Read Chapter 13.
What really is personality? Why is testing and categorizing so important in the study of personality? Should it be? How has your understanding of personality changed since reading this chapter?
From your reading, which topic(s) are most interesting to you?
What was the most surprising or memorable thing you learned about in this reading?
Provide a list of psychological terms that you used in your comment at the bottom of your post.
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5 Factor Personality Test http://www.personalitytest.org.uk/
I don’t just have a personality… I am one. Anyone who had spent more than five minutes with me can verify that. I’m loud, and obnoxious, and I get way too excited about anything even remotely nerdy. But there isn’t just one type of personality. There are many types of people, and each person’s personality is different in its own way. A personality is described as a set of traits or some aspect of being that helps to determine one’s inner experiences, as well as how they interact with the outside world. It can also be described as a combination of people’s fixed inner traits and how these traits help people to interact with situations. How individuals react to certain situations, as well as the consistency with which they react to these situations, is a driving force behind personality.
Many psychologists (and laymen) find great interest in categorizing and carefully separating types of personalities by a set type of criteria. This is important, because it can give us a broad range of personality types to offer ourselves some sense of belonging, and it also helps to create a uniform baseline to judge personalities on, in a way that can help psychologists and others better understand the human mind, and the disorders associated with them. I do think that these tests are helpful in many ways, but I also think they downplay the individualism of the human mind. By categorizing personality to different groups, there are limitations placed on the type of personality being described. Instead of a great artist, happy person, with a very sociable lifestyle, someone might be relegated to a simple ‘creative personality’, which limits the bright canvas of a human life to a bleak palette of black and white. This chapter has allowed me to think about personality in a way that is more than simple terms. Instead, I can now see that there are many different personalities, and each trait is a driving force behind our actions, and how people react to certain situations.
The most surprising aspect of this chapter was the idea of personality disorders. I hear about these a lot, and I always think that there is either this one single category labeled PERSONALITY DISORDERS, or there are simply thousands of different variations. However, the textbook claims that there are just 10 personality disorders, which threw me off a little bit, and I was glad to know this. Surely there are variations within these disorders, but this provided a clearer picture for me. One of the disorders, narcissism, particularly interested me, because I want to wonder what exactly pushes someone over the edge from self-involved to narcissistic. For example, I had a teacher in high school who really liked to talk about himself while he was teaching, and would often talk about how great he was. He was by far one of my favorite teachers, and he always phrased these words like jokes, but I often wondered if he was truly a narcissist. In the end, the chapter taught me more about this, and helped me to apply these rules to real life a little bit better.
personality
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situations
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criteria
mind
individualism
personality disorders
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Personality is a person’s unique characteristics that are formed from a combination of things such as traits, biological factors, and the environment that determine what people experience and how they act. The main reason for psychologists’ continued work in testing and categorizing personalities is because as humans, we have the natural inclination to want to reduce uncertainty. Categorizing people’s personalities and trying to figure out why people behave in the way that they do and what makes them behave in that way can help us better predict how they will act and react in different situations. I think what’s important to remember when doing all of this analysis and categorization is that no person will fit into one specific category or even into a few categories. Each of these personality categories or factors, such as the superfactors or the five-factor model from the trait perspective, are a continuum and people will fall along the line. In my opinion it is less important to place people in exact categories to “figure them out” than it is to recognize the different personality types to better be able to respect differences in gender, culture, subcultures, and socioeconomic circumstances. This chapter on personality combined with the information I have learned in my interpersonal class have really helped me to understand that people view themselves and the world in different ways and although we can’t understand exactly why people act in the way they do, it is possible to determine some factors that can help us better understand and respect people.
The part of this chapter that I found to be the most interesting was the section on how people’s personalities differ. In particular, I found the sections on gender and cultural differences to be the most interesting. In my interpersonal communication class we talked about how communication patterns differ between genders and cultures and it was interesting to see how personality types differ as well. I found it very interesting that the book stated that there are more personality differences between members of the same gender than there are between the two genders. I find this to be very interesting because we so often talk about men and women as though they are different species even though they are more alike than different. This begs the question as to how much of our personalities are based on gendered socialization. As far as culture goes, I enjoyed reading about how personalities can differ based on whether the culture is individualistic or collectivist.
