The Trait Approach PDF

3 7 The Trait Approach Theory, Application, and Assessment The Trait Approach Important Trait Theorists Factor Analysis and the Search for the Structure of Personality The Situation Versus Trait Controversy Application: The Big Five in the Workplace Assessment: Self-Report Inventories Strengths and...

3 7 The Trait Approach Theory, Application, and Assessment The Trait Approach Important Trait Theorists Factor Analysis and the Search for the Structure of Personality The Situation Versus Trait Controversy Application: The Big Five in the Workplace Assessment: Self-Report Inventories Strengths and Criticisms of the Trait Approach DNY59/E+/Getty Images Summary Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. The Trait Approach 135 S uppose for the moment that, like many college freshmen living in on-campus housing, you have been assigned a roommate you don’t know. A few weeks before classes, your new roommate sends you an e-mail message. After saying hello and introducing himself or herself, your roommate asks: “What kind of person are you?” Describing your physical features is relatively easy and giving facts about your hometown or number of siblings takes almost no time at all. But how do you describe your personality to someone you have never met? If you are like most people, you probably tackle this problem in one of two ways. You might start by describing the type of person you are—a quiet type, an independent type, an outgoing type. The other strategy is to describe your characteristics— studious, shy, friendly. In either case, you would be using a rough variation of the trait approach to personality. That is, you would be identifying relatively stable features of your personality that distinguish you from other individuals. People have tried to describe personality for probably about as long as humans have used language. Gordon Allport (1961), one of the original trait theorists, counted more than 4,000 adjectives in the English language that can be used for this purpose. Thus, an early challenge for personality psychologists was combining all these characteristics into a usable structure. Some of the first attempts to identify and describe personality were typology systems. The goal was to discover how many types of people there are and identify each person’s type. The ancient Greeks divided people into four types: sanguine (happy), melancholic (unhappy), choleric (temperamental), and phlegmatic (apathetic). Another early effort identified three basic personality types based on general physique: endomorphic (obese), mesomorphic (muscular), and ectomorphic (fragile). The three types were said to differ in personality as well as physical appearance (Sheldon, 1942). Today personality researchers have largely abandoned typologies. The problem is that several assumptions underlying the approach cannot be justified. A typology assumes that each of us fits into one personality category and that all people within a category are basically alike. The approach also assumes that the behavior of people in one category is distinctly different from the behavior of people in other categories. You can’t be a little of category A and a little of B. You must be either A or B. These assumptions simply don’t stand up to empirical scrutiny. Although typologies are still popular outside of academia (zodiac signs, for instance), psychologists have replaced the type approach with the trait approach. The Trait Approach A lmost any personality characteristic you can think of—optimism, self-esteem, achievement motivation—can be illustrated with the trait continuum shown in Figure 7.1. Several important characteristics about the trait approach are depicted in this simple diagram. First, trait psychologists identify characteristics that can be represented along a continuum. For example, achievement motivation can range from little interest in achieving at one extreme to highly driven achievers at the other. Second, trait psychologists maintain that we can take any person and place him or her somewhere along the continuum. We are all more or less aggressive, more or less friendly, and so on. Finally, if we were to measure a large number of people and Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. Chapter 7 / The Trait Approach Number of People at Each Point 136 Extremely Low in Trait Average Extremely High in Trait Figure 7.1 Trait Continuum place their scores at appropriate points along the continuum, we probably would find that the scores are normally distributed; that is, they would form the well-known bell curve. Relatively, few people score extremely high or extremely low. Instead, most of us fall somewhere toward the middle of the distribution. A trait is a dimension of personality used to categorize people according to the degree to which they manifest a particular characteristic. The trait approach to personality is built on two important assumptions. First, trait psychologists assume that personality characteristics are relatively stable over time. It would make little sense to describe someone as high in sociability if that person loved being around people one day but shied away from social settings the next. Of course, we all have times we prefer to be alone and other times we seek out friends. But if we were to examine a given individual’s behavior over a long period of time, we should see a relatively