Module 1: Nature of Personality (PDF)

MODULE I NATURE OF PERSONALITY STRUCTURE 1.1 Introduction 1.2 Origins of the term Personality 1.3 Meaning and Definition of Personality 1.4 History of Personality Theories 1.5 Need for Personality Theories 1.6 Summary 1.7 Questions LEAR...

MODULE I NATURE OF PERSONALITY STRUCTURE 1.1 Introduction 1.2 Origins of the term Personality 1.3 Meaning and Definition of Personality 1.4 History of Personality Theories 1.5 Need for Personality Theories 1.6 Summary 1.7 Questions LEARNING OBJECTIVES:  To know a general, integrated and clear concept about Personality  To understand personality assessment  To identify several important Theories of Personality  To identify key themes in Theories of Personality 1.1 INTRODUCTION Personality is the one word in Psychology which is used by most of us, rather carelessly and loosely. It is more comprehensive in its connotation than “temperament” or ‘character’ but we often confuse it with them. We often identify it with the ‘externals’ of an individual, his looks, voice, dress, manners and gestures, when we remark, “Sunita has a wonderful personality or Anil has a poor personality.” The externals or physique and appearance constitute only one factor in one’s personality; they do not constitute the whole that is implied by the term personality. An individual’s personality is the combination of traits and patterns that influence their behavior, thought, motivation, and emotion. It drives individuals to consistently think, feel, and behave in specific ways; it is what makes each individual unique. Over time, these patterns strongly influence personal expectations, perceptions, values, and attitudes. Personality psychology is the study of human personality and how it varies among individuals and populations. Personality has been studied for over 2000 years, beginning with Hippocrates in 370 BCE and spanning through modern theories such as the psychodynamic perspective and trait theory. The personality implies psychological and social character that an individual acquires by hereditary biological endowment which provides him the basis for development and social growth of environment within which he springs forth. The continuing process whereby the child is influenced by others (especially the parents) is called socialization. It is a course of learning whereby the child comes to act in accordance with the special demands that membership in a certain society imposes upon him. Personality is a sum of physical, mental and social qualities in integrated manner. Based on definitions, it may be said that there are two main approaches to the study of personality: (i) the psychological and (ii) the sociological. The psychological approach considers personality as a certain style peculiar to the individual. This style is determined by characteristic organization of mental trends, complexes, emotions and sentiments. 3 1.2 ORIGINS OF THE TERM “PERSONALITY” The word “personality” originates from the Latin word persona, which means “mask.” Personality as a field of study began with Hippocrates, a physician in ancient Greece, who theorized that personality traits and human behaviors are based on four separate temperaments associated with four fluids of the body known as “humors”. This theory, known as humorism, proposed that an individual’s personality was the result of the balance of these humors (yellow bile, black bile, phlegm, and blood), which corresponded to four dispositions (grumpy, melancholy, calm, and cheer, respectively). While this theory is no longer held to be true, it paved the way for further discoveries and insight into human personality. Interestingly, several words in the English language that describe personality traits are rooted in humorism: “bilious” means bad-tempered, which is rooted in humorists’ thought that yellow bile was associated with grumpiness; “melancholic” is from the Greek words for “black bile,” again rooted in humorists’ thought that black bile was associated with depression. Similarly, “phlegmatic” describes a calm personality and “sanguine” (from the Latin for “blood”) a cheerful or playful one. A great deal of modern personality psychology is influenced by, and attempts to answer, the following five philosophical questions about what really determines personality:  Freedom versus determinism: How much, if any, of an individual’s personality is under their conscious control?  Heredity versus environment: Do internal (biological) or external (environmental) influences play a larger role in determining personality?  Uniqueness versus universality: Are individuals generally more alike (like each other) or different (unique) in nature?  Active versus reactive: Is human behavior passively shaped by environmental factors, or are humans more active in this role?  Optimistic versus pessimistic: Are human’s integral in the changing of their own personalities (for instance, can they learn and change through human interaction and intervention)? 1.3 MEANING AND DEFINITION OF PERSONALITY The term personality is used in various senses. Generally, it is used to indicate the external outlook of an individual. In philosophy it means the internal quality. But in social psychology the term personality indicates neither the external or outward pattern nor does it indicate the internal quality. It means an integrated whole. The term ‘persona’ was used to indicate the actions of an individual. In the modern world and psychology, it has come to indicate the sum of an individual’s characteristics and qualities. Various thinkers, social psychologists and others have defined personality in many ways. According to K. Young, “Personality is a patterned body of habits, traits, attitudes and ideas of an individual’s, as these are organized externally into roles and statues and as they relate internally to motivation, goals, and various aspects of selfhood. As G.W. Allport has defined, 4 “Personality is the dynamic organisation with the individual of those psycho-physical system that determine his unique adjustment to his environment.” By personality Ogburn means “the integration of the socio-psychological behavior of the human being, represented by habits of action and feeling, attitudes and opinions.” According to Lundberg and others, “The term personality refers to the habits, attitudes and other social traits that are characteristic of a given individual’s behavior”. “Personality represents those structural and dynamic properties of an individual or individuals as they reflect themselves in characteristic responses to situations”. This is the working definition of personality given by Lawrence A. Pewin. Gordon Allport defines personality as: Personality is the dynamic organisation within the individual of those psycho-physical systems that determine his unique adjustment to his environment”. The Personality is the combination of activities whether internal or external. It can be said like as organisation of internal and external activities. 