The most surprising thing I found in this chapter was the research on personality and biology. I had never thought of personality being genetic before and I was very surprised to find out that a large portion of our personality is determined by genetics. Although I don’t have a twin, I can definitely see similarities in my sister and I. We are very much different but we tend to like the same kinds of activities and dislike the same sorts of activities. Although a large part of this could be due to the environment we grew up in, it is interesting to read about the impact that biology has in shaping our personalities.
Vocabulary: personality, superfactors, five-factor model, trait perspective, gender, culture, individualistic, collectivist, genetics
Personality is described by the textbook as, "the unique characteristics that account for our enduring patterns of inner experience and outward behavior". There are many theories regarding personality and a common one today is the five factor model. The model identifies five major trait categories which include: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. These five categories are known as superfactors. The book discusses the idea that our personality traits, or superfactors, remain relatively constant across different situations. We like to think that we would behave or feel or act in a certain way during a situation, but research shows that we will act in similar ways that we have in the past. For example, people may not be inclined to look to their personalities to explain their behaviors, but they are quick to do so when looking at others. This is known as the fundamental attribution error. We like to provide excuses for our own actions while reprimanding others for doing the same thing all the while blaming it on their distinct personality traits. As individuals advance into their adult years, traits begin to become more and more stable and unchanging.
I decided to take the personality test to see what it would produce as results for me. It is a short questionnaire with questions involving the five factors. I answered the questions very honestly, although I did catch myself initially thinking about answering it in a socially acceptable way rather than my own personal opinion. I have to say that I was not surprised by the outcome. For openness, extraversion, and agreeableness I ranked "about average". For conscientiousness and neuroticism though, I ranked "relatively high". (These scores are based on other people who have taken the test.) I wasn't surprised that I ranked high for the latter two because I do find myself to be more organized, dutiful, and somewhat insecure with emotional distress. I thought it was great to confirm my own ideas and beliefs about my personality.
In my opinion, categorizing different personalities is a difficult process. Each individual, while we may be alike in some regards, has their own personality that is a combination of many different traits. It is hard to place a person into one area because it may not be all-encompassing of their specific personality.
There were a couple of topics that I found quite interesting from this chapter, one of them being phrenology. The theory of phrenology was created by Franz Joseph Gall during the early 1800s. He believed that by studying the shape of a person's skull, you could assess their mental and moral qualities. Gall was looking to find and provide precise information about what biological systems affected personality patterns. He thought that he could pinpoint specific parts of the brain that were responsible for each distinct personality quality. While his techniques were found to be inaccurate, they did influence the study of neuroscience because his ideas about the localization of the brain functions and the role of the brain in personality were, in fact, accurate. I was interested in this particular topic because, to be honest, it made me giggle a bit.
Vocabulary Terms: personality, five factor model, superfactors, personality traits, fundamental attribution error, phrenology
After reading this chapter on personality the idea of defining this broad topic was a little daunting. According to the book personality is, “unique characteristics that account for our enduring patterns of inner experience and outward behavior.” In other words, personality is the many different characteristics that describe us individually that show through how we view ourselves and how we act in the world around us. Throughout this chapter the idea of testing and analyzing data to determine certain personality traits and types where mentioned. This area is very important in the study of personality in order to gain more understanding on the many different characteristics and behaviors that make up who we are as unique individuals. The study and characterizing of personality is also very important in order to organize different personalities and to study the many things that can go wrong in order to understand them better.
Before reading this chapter I thought personality just encompassed the characteristics and temperament that others see in an individual. After reading this chapter, I realized that personality not only encompasses what others perceive of a person but also how that person perceives themselves. This led me to think more about how I perceive myself. Along with this, I read the picture caption on page 512 and realized that being narcissistic is a personality disorder. Before reading this chapter I thought that being narcissistic was a personality trait. I had never considered it a personality disorder before. After reading this chapter I also looked more at what my behaviors say about my personality and how I perceive myself.