stable level of sociability. Someone who tends to be highly sociable today will probably tend to be sociable next month, next year, and many years down the road. This is not to say that personality does not change. Researchers find that our personalities continue to develop as we move through adulthood and into old age (Bleidorn, Kandler, Reimann, Angleitner, & Spinath, 2009; Roberts & Mroczek, 2008; Roberts, Walton, & Viechtbauer, 2006). However, these changes are gradual and typically evolve over a period of many years. The second assumption underlying the trait approach is that personality characteristics are stable across situations. Aggressive people should exhibit higherthan-average amounts of aggression during family disagreements as well as when playing softball. Again, we all act more aggressively in some situations than in others. But the trait approach assumes that over many different situations we can identify a relatively stable average degree of aggressiveness. But note that, as discussed later in this chapter, these assumptions of trait stability over time and across situations have not gone unchallenged. Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. Important Trait Theorists 137 In contrast to many of the other perspectives covered in this book, trait researchers usually are not interested in predicting one person’s behavior in a given situation. Instead, their focus is predicting how people who score within a certain segment of the trait continuum typically behave. Thus, a trait researcher might compare people who score relatively high on a social anxiety scale with those who score relatively low. The investigators might find that, on average, people high in social anxiety make less eye contact than those low on this trait. Of course, there would be a few high-anxiety people in this study who make a lot of eye contact and a few low-anxiety participants who make very little. But rather than singling out one individual, the researchers’ goal is to identify how the average person in either of these two groups acts. It is also important to note that the significance of a person’s score on a trait measure lies in how that individual compares with other people. When we say someone is feminine, we are saying only that the person is more feminine than most people. It is important to keep this notion in mind when interpreting personality test scores. Test takers who, for example, think of themselves as outgoing are sometimes surprised to learn that they score in the middle of the distribution on a measure of extraversion. The score does not mean that these individuals are not sociable or that they don’t enjoy parties. But it does suggest that they probably are not as extraverted as many other people who have taken the same personality test. Finally, unlike most of the other approaches to personality, no major schools of psychotherapy have evolved from the trait approach. Information collected by trait researchers can be useful to therapists making diagnoses and charting progress during therapy. In addition, many of the characteristics examined by trait researchers, such as self-esteem and social anxiety, are relevant to a client’s well-being. But research findings on personality traits typically provide only a direction for how to change people who may be too high or too low on a personality dimension. Trait psychologists are more likely to be academic researchers than practicing therapists. Important Trait Theorists Y ou will notice references to traits and trait measures scattered throughout most of the chapters in this book, a testimony to how widely accepted the trait concept has become in personality psychology. Personality psychologists from nearly every approach, as well as researchers from many other fields of psychology, use traits and trait measures in their work. The expansion of the trait approach from virtually nothing less than a century ago to its prominent influence today can be attributed in part to the pioneering work of some early trait theorists. Gordon Allport The first recognized work on traits by a psychologist did not appear until 1921. That was the year Gordon Allport, along with his brother Floyd, published Personality Traits: Their Classification and Measurement. Gordon Allport also taught what is believed to be the first college course on personality in the United States, in 1925 (Nicholson, 1997). Only one year after receiving his bachelor’s degree, the unconventional Allport somehow managed to arrange a meeting with Sigmund Freud. Allport wanted to talk Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. 