The
halo effect
is the tendency to generalize a favorable impression to unrelated dimensions of the subject’s personality.

Have you ever watched the behavior of people as you waited in line or sat in a public place? If so, you were engaging in a process similar to the assessment known as direct observation. Psychologists sometimes look at the behavior of an individual as he/she interacts with others, carries on normal functions, or performs specific tasks in order to identify personality traits or problems. Behaviorists prefer observational techniques. They may use rating scales that list personality traits or behaviors to be evaluated.
Behavioral assessments
record the frequency of specific behaviors in an observation. Though they criticize the subjective nature of other types of assessment, behaviorists also have to make inferences about what they see in another person’s behavior. Lab studies have careful controls, but a potential flaw with naturalistic observational studies is the
Hawthorn effect
. When people know that they are being observed, they change their behavior to what they think the observer expects or to make themselves look good.

Psychoanalysts use
projective personality tests
that present ambiguous stimuli, such as inkblots or pictures, with the assumption that test takers will project their unconscious thoughts or feelings onto the stimuli. The objective is to uncover deeply hidden unconscious thoughts, feelings, wishes, and needs. The famous Rorschach inkblot test presents 10 bilaterally symmetrical inkblots, asking the person to tell what he/she sees in each one and to indicate the features of the inkblot that prompted the response. The evaluator scores each response based on a rubric, inputs the data into a scoring system, then uses clinical judgment to prepare a profile of the person’s motives and conflicts. Another projective test, the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) created by Henry Murray and Christiana Morgan, consists of a set of 20 cards (one blank) with people in ambiguous situations. People are shown a number of cards in sequence. Murray thought that people would reveal their need for achievement, sex, power, or affiliation in their answers to requests to tell what is happening in the picture, what led up to it, how the people feel, and how the situation turns out. For example, people who tell stories in which people work hard to accomplish their goals or overcome obstacles indicate a high need for achievement. Because they are unstructured, projective tests often get people to talk about anxiety-provoking situations that they otherwise wouldn’t reveal, exposing unconscious conflicts. Although psychoanalysts have delineated ways to interpret the subjective responses on projective tests, other psychologists question the validity and reliability of these assessments.