The topics that caught my attention the most were the anxiety and defense mechanisms. These mechanisms were towards the beginning of the chapter as the idea of personality was being introduced. I thought it was interesting that defense mechanisms not only include repression and denial but also encompass reaction formation, displacement, and sublimation. I had heard of repression and denial before reading this chapter but the idea of the other defense mechanisms were new knowledge for me. This made these concepts all the more interesting.
The most surprising things that I learned about in this reading besides the different anxiety and defense mechanisms were the five factor model and the different evaluating trait theories. These were very surprising to me because I had never heard of them before as a way to characterize or explain a person’s personality. The book described the five factor model as a combination of levels of agreeableness, extraversion, neuroticism, conscientiousness, and openness to experience. The evaluating trait theories looked at many questions that scientists have been able to answer through personality research in many different areas. Some of the main take-aways that I got from this section included that traits apply to many different cultures, traits may be stable across situation, and personality traits are more stable across short times spans as opposed to longer time spans. The topic of evaluating trait theories and the five factor model introduced different areas of characterizing and explaining aspects of personality that were novel to me. This chapter overall was very informative and led to some great discoveries of new information.
Vocabulary: personality, characteristics, traits, narcissistic, personality disorder, defense mechanisms, repression, denial, reaction formation, displacement, sublimation, five factor model, evaluating trait theories, agreeableness, extraversion, neuroticism, conscientiousness
The book defines personality on p. 482 as, “unique characteristics that account for our enduring patterns of inner experience and outward behavior.” Basically, personality is what makes you a person. It’s how you think and feel about things and respond to them.
Psychologists have many theories about how personalities are formed. Sigmund Freud states that there are three main factors that drive development: the id, the ego, and the superego. He also asserted that sexuality and sexual desires are our main motivation and the central drive behind our personality development.
Not all psychologists would agree with Freud. Another group, called humanists, disagree that we are driven by forces that are natural and subconscious and have no control over our personality development. Abraham Maslow believed that we all have a hierarchy of needs, and at the top is self-actualization, which is reaching our full potential. He believed this is what we all ultimately strive for, and that humans and their personalities are all positive at the core. Carl Rogers would agree with him, but focuses on self-concept, which is the way we see ourselves and how others can recognize us, as opposed to Maslow’s hierarchy. To develop our self-concept properly, we need unconditional positive regard, especially from parents in childhood.
Most psychologists believe that a person’s personality is made up of a combination of several different personality traits, tendencies toward certain patterns of behavior. But other factors besides traits influence how a person behaves. Interactions with others and situations we experience also influence our behavior. Past experiences, the environment you were raised in, and even your genes and the way your brain functions have an effect on your behavior and personality. Differences in gender have also been proven to affect personality, but a lot of this is due to the social rule theory. Differences in culture also have an effect on personality, as different cultures value different traits.
People are obsessed with taking personality inventories to find out more about themselves, but these are not always accurate, as they require you to assess yourself. To make a good impression on society, people may lean towards socially desirable responding. A more reliable form of testing personalities are projective tests, in which a professional tests a person’s unconscious to see how they respond.
Personality testing is important because the results can be used for a number of things, if the test is done correctly. Employers, researchers, and clinicians have all used personality tests to help them make decisions about their prospective employees, research participants, or clients. Personality testing can eliminate a lot of surprises about a person in the future.
Before reading this chapter, I didn’t know a lot about personality. I didn’t realize how many factors played into it. I also didn’t realize that those self personality inventories aren’t that reliable, which was kind of disappointing for me. It was also the most surprising part of the reading, because I always thought I was pretty good about being honest on those, but now looking back I realize I may have lied on a few to make myself look better or to get the results I wanted.
The most interesting part of the reading to me was the section on personality tests, especially the five factor model. It reminded me of the Myers-Briggs test. I love taking personality tests and finding out more about myself- it’s just always been something I’ve been interested in.