138 Chapter 7 / The Trait Approach “Dispositions are never wholly consistent. What a bore it would be if they were—and what chaos if they were not at all consistent.” Gordon Allport psychology, but Freud spent much of the time inquiring about Allport’s unconscious motives. As far as Allport was concerned, there were obvious, conscious reasons for his behavior. But Freud’s limited orientation wouldn’t allow him to see the obvious. “Psychologists would do well,” Allport concluded from the visit, “to give full recognition to manifest motives before probing the unconscious” (1968, p. 384). Unlike Freud, whom he accused of blindly adhering to psychoanalytic theory, Allport acknowledged the limitations of the trait concept from the beginning. He accepted that behavior is influenced by a variety of environmental factors and recognized that traits are not useful for predicting what a single individual will do. Allport also believed that our traits have physical components in our nervous systems and predicted that scientists would one day develop technology advanced enough to identify personality traits by examining neurological structures. Allport identified two general strategies researchers might use when investigating personality. So far, we have described traits and trait research along the lines of what Allport called the nomothetic approach. Researchers using this approach assume that all people can be described along a single dimension according to their level of, for example, assertiveness or anxiety. Each person in a study using the nomothetic approach is tested to see how his or her score for the given trait compares with the scores of other participants. Allport referred to these traits that presumably apply to everyone as common traits. Although the vast majority of trait researchers use the nomothetic approach, Allport championed another way to conduct research on personality that is often ignored. Rather than forcing all people into categories selected beforehand, researchers using the idiographic approach identify the unique combination of traits that best accounts for the personality of a single individual. To illustrate Allport’s point, you might take a few minutes to list 5 to 10 traits you believe are the most important in describing your personality. Have a friend do the same for himself or herself and then compare your answers. You will most likely discover that the two of you have compiled very different lists. You may have used independent or genuine to describe yourself, but it may not have occurred to your friend to think in terms of independence or genuineness. Similarly, the traits your friend comes up with might never have crossed your mind when you wrote your self-description. Allport referred to these 5 to 10 traits that best describe an individual’s personality as central traits. If you want to understand one particular person, Allport recommended that you first determine the central traits for this individual and then decide where he or she falls on each of these dimensions. Although the number of central traits varies from person to person, Allport proposed that occasionally a single trait will dominate a personality. These rare individuals can be described with a cardinal trait. Allport pointed to historical figures whose behavior was so dominated by a single trait that the behavior became synonymous with the individual. Thus, we speak of people who are Machiavellian, Homeric, or Don Juans. The advantage of using the idiographic approach is that the person, not the researcher, determines what traits to examine. With the nomothetic approach, the traits selected by the investigator might be central for some people, but only what Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. Bettmann/Getty Images Gordon Allport 1897–1967 Gordon Allport was born in Montezuma, Indiana, to a family with three older brothers, including 7-year-old Floyd. Even as a child, Gordon did not fit in. “I was quick with words, poor at games,” he wrote. “When I was ten a schoolmate said of me, ‘Aw, that guy swallowed a dictionary’” (1967, p. 4). Allport was persuaded by his brother Floyd to attend Harvard. This was the beginning of an academic and professional shadow in which the younger Allport was to spend many of his early adult years. Not only did Gordon follow his brother to both undergraduate and graduate degrees at Harvard, but he also chose Floyd’s field of study, psychology. Floyd was the teaching assistant for Gordon’s first psy­ ordon took chology class. Later, G a course in experimental psychology from his brother, served as a participant in some of his research, and helped him with the editing of the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology. But Gordon soon developed a very different view of psychology. Floyd was a social psychologist who went on to achieve substantial recognition in that field. However, Gordon had different ideas about the best way to understand human behavior. In graduate school, Allport once again felt different from his peers. “Unlike most of my student colleagues,” he wrote, “I had no giftedness in natural science, mathematics, mechanics (laboratory manipulations), nor in biological or medical specialties” (1967, p. 8). After confessing these feelings to one of his professors, he was told, “But you know, there are many branches of psychology.” “I think this casual remark saved me,” Allport later reflected. “In effect he was encouraging me to find my own way in the … pastures of psychology” (1967, p. 8). This he did, despite much early resistance to his notion of personality traits. Perhaps the earliest of these confrontations came in graduate school when Allport was given 3 minutes to present his research ideas at a seminar at Clark University in front of the famous psychologist Edward Titchener. His presentation about personality traits was followed by total silence. Later, Titchener asked Allport’s adviser: “Why did you let him work on that problem?” But Allport was not discouraged. He went on to a distinguished career, most of it at Harvard. His 1937 book, Personality: A Psychological Interpretation, outlined his theory of personality traits and