1.2C Differences between People Summary Problem 5

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Problem 5
1. How can you categorize personality traits?
2. What type of empirical approaches are there?
3. Traits theories
4. (What is the difficulty in generalizing personality traits?
Traits

 Consistent patters in which individuals behave, feel & think
o Endure, almost regardless of time & place
 Two connotations:
o Consistency: traits describes regularity in the person’s behaviour
 E.g. sociable person always sociable across social settings
o Distinctiveness: characteristics that make a person distinct from others (unique)

Different views of traits
 Nomothetic view
o Traits exist in same way in every person
o Uniqueness: unique combination of levels on many trait dimensions
 Idiographic view
o Emphasize uniqueness
o Trait may be possessed only by one person (many different traits)

Traits as Internal Causal Properties
 Are internal → carry desires from one situation to another
o Causal: desires can be explained by individuals who posses them
o Internal desires influence external behaviour
o E.g. desire for material things → shopping
 Traits are not equated (gleichgesetzt) with external behaviour
o E.g. strong desire for pasta → on a diet → therefore just looks at the food longingly, but does
not act on desire
 can lie dormant → capaci es are present, but behaviour is not expressed

Traits as Descriptive Summaries

 descriptive summaries of attributes → no assump on about internality & causality
o e.g. trait of jealousy → describe expressed behaviour (stalking his girlfriend, etc.) &
summarize trend in his behaviour
o jealousy might be due to social situations (other guys hitting on girlfriend)

Trait theories in general
 people differ from each other in the amounts of various characteristics they have
 Person behaviour/personality can be explained by traits
 Direct correspondence between person’s performance of traits-related actions & his possession of the
corresponding traits (people who act in extraverted manner → correspond to traits of extraversion
 Try to establish personality taxonomy
 Taxonomy: way of classifying the things being studied
 Practical value: make predictions about persons behaviour
o E.g. job application → measures their characteristics personality traits
 Predict job performance
 Some theories explain behaviour

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o Other just describe & predict (like a map just shows the continents & does not explain why
they are located at their specific place)
 Biological perspective:
o Inherited biological factors → primary determinant of individual differences in traits

Lexical approach
 Starts with lexical hypothesis: all important individual differences have become encoded within the
natural language
o Difference among people have been noticed & words invented to describe those differences
o E.g. people on artic parts of Sweden, etc. have a word for 300 different qualities of snow
 Two criteria for identifying important traits
o Synonym frequency: the more synonyms the attribute has, the greater is the importance of
the attribute to describe individual differences
o Cross-cultural universality: the more important an individual difference is, the more
languages will have a term for it

Statistical approach
 Starts with pool of personality items (e.g. adjectives, items, sentences)
 Statistical procedure: large number of people rate themselves on the items
o Use factor analysis to identify groups or clusters of items
o Can determine which personality variables have some common property

Theoretical approach
 Determines which variables are important to measure
o E.g. Freudian → measure of oral & anal personality are essential
o E.g. theory of sociosexual orientation (Simpson & Gangestad)
 Women and men pursue one of two sexual relationship strategies
 Single committed relationship with children
 Greater degree of promiscuity (less investment of children)

Allport
 Traits are the basic units of personality
o Generalizing & personalized determining tendencies
o Consistent & stable models of individual’s adjustment to his environment
 Traits can be defined by three properties
o Frequency
o Intensity
o Range of situations
 Different kind of traits
o Cardinal trait: persistent, observable disposition
o Central trait: cover secondary dispositions → traits with varying degree of significance &
generality
 Functional autonomy of human motives
o In adult life → motive become independent of tension-reducing drives
 Criticism
o Limited empirical contributions → did little research (no research on genetic basis)
o Antiscientific → idiosyncratic perspective conflicts with science search for general laws