Terms: personality, id, ego, superego, self-actualization, self-concept, unconditional positive regard, personality traits, situationism, interactionism, social rule theory, personality inventories, socially desirable responding, projective tests
Personality is what we call the different characteristics that affect our thoughts and actions. There are many different schools of thought on what the personality might be but an understanding of all theories gives us a better picture of what exactly the personality is. Testing the personality is a common occurrence. Facebook is filled with personality quizzes and I’ve even taken one for a job interview before. The world definitely seems to care about personality types and for good reason. Your personality is a very large part of how you are defined as a person. The idea with personality testing is to get a glimpse into the way that someone perceives the world by giving them vague prompts and analyzing their answers. Understanding how people react to different things allows us to group them and better understand behavior they may have. People who fall under similar categories of personality are likely to think and act in similar ways. I don’t know if I can think of a better way to “quantify” the human personality so I think that testing a categorizing has to be an important part of studying personality.
My personal concept of personality was broader than the book definition. I would probably define personality as a culmination of a lot of the things that we have talked about this semester instead of just this chapter. It was very interesting to read about the biological ties of personality trait and the concept of different hormones and brain structures that affect personality. It is very interesting to me that the personality could be scientifically predicted.
One of the most surprising things that I read was the discussion of differences between men and women. I know that men and women have a lot of different cognitive development because of evolutionary differences it the cultural roles of men and women but its strange to think that they are so engrained into us that they can be consistently seen across the majority of men and women
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Personality, as was discussed in this chapter, is a very broad and complicated topic, but can be defined as follows, “the unique characteristics that account for enduring patterns of inner experience and outward behavior. My understanding of personality has changed immensely since reading this chapter. Prior, I assumed personality was simply a combination of different traits and was very environmentally influenced. Now I know that it is actually much more complicated than that and genetics play just as much of a role as environment does. There are many different perspectives that attempt to elaborate on this idea of personality, such as psychodynamic, humanistic, trait, situationist, and interactionist perspectives. The psychodynamic theory, which was presented by Sigmund Freud, focuses on the clash between instinctual drives (id), such as eating, sleeping, and sex, and the ego and superego, which involves morals and reality. The humanistic perspective focuses on positive psychology and psychological function rather than dysfunction. The trait perspective explains personality in terms of a combination of personality traits. A largely agreed upon model of common traits that most often occur is the five-factor model, which involves openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. The situationist model says that personality is governed by different situations as opposed to internal traits. The interactionist model focuses on the interaction between situations and people. Essentially, personality is a mixture of internal personality traits as well as reactions to certain situations. Testing is important in the study of personality because it allows logical conclusions to be drawn. It also allows accurate predictions to be made from those conclusions. Only observation and case studies does not lead to big ideas that make accurate predictions. One can only really work “backwards” to connect observable patterns to aspects of that person’s history, but does not allow for future predictions. However, an important part of psychology is making predictions, so testing and being able to make accurate predictions is key. I don’t feel categorizing should be as important in studying personality. An idea that was briefly touched on in the gender differences section was that too often strict categorization leads to societal misconceptions and discrimination based on that categorization. For example, women get categorized as nurturing so they are expected to stay home and raise children. While women tend to be more nurturing then men, this does not mean that all women should be forced to stay home and raise kids. Categorization of personalities can be used to give us big picture ideas, but should not be applied in all individual cases.
The most interesting topic was the trait perspective of personality. As I discussed earlier, I was under a prior assumption that the only thing to personality was personality traits. Like the example in the book described, generally when you are asked to describe someone’s personality you list of traits, assuming that accounts for the personality as a whole. However, this is only one small perspective of personality, and many other factors are at play. The most memorable thing I learned from this reading was that women and men or more alike than different, and most differences come from individuals, not a gender as a whole. Being a feminist, this is obviously a very reassuring fact to read, especially when it is scientifically backed. I’ve always felt that they only thing holding women back from achieving what men do is society and its stereotypes and discrimination, and this section only reasserted those feelings.