was well received by many psychologists. Two years later, Allport was elected president of the American Psychological Association. In 1964, he received the prestigious Distinguished ­S cientific Contribution Award from that same organization. Allport’s decision to wander off into different pastures of psychology was appropriate for the man who promoted the idea of individual differences. This decision also took him out of his brother’s shadow, perhaps best symbolized when Gordon later became editor of the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology himself. He identified his confrontation with Titchener as a turning point in his career. “Never since that time have I been troubled by rebukes or professional slights directed at my maverick interests,” he said. “Later, of course, the field of personality became not only acceptable, but highly fashionable” (1967, p. 9). 139 Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. 140 Chapter 7 / The Trait Approach Allport called secondary traits for others. A test score indicating a person’s level of sociability is of great value when sociability is a central trait for that person, but may be of limited value when it is not. Henry Murray ­“Personality, like every other ­living thing, changes as it grows.” Gordon Allport Unlike Gordon Allport, who rejected much of psychoanalytic theory, Henry Murray’s approach to personality was a blend of psychoanalytic and trait concepts. Early in his career, Murray had the opportunity to interact extensively with Carl Jung. As a result, Murray’s writings are filled with references to the unconscious. The psychoanalytic influence on Murray’s work also can be seen in one of his principal contributions to the field of personality, the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT). As described in Chapter 3, the TAT is a projective measure designed to get at material not readily accessible to conscious thought. Murray called his approach personology and identified psychogenic needs as the basic elements of personality. He described these needs as a “readiness to respond in a certain way under certain given conditions” (1938, p. 124). He eventually arrived at a list of 27 psychogenic needs, including the need for Autonomy, the need for Achievement, the need for Dominance, and the need for Order. In keeping with his psychoanalytic background, Murray postulated that these needs are largely unconscious. According to Murray, each of us can be described in terms of a personal hierarchy of needs. For example, if you have a strong need for a lot of close friends, you would be said to have a high need for Affiliation. The importance of this need is not so much how it compares with the Affiliation needs of other people but how intense it is compared to your other needs. Suppose you have a big test tomorrow, but your friends are having a party tonight. If your Achievement need is higher on your personal hierarchy than your need for Affiliation or your need for Play, you’ll probably stay with your books. If your Achievement need, although high, is not quite as strong as these other needs, your grade will probably suffer. Murray recognized that whether a need is activated depends on the situation, which he called the press. For example, your need for Order won’t affect your behavior without an appropriate press, such as a messy room. If you have a strong need for Order, you probably make time to clean your room even when it is only slightly disheveled. If you have a relatively weak need for Order, you might wait until the room is too messy to move around in—and even then the cleaning might be motivated more by a need to please your roommates than to see things arranged neatly. Factor Analysis and the Search for the Structure of Personality A longside Allport and Murray, we find another pioneer of the trait approach, ­Raymond Cattell. Unlike many theorists, Cattell did not begin with insightful notions about the elements that make up human personality. Rather, he borrowed an approach used in other sciences. Notably, Cattell’s first college degree was in Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. Bettmann/Getty Images Henry Murray 1893–1988 There is little in Henry Murray’s background to suggest that he would one day be recognized as an influential personality theorist. In his own words, “[my] record consisted of nothing but items which correlated negatively … with the records of the vast majority of professional psychologists” (1967, p. 286). Murray attended one psychology lecture as an undergraduate. He found it boring and walked out. He earned his bachelor’s degree in history in 1915, followed by a medical degree from Columbia in 1919. After working a few years in embryology, Murray went to Cambridge University in England, where he earned a doctorate in biochemistry in 1927. How does a biochemist become an important personality theorist? During the latter years of his academic training, Murray was exposed to and enthusiastically embraced the writings of Carl Jung. He was particularly impressed with Jung’s description of psychological types. In 1925, while studying in England, he arranged to meet with Jung in Vienna. His conversations with Jung persuaded Murray that his real interests were in the budding field of psychology. Murray’s career also was influenced by another individual whose role has often gone unrecognized. That person