Personality Psychology

What is Personality Psychology?

• Personality Psychology: The scientific study of the ways people differ from one another in how they feel, think, and behave.
• Key Question: How do people differ from one another, and why?
• Most interested in the differences that last.

Same behavior, different scientific lenses

Tosh spoke up in class today. Why?

• Developmental psychology asks about age.
  • Does the tendency to speak up change from early childhood to adolescence to adulthood?
• Social psychology asks about the situation.
  • What in this room, with these people, today, made speaking up likely?
• Cognitive psychology asks about the shared mental processes everyone uses to generate thoughts and actions.
  • How did perception, memory, and reasoning processes work together to produce the comment, as well as the rest of the class’s reaction to it?
• Personality psychology asks about the lasting differences between people.
  • Why has Tosh been contributing to class discussions since kindergarten, but Jaylen almost never speaks, and Grace is somewhere in the middle?

Our Five Content Areas

We will study personality in five areas:

• Traits
• Biology
• Motivation
• Culture
• Identity

Traits: how we measure and describe the differences between people

• What separates a lasting trait from a passing mood.
• The small set of dimensions that hold most of the ways people differ.
• How a trait gets measured, and what makes one score worth more than another.
• What trait scores actually predict about school, work, health, and relationships.

Biology: how genes and physical makeup influence personality

• What twin studies can and cannot tell us about the role of genes.
• Why “genetic” does not mean “fixed.”
• What brain scans and hormone tests have actually shown, and what gets oversold.
• Why humans vary at all, instead of all turning out the same.

Motivation: how goals and desires influence personality

• What people want, and where those wants come from.
• Why two people with the same trait but different goals can behave differently.
• How people control their own impulses, and when that control fails.
• What happens when a person’s goals and their situation are in opposition to each other.

Culture: how shared beliefs and practices influence personality

• Universal aspects of personality vs. culturally specific.
• How culture shapes what people want and how they explain themselves.
• How large the average differences between men and women actually are.
• What we can and cannot conclude from research run mostly on college students in a few countries.

Identity: how the story we tell about ourselves influences personality

• Where a person’s picture of themselves comes from.
• The story someone tells about their own past, and how it gets revised.
• What people reliably get wrong about themselves.
• Whether other people see you the way you see yourself.

Theme 1: Person AND Situation

• Person AND Situation: Our thoughts, feelings, and behavior come from our personality interacting with our environment.
• The same personality looks different depending on where a person is.
  • Ex: A talkative student is at her most talkative in a small class where the teacher asks for opinions.
  • Ex: A student who talks constantly with her friends says almost nothing in a job interview.
• Personality also helps decide which situations we end up in, so we are not just reacting to whatever we are handed.
  • Ex: A man who hates crowds takes a job where he works alone most of the day.
• Genes need an environment to act in, so no part of who we are is set by biology by itself.

Theme 2: Stability AND Change

• Stability AND Change: Personality is stable across time and still changes in predictable ways.
• Where we stand compared to other people tends to hold for decades.
  • Ex: A woman who was more anxious than her friends in high school is still more anxious than them at forty.
• Our average levels still move as we age, and they move in the same direction for most people.
  • Ex: Most people become more responsible between twenty and thirty.
• What we are working toward changes much faster than our traits do.
  • Ex: A man’s goals at twenty-five and at fifty look nothing alike, though his temper is recognizably the same.
• The story we tell about our own past also gets rewritten as we age, even when the events themselves do not change.

Theme 3: Degrees, NOT Types

• Degrees, NOT Types: Personality traits differ along spectrums, not across distinct categories.
• Popular systems sort people into types.
  • Ex: The Myers-Briggs, astrological signs, and love languages all place a person into a category.
• The scores behind those categories run smoothly, and most people land near the middle, so the dividing line is chosen by whoever built the system.
• Genes work the same way. Many of them with small effects add up to a smooth range instead of two groups.
• We will talk about why and when types might still be useful.

Theme 4: Limited Self-Knowledge

• Limited Self-Knowledge: We have limited understanding of our own personality.
• Other people often describe us differently than we describe ourselves.
  • Ex: A man describes himself as a great listener, but his spouse and kids say otherwise.
• We cannot “see” all of the genes contributing to our personality.
• We are unaware of many of the ways that culture influences who we are.
• The story we tell about ourselves is built partly out of guesses about why we did things.
  • Ex: A student is certain she studies best with music playing, but she scores higher on the tests she studied for in silence.

In Sum: Our Five Content Areas

• Traits: How we measure and describe the lasting differences between people.
• Biology: How our genes and physical makeup influence our personality.
• Motivation: How our goals and desires influence our personality.
• Culture: How shared beliefs and practices influence our personality.
• Identity: How the story we tell about ourselves influences our personality.

In Sum: Our Core Themes

Memorize these! We will see them in each of our five content areas.

• Person AND Situation: Our thoughts, feelings, and behavior come from our personality interacting with our environment.
• Stability AND Change: Personality is stable across time and still changes in predictable ways.
• Degrees, NOT Types: Personality traits differ along spectrums, not across distinct categories.
• Limited Self-Knowledge: We have limited understanding of our own personality.