Terms: Personality, psychodynamic, humanistic, trait, situationist, interactionist, id, ego, superego, positive psychology, personality traits, five-factor model
Personality is defined as the unique characteristics that account for enduring patterns of inner experience and outer behavior. I find this subject totally fascinating because my brother and I are very close, but we don’t spend a lot of time together and we haven’t for several years due to busy schedules. However, when I meet someone that my brother knows really well, nine times out of ten I’ll get a comment from them that I remind them so much of him, or that I’m very much like him. I know that we have a lot of the same mannerisms and personality traits, but at the same time we’re near polar opposites in some ways. I’ve always been curious about the nature vs. nurture side of that and also how gender plays a part.
I think the testing and categorizing is so important in personality studies because no two personalities are ever 100% the same. It’s important to be able to organize data into manageable categories rather than excluding one bit of information because it’s only slightly different. Hopefully the continued testing and categorizing will help us to make sense of personalities and why they are the way they are in the future.
The most interesting quote that stuck out to me was “personality arises from our striving to meet our needs”. This is in the section about self-actualization, the need to fulfill our full potential as humans. This is interesting to me because I’ve done a lot of thinking about my personality this semester, and especially tonight because I was at a group interview for SAA called a Social Information Session. The whole purpose of this is so current members of SAA can watch you and see how you interact with people, whether you know them well or are meeting them for the first time. They’re basically watching to see if potential candidates have a personality that would represent the organization and the university when meeting prospective students. I find that a lot of my personality comes from striving to be the best I can be. If I am unable to use my personality to be professional, I wouldn’t ever get any positions I interviewed for. On the flip side, if I wasn’t able to put my personality into my professional life, such as being able to be myself during residence hall tours at work, I would probably not be happy with my job.
personality, self-actualization, gender.
Personality can be defined as the integration of qualities or traits that account for behavior and influences of inner experiences. There are many theories about personality that exist and attempt to resolve the uncertainty of why people tend to behave as they do and what factors play a role in determining personality. There are several perspectives in which theorists think about personality. For example the humanistic perspective assumes that personality development is affected by uncontrollable, outside forces. The trait perspective, on the other hand, believes that personalities are composed of different traits which ultimately define our behavior. Other perspectives include psychodynamic, situationist, and interactionist. Among the list of personality theorists is Sigmund Freud who believed that “personality forms as a result of struggles between primal needs and social or moral restraints”. His ideas are based around his attitude of the conscious and unconscious mind. As we learned in chapter six there are different levels of consciousness which Freud believes are present in the mind. These three levels are consciousness which contains thoughts and feelings that are present, preconscious which holds information that can be readily available, and unconscious which is important to the development of personality. Other forces Freud thought influenced the development of personality include basic instincts, rational thinking, and moral limits. He referred to these elements as the id, the ego, and the superego respectively. Of course not all theorists held the same psychodynamic perspective as Freud. Others who had developed psychodynamic perspective theories similar to Freud’s are Alfred Adler, Carl Jung, and Karen Horney. Carl Jung accepted Freud’s view on the importance of the unconscious mind as an influential factor in determining personality. Jung, however, split the unconscious into the personal unconscious and the collective conscious. He centered his theory on the theme of harmony.
While personality is important, I think that it is extremely difficult to try and explain how everyone’s personality develops and what changes it. Everyone is different and trying to find an overarching theory that supports everyone really generalizes people. Prior to reading this chapter I didn’t really know that there were personality theories or different perspectives of personality. I thought of personality more of how the humanistic perspective and the trait theory explained personality. While it was interesting to learn about the different perspective, some were difficult to understand such as some of the theories from the psychodynamic perspective.
The most memorable thing I learned from this chapter was the results of the Minnesota Twin study. It was definitely interesting to learn that identical twins that were separated at birth have very similar behavioral tendencies compared to fraternal twins who lived together. Before hearing about this study I always that the personality is shaped by the experiences one has had but it turns out our genes play a larger role in determining personality traits than I originally thought. One fact that I found interesting that the “English language has 4500 words to describe personality”. It seems as though this number is very small but then again if we were asked to list words to describe personality we would most likely have very similar words.