1.4 HISTORY OF PERSONALITY PSYCHOLOGY The history of personality psychology dates as far back as Ancient Greece. Indeed, philosophers since the 4th Century BCE have been trying to define exactly what it is that makes us. In 370 BCE, Hippocrates proposed two pillars of temperament: hot/cold and moist/dry, resulting in four humors or combinations of these qualities. The hot and dry combination was referred to as yellow bile, cold and dry as black bile, hot and wet was blood and cold and wet was phlegm. Though much of the work that arose from this theory of the Four Humors was medicinal in nature, it was also hypothesized a patient's personality could be influenced by humoral imbalances. This categorical way of thinking about personality permeated ancient thinking on the matter. Plato proposed four groupings (artistic, sensible, intuitive, reasoning) and Aristotle hypothesized four factors (iconic i.e. artistic, pistic i.e. common-sense, noetic i.e. intuition and dianoetic i.e. logic) contributed to one’s social order in society. Aristotle was also one of the first individuals to hypothesize connections between physical aspects of the body and behavior. In the mid to late 18th Century, Franz Gall, a neuroanatomist, fathered the new ‘pseudoscience’ of phrenology, a doctrine that hypothesized correlations between specific brain areas and functions. Gall believed measurements of the skull could reveal something about individuals’ inner thoughts and emotions, an assumption that paved the way for modern neuropsychology. Gall’s work was some of the first to move away from a philosophical explanation of behavior and personality into one rooted in anatomy. Physiological evidence for such a conjecture arrived in the mid-19th Century with the iconic and fascinating case of Phineas Gage. Gage was a railroad construction worker from New Hampshire when, in 1848, an accident caused a tamping iron to be driven through the side of his face, behind his left eye and all the way through the top of his skull. Miraculously, Gage recovered. Though weakened, he was able to walk and speak. However, the brain 5 damage from the accident resulted in numerous changes in his personality. Though history has distorted the extent of these changes, it is generally agreed that Phineas Gage’s demeanor went from moral and calm to irreverent, impatient and profane. His case is one of the first to provide physical evidence that personality is linked to specific brain regions. In another conceptualization of personality, Sigmund Freud published The Ego and the Id in 1923. Freud posited that the human psyche consists of three main components: the id, the ego and the superego which control all conscious and unconscious thought and therefore behavior. The id can be thought of as the innate drivers of behavior. It encompasses bodily needs and desires and, according to Freud, drives us to seek out these wants. In other words, it is “the dark, inaccessible part of our personality [that] contains everything that is inherited, the instincts, which originate from somatic organization.” The ego can be thought of as the bridge between the id and reality; it is what finds realistic ways to achieve what the id wants and finds justifications and rationalizations for these desires. Lastly, the superego is the organized component of the psyche and is often referred to as the moral check of the ego. It is responsible for conscience and for regulating the drives of the id and ego by providing a sense of right and wrong. Carl Jung, a psychiatrist and student of Freud, developed a type-based theory of personality. In his book, Psychological Types, Jung claims individuals fall into different dichotomous personality categories - for example, introversion/extraversion. The typology theory of personality was further popularized by Katherine Cook Briggs and her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers who eventually developed the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. Type theory remains a common conceptualization of personality to this day. The trend of investigating the personality puzzle from the angle of “what are our underlying drives?” continued into the 1940s and 1950s. Many are familiar with Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs but fail to recognize Maslow proposed that all human motivation is driven by the necessity of fulfilling these needs in accordance with the principle of self-actualization, which states humans are driven to be the best they can be. In the late 1950s, Carl Rogers built off the ideas of Maslow, arguing that yes, we all strive to achieve our greatest potential, but we do so in diverse ways according to our personalities. This line of reasoning leads to a chicken and the egg problem: motivations to do something (like fulfill your human needs) ultimately influence behavior and thereby influence personality (as Maslow believed); but, that personality is simultaneously influencing the way you act upon motivations (as Rogers hypothesized). Ultimately, there is no right answer in terms of which way this circle flows. The puzzle untangling the relationship between personality and behavior persists in modern psychological conversations and continues to inspire research and debate across many fields of study. The study of