Social Class and Personality Traits

Social Class and Personality

• Lower-class parents tend to emphasize obedience to authority, while higher-status parents tend to emphasize self-direction and nonconformity to authority.
• Social class within a culture can have an effect on personality.

Cultural Universals

• Beliefs about the personality characteristics of men and women may reflect actual differences in personality.
• Cultural universals include the expression of emotion and the five-factor model of personality traits.
• The five-factor model includes openness, which appears to be somewhat variable across cultures.

Culture and Personality

• Cultural personality psychology seeks to discover the principles underlying cultural diversity, how human psychology shapes culture, and how cultural understandings shape our psychology.
• Within-group similarities and between-group differences can be physical, psychological, behavioral, or attitudinal, and are called cultural variations.

Three Major Approaches to Culture

• The three major approaches to culture are evoked culture, transmitted culture, and cultural universals.
• Evoked culture refers to cultural differences created by differing environmental conditions activating a predictable set of responses.
• Transmitted culture consists of ideas, values, attitudes, and beliefs that are transmitted from one person's mind to another through interaction.

Evoked Culture

• Evoked culture requires a universal underlying mechanism and environmental differences in the degree to which the mechanism is activated.
• Examples of evoked culture include cooperation and sharing under high-variance conditions, early experience and mating strategies, and honors, insults, and evoked aggression.
• Cultural differences in conformity can be explained by evoked culture.

Transmitted Culture

• Transmitted culture includes moral values, self-concepts, and other cultural differences that are passed from one generation to the next.
• Research shows that self-concepts differ substantially from culture to culture, with some cultures emphasizing interdependence and others emphasizing independence.
• Acculturation is the process of adapting to the ways of life in one's new culture.

Cultural Differences in Self-Enhancement

• Self-enhancement is the tendency to describe and present oneself using positive or socially valued attributes.
• Tendencies toward self-enhancement tend to be stable over time.

Do Cultures Have Distinctive Personality Profiles?

• Most studies reveal that stereotypes about national personality rarely correspond to average levels of actual assessed personality.

Personality Variations Within Culture

• Within-culture variations can arise from several sources, including differences in socioeconomic class, historical era, and local evoked or transmitted culture.
• Whether a language has a word for a particular emotion or not does not affect whether people experience the emotion in the same way.

Emotions and Language

• The view that language is not necessary for people to experience emotions may be contrasted with the Whorfian hypothesis of linguistic relativity, which contends that language creates thought and experience.
• Darwin's research suggests that emotions such as grief, contempt, disgust, fear, and jealousy are expressed uniformly across cultures.
• Certain emotions, such as anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, and surprise, are universal across cultures.

The Science and Politics of Studying Sex and Gender

• Debate exists over whether sex differences are real and significant, or exaggerated and minimal.
• Two perspectives: minimalists (sex differences are small and inconsequential) and maximalists (sex differences are significant and comparable to other effects in psychology).

History of the Study of Sex Differences

• Men and women are essentially the same on most measures of cognitive ability, except for spatial rotation ability.
• Spatial rotation ability refers to the ability to track a moving object, such as throwing a spear or football.

Minimalists and Maximalists

• Minimalists argue that sex differences are small and have little practical importance in everyday life.
• Maximalists argue that sex differences are significant and should not be trivialized.

Sex Differences in Personality Temperament in Children

• Inhibitory control (ability to control inappropriate responses) favors girls.
• Perceptual sensitivity (ability to detect subtle stimuli) favors girls.
• Surgency (approach behavior, high activity, and impulsivity) favors boys.
• No significant sex differences in negative affectivity (anger, difficulty, distress, and sadness).

Five-Factor Model of Personality

• Extraversion: women score slightly higher on gregariousness, men score slightly higher on activity level.
• Agreeableness: women score higher on trust, tender-mindedness, and modesty; women smile more often than men.
• Conscientiousness: women score slightly higher on order.
• Emotional Stability: women score lower than men.
• Intellect-Openness to Experience: essentially no sex differences, but women score higher on fantasy and ideas.

Basic Emotions: Frequency and Intensity

• Women experience both positive and negative emotions more frequently and intensely than men.

Other Dimensions of Personality

• Self-esteem: males score slightly higher than females, but the gap closes in adulthood.
• Sexuality, Emotional Investment, and Mating: men have more difficulty being friends with the opposite sex; women score higher in emotional investment.
• People-Things Dimension: women prefer teaching and helping professions, men prefer construction and engineering.

Masculinity, Femininity, Androgyny, and Sex Roles

• Androgyny refers to the possession of both masculine and feminine characteristics.
• Instrumentality (assertiveness, boldness, dominance) and Expressiveness (nurturance, expression of emotions, empathy) are key dimensions.
• Gender Schemata: the ideal is to be gender-aschematic, not using gender in processing social information.

Gender Stereotypes

• Cognitive component: forming social categories based on gender.
• Affective component: feeling hostile or warm towards someone based on gender.
• Behavioral component: behaving in a certain way based on gender stereotypes.