was Christiana ­M organ, Murray’s paramour for several decades (Robinson, 1992; Weiner, 2013). Morgan accompanied ­Murray on his trip to see Jung. She also had a hand in developing the TAT, although she received none of the credit. Some of the illustrations used in the test were drawn by Morgan. ­ arvard After working at the H Psychological Clinic and receiving formal psychoanalytic training, Murray accepted a position at Harvard, where he taught until his retirement in 1962. Like most turns in his career, Murray was struck by the improbability of becoming a lecturer in psychology. Not only did he have a relatively weak background in psychology, he also was a stutterer. Nonetheless, Murray’s academic career was long and successful. Murray took a brief break from academia in 1943 when he was recruited by the Office of Strategic Services, a forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency. His job was to use his knowledge of personality to help in the selection of undercover agents. ­M urray also became something of a literary scholar, although he confessed once that “in school, [I] had received [my] consistently worst marks in English” (p. 286). He had a particular passion for the writings of Herman ­Melville and became an authority on ­Melville’s life. Murray died in 1988 at the age of 95. chemistry. He argued that just as chemists did not begin by guessing what chemical elements might exist, psychologists should not begin with a preconceived list of personality traits. Much of Cattell’s work was devoted to discovering just how many basic personality traits there are. Although psychologists have identified, measured, and researched hundreds of traits as if each trait were independent from the others, Cattell believed many traits are related. For example, being sociable is not entirely different from being extraverted, although we can point to some fine distinctions. In his quest to discover the structure of human personality, Cattell employed a statistical technique called factor analysis. Although a complete understanding of the procedure is beyond the scope of this book, an example can illustrate how researchers use factor analysis to determine the relationship between personality traits. 141 Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. 142 Chapter 7 / The Trait Approach Suppose you had tests to measure the following 10 traits: aspiration, compassion, cooperativeness, determination, endurance, friendliness, kindliness, persistence, productivity, and tenderness. You could give these tests to a group of people and obtain 10 scores per person. You might then use correlation coefficients (Chapter 2) to examine how scores on one test compare with scores on the other nine tests. For example, you might find that friendliness and tenderness scores are highly correlated. If a person scores high on one test, you can predict with some confidence that the person also will score high on the other test. Looking at the pattern of correlation coefficients, you might discover that the tests tend to cluster into two groups. That is, five of the tests are highly correlated with one another, but not with the other five tests. These other five tests are similarly correlated among themselves, but not with the tests in the first group. The two groups might look something like this: Group A Group B aspiration determination endurance persistence compassion cooperativeness friendliness kindliness productivity tenderness Although you originally measured 10 traits, a reasonable conclusion would be that you actually measured two larger personality dimensions, one having to do with achievement and the other with interpersonal warmth. This is a simple illustration of Cattell’s basic approach. By analyzing data from various sources with factor analyses, he attempted to determine how many of these basic elements exist. He called the basic traits that make up the human personality source traits. Unfortunately, data obtained from factor analyses typically are not as neat and clear-cut as this example suggests. If they were, we would have determined the number of source traits a long time ago. One serious limitation of factor analysis is that the procedure is confined by the type of data chosen for analysis. For example, what would happen if you took a few tests out of the previous example and inserted a few new ones, such as independence, absentmindedness, and honesty? Most likely, this would change the number of categories (called factors) and the traits associated with them (or, in factor analytic terms, “loaded on” them). In response to this problem, Cattell collected information about personality from many different sources. In addition to data from personality tests, he examined ­personal records, such as report cards and ratings by employers, and looked at how people acted when placed in lifelike situations. From this work, Cattell identified 16 basic traits, and created a personality test, the Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire (16 PF), to measure them. A revised version of the 16 PF remains a widely used personality inventory today (Cattell, 2004; Cattell & Mead, 2008). The Big Five Efforts to identify and describe the basic dimensions of personality did not end with Cattell’s original model. Rather, this question has been an ongoing issue in personality Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.