personality structure arguably got its start in 1884 when Sir Francis Galton first applied the Lexical Hypothesis. This approach, which posits that words are inherently 6 “expressive of character,” was furthered in 1936 in the seminal work of Allport and Odbert. Using Webster’s Dictionary, this duo identified close to 18,000 words in the English language that could be used to describe personality. In the 1940’s, psychologist Raymond Cattell worked with his mentor Charles Spearman on developing factor analysis, a now-common statistical technique used to investigate variability within a sample in the hopes of uncovering a core set of factors driving said variability. Cattell believed the method could be applied to the study of personality to uncover the factors that lead to observed individual differences. His work led to a set of 16 fundamental factors. A few years later, in 1947, Hans Eysenck posited there were only two pertinent dimensions of personality -- extraversion and neuroticism -- and that these could be combined to describe four key personality types (High E/Low N, High E/High N, Low E/High N, Low E/Low N). Another key part of Eysenck’s model was his explanation of the potential causation of these high and low tendencies. He posited that differences in limbic system arousal led to differences in neuroticism and he believed low cortical arousal led to extraversion while high cortical arousal led to introversion. This might seem counterintuitive, but the reasoning has to do with individuals with high arousal wanting to lower their arousal levels (hence introversion) and vice versa. The 1960’s saw a return to and a refinement of Cattell’s 16 factor model as Ernest Tupes and Raymond Christal (1961) and Warren Norman proposed the idea that there were five recurring factors within Catell's sixteen: Surency, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Emotional Stability, and Culture. These five factors would eventually morph into the Big Five we know today (Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Neuroticism, and Openness) as Lewis Goldberg initiated his own investigation of the lexical hypothesis (1981) and found the same five principal dimensions, later coining the term ‘Big Five.’ In the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, Paul Costa and Robert McCrae, two other giants in the field of personality research, independently verified the construct of these five factors of personality. Since the late 20th century, researchers have conducted thousands of studies confirming the structure, universality, replicability, and productiveness of the Big Five. The Big Five were derived primarily through an inductive, or itemetric, approach. That is, there was a “boiling down” of a large group of items that were not theoretically assumed to relate to one another. In contrast, type measures of personality (MBTI), were developed through an inductive approach. More specifically, they were developed around theories of mind (e.g., Jung, Freud). While both approaches are valid, the Big Five approach has proven itself to be more reliable and valid throughout years of research. Read here for a more detailed discussion of the efficacy of the MBTI versus the Big Five. 7 1.5 WHY DO WE NEED PERSONALITY THEORIES? Differing personality theorists have varying definitions for personality and one definition of personality is a pattern of unique characteristics and relatively permanent traits, which give individuality and consistency to an individual’s behavior (Feist & Feist, 2009). There are several reasons why it is important to study different theories of personality. Throughout history, several well-known thinkers and theorists, such as Sigmund Freud and Erik Erikson developed differing theories to explain personality, therefore studying their differing theories of personality provides similar, differing, and new aspects concerning personality and by what means they study personality. Also studying different theories enables one to see the point of view each theorist used to make speculations about personality. All developed theories of personality have differing explanations as for what personality is a result of. For example, theories referred to as behavioral theories suggest personality results from interactions between an individual and his or her environment, while theories referred to as psychodynamic theories of personality emphasize that personality is an influence of the childhood experiences and the unconscious mind. Since theorists cannot agree upon one definition of personality, and since varying theories of personality are developed from the point of view of each theorist, it is important to study different theories of personality to gain a better understanding of what personality is and how an individual's personality develops. 1.6 SUMMARY From eccentric and introverted to boisterous and bold, the human personality is a curious, multifaceted thing. We each have a unique mix of characteristics, and value different traits in ourselves and others. Questions of personality have challenged us from the dawn of personhood: Can people ever change? Can an angry person ease his or her rage, for instance, or a meek person finally speak up? What is the difference between normal and pathological behavior? Do others perceive us the same way we perceive ourselves? Psychological research has made some progress on these questions—a branch of the field, known as personality psychology, is dedicated to them—but we still don’t understand many facets of personality. Because personality is so pervasive and all-important, it presents a clinical paradox of sorts: It is hard to accurately assess one's own personality, yet impossible to overlook that of others. But since personality can make or break one's relationships at home and at work—and because we all want to be grounded in who we are—researchers will continue to dig deeper into why we are the way we are, and how our personalities influence our behavior. 1.7 QUESTIONS: 1. Define and explain the term personality 2. Write a brief not on History of personality theories 3. Why do we need personality theories? 8