Personality: Definition & Key Elements

Study Notes

Personality is a set of psychological traits and mechanisms within an individual, influencing their interactions with the world and shaping their experiences.
Personality is enduring, meaning traits persist over time, and influential, impacting individuals' lives.
There's a person-environment interaction where personality traits contribute to how individuals perceive, select, evoke, and manipulate their environments.
Personality is involved in adaptation, helping individuals accomplish goals, cope with challenges, and adjust to life's problems.
Environment plays a crucial role in shaping personality, influencing what individuals attend to and respond to.

Psychological Traits: Characteristics describing individual differences.
Mechanisms: Processes that underlie personality, allowing predictions of behavior. These are internal to the individual and are relatively enduring.
Within the Individual: Personality resides within a person and remains consistent across situations. Example: A person's reaction to a threatening situation (fight or flight) reveals their personality.
Organized: Traits and mechanisms within a person are interconnected and not simply random.

Like All Others: This level focuses on human nature, including shared needs like belonging, love, and capacities like empathy. It considers cultural norms too.
Like Some Others: This level explores individual and group differences, focusing on the prevalence of traits and how they vary between individuals and groups.
Like No Others: This level focuses on individual uniqueness, highlighting unique traits that are specific to a person, such as Josh's unique way of expressing love.

Dispositional Domain: Focuses on traits someone is born with.
Biological Domain: Investigates how personality is influenced by biological systems (e.g., genetics, neurotransmitters).
Intrapsychic Domain: Explores inner workings of the mind, such as unconscious processes.
Cognitive-Experiential Domain: Focuses on thoughts, beliefs, and how individuals perceive and interpret the world.
Social and Cultural Domain: Examines how personality is affected by social and cultural factors.
Adjustment Domain: Studies how personality influences coping with stress and adapting to life challenges.

Comprehensiveness: A theory should explain a wide range of known facts about personality.
Heuristic Value: A theory should guide researchers to new discoveries and insights.
Testability: A theory should generate testable predictions that can be empirically verified.
Parsimony: A theory should be simple and concise, using as few assumptions or premises as possible.
Compatibility and Integration: A theory should be consistent with knowledge from other domains and integrate well with other scientific disciplines.

This research approach investigates personality across groups of people.
Researchers compare individual trait or factor scores, relating them to other variables.