Vocabulary: personality, id, ego, superego, situationalism, interactionism, personality traits
A personality is described as a set of traits or some aspect of being that helps to determine one’s inner experiences, as well as how they interact with the outside world. It can be described as a combination of people’s fixed inner traits and these specific traits are what help people interact with each other during specific situations.
I decided to take the personality test to see what the results would be, I always find these very interesting. This test is a short questionnaire involving five factors. I answered the questions honestly with my personal opinion and I have to say I was not really surprised with the outcome. I was average in extraversion, relatively high in agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness, while I was relatively low in neuroticism. I can understand the extraversion because there are times I want to be around people and other times I do not want to be around people, but at the same time I still hate when it is quite. I was not surprised I was ranked high because I was raised with the thought of ‘treat people how you want to be treated’ so I am always friendly when I meet people and I have to be organized or I will lose everything. It is just the way I am. Plus I want to practically explore the world and growing up I had many different neighbors from different backgrounds and family friends as well, so I was always experiencing new things and I still want to. But neuroticism is something that I found a little confusing. When I think of it it makes me think more of stress, then distress so then I think that no this test is wrong because I have very high stress levels, but I actually am a very relaxed person most of the time and try not to get too emotional.
The most interesting part for me was learning about how people’s personalities differ. The most particular thing was that sections on gender and cultural differences. I loved hearing about how there are more personality differences in the same gender than between two genders. I found it so interesting because as I was reading the chapter I would think of my friends and how our personalities are completely different, but that was what made us friends in the first place.
What was memorable to me was the section on research on biology and personality. I found it really interesting because growing up my mom would always say that I was acting like my father. I know my obnoxious personality comes from my dad and my sarcastic personality comes from my mom. Although I know part of my personality has to come from just growing up with my parents around me, I actually had heard earlier in the semester that you could inherit personality traits from parents in my dynamics of human development class, and I happen to find it very interesting.
Vocabulary: personality, traits, situations, five factor model
Simply put, personality is made up of characteristics and patterns that effect our behavior. Our personality is what differentiates us; me from you. It is believed that that there are five traits that influence our personality; these traits are openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism. Put together, these traits make up the five-factor model. testing and categorizing personality is important to see what kind of person we are. It is also helpful to create “normal” and “abnormal” personalities that can be used to diagnose personality disorders. I believe it is important scientifically to test and categorize personality, but I don’t that that everyone should immediately go and get there personality tested. Everyone knows what kind of person they are, and I don’t think that telling someone what kind of person a test shows them to be is the best idea. No matter how good of a test it might be, it is not perfect and will have some error, and that error might lead to results that go against what a person knows about their personality. All that being said, I still love to take facebook personality quizzes telling me what Disney character I am most similar to, or which classical composer is my soul mate. My understanding of personality has changed since reading this chapter because I now understand that personality is not a single thing, but made up of different traits and those traits are made up of other smaller behaviors. And while reading this chapter, I did find myself looking at the five-factor model and going through each of the five traits and the different behaviors that went along with each trait and tried to determine where I was on a personality scale.
The topics that were most interesting to me were the five-factor model, Freud’s defense mechanisms, and personality disorders. Along with trying to determine my personality through the five-factor model, I also went through all of Freud’s defense mechanisms trying to figure out which ones I use, or which ones I notice other people using. I also liked reading about the different types of personality disorders and trying to diagnose anyone with the slightest symptom, which my friends very much enjoyed.
The most surprising thing for me was how right Freud seemed to be with his personality evaluations, and how much we use Freud’s ideas in our day to day lives, and how he is not recognized by the scientific community. Before reading, I knew that Freud’s theories lost their scientific favor, but this chapter in particular was hard for me to accept that because of how much I could relate to most of his ideas, or see them in movies or books.
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