1 CHAPTER 14 Personality Preview Personality is one s characteristic pattern of thinking, feeling, and acting. Psychodyn...
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Personality Preview Personality is one’s characteristic pattern of thinking, feeling, and acting. Psychodynamic theories focus on the unconscious and early childhood experiences. Sigmund Freud, in his psychoanalytic perspective, proposed that childhood sexuality and unconscious motives influenced personality. For Sigmund Freud, conflict between pleasure-seeking biological impulses and social restraints centered on three interacting systems: id, ego, and superego. Freud believed that children develop through psychosexual stages and that people’s later problems are rooted in how they resolve conflicts associated with these stages. The neo-Freudians agreed with Freud’s basic ideas but placed more emphasis on the conscious mind and on social influences. Today, psychodynamic theorists agree with many of Freud’s views but not his idea that sex is the basis of personality. Contemporary research confirms that, more than most of us realize, our lives are guided by unconscious information processing. The humanistic perspective emphasizes the growth potential of healthy people. Abraham Maslow believed that if basic human needs are met, people will strive to actualize their highest potential. Carl Rogers suggested that being genuine, accepting, and empathic helps others to develop a positive self-concept. The trait perspective attempts to describe the predispositions that underlie our actions. Through factor analysis, researchers have isolated five distinct dimensions of personality. People’s specific behaviors vary across situations as their inner dispositions interact with particular environments. The social-cognitive perspective emphasizes how internal personal factors combine with the environment to influence behavior. More than other perspectives, it builds from research on learning, cognition, and social behavior. Researchers assess how people’s behaviors and beliefs both affect and are affected by their situations. Currently, the self is one of Western psychology’s more vigorously researched topics. Studies confirm the benefits of positive self-esteem but also point to the possible hazards of unrealistically high self-esteem. Compared with defensive self-esteem, secure self-esteem depends less on external evaluations and enables us to lose ourselves in relationships and purposes larger than self. Introductory Exercise: Fact or Falsehood? The correct answers to Handout 14–1 are as follows: 1. T 2. F 3. T 4. F 5. F 6. T 7. F 8. T 9. F 10. F
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HANDOUT 14–1 Fact or Falsehood?
T F
1. Freud believed that boys develop unconscious sexual desires for their mother when they are between 3 and 6 years of age.
T F
2. One of the most reliable and valid measures of personality is the Rorschach inkblot test.
T F
3. Freud believed that personality forms during the first few years of life.
T F
4. Psychologists generally agree that painful experiences commonly get pushed out of awareness and into the unconscious.
T F
5. Dreams are disguised wish fulfillments that can be interpreted by skilled analysts.
T F
6. Personality differences among dogs are as evident and as consistently judged as personality differences among humans.
T F
7. Extraverts more than introverts prefer communicating by e-mail.
T F
8. From a few minutes’ inspection of our living and working spaces, someone can, with reasonable accuracy, assess our emotional stability.
T F
9. The best means of predicting future behavior is a personality test or an interviewer’s intuition.
T F
10. The majority of people suffer from low self-esteem.
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Guide Objectives Every question in the Test Banks is keyed to one of these objectives.
Introduction to Personality and Psychodynamic Theories 14-1. Describe historically significant and current theories that inform our understanding of personality. 14-2. Discuss how Sigmund Freud’s treatment of psychological disorders led to his view of the unconscious mind. 14-3. Describe Freud’s view of personality. 14-4. Identify the developmental stages proposed by Freud. 14-5. Describe how Freud thought people defended themselves against anxiety. 14-6. Identify which of Freud’s ideas were accepted or rejected by his followers. 14-7. Describe projective tests and how they are used, and discuss some criticisms of them. 14-8. Discuss how contemporary psychologists view Freud’s psychoanalysis. 14-9. Discuss how modern research has developed our understanding of the unconscious. Humanistic Theories and Trait Theories 14-10. Describe how humanistic psychologists view personality, and explain their goal in studying personality. 14-11. Explain how humanistic psychologists assessed a person’s sense of self. 14-12. Describe how humanistic theories have influenced psychology, and discuss the criticisms they have faced. 14-13. Explain how psychologists use traits to describe personality. 14-14. Identify some common misunderstandings about introversion, and discuss whether extraversion leads to greater success than introversion. 14-15. Describe personality inventories, and discuss their strengths and weaknesses as trait-assessment tools. 14-16. Identify the traits that seem to provide the most useful information about personality variation. 14-17. Discuss whether research supports the consistency of personality traits over time and across situations. Social-Cognitive Theories and the Self 14-18. Discuss how social-cognitive theorists view personality development, and describe how they explore behavior. 14-19. Discuss the criticisms social-cognitive theorists have faced. 14-20. Explain why psychology has generated so much research on the self, and discuss the importance of self-esteem to psychology and to human well-being. 14-21. Discuss how excessive optimism, blindness to one’s own incompetence, and self-serving bias reveal the costs of self-esteem, and describe how defensive and secure self-esteem differ.
Introduction to Personality and Psychodynamic Theories u Lecture: Issues in Personality Theory uE xercises: Introducing Personality; Evaluating Personality Measures Available on the Internet
14-1. Describe historically significant and current theories that inform our understanding of personality. Psychologists consider personality to be an individual’s characteristic pattern of thinking, feeling, and acting. Psychoanalytic theory proposed that childhood sexuality and unconscious motiva-
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tions influence personality. The humanistic approach focused on our inner capacities for growth and self-fulfillment. Later theorists built upon these two broad perspectives. Trait theories, for example, examine characteristic patterns of behavior (traits). Social-cognitive theories explore the interaction between people’s traits (including their thinking) and their social context.
Psychodynamic Theories u Lecture: Freudian Slips
14-2. Discuss how Sigmund Freud’s treatment of psychological disorders led to his view of the unconscious mind.
Psychodynamic theories of personality view human behavior as a dynamic interaction between the conscious and unconscious minds, including their associated motives and conflicts. These theories are descended from Freud’s psychoanalysis, his theory of personality and the associated treatment techniques.
In his private practice, Freud found that nervous disorders often made no neurological sense. Piecing together his patients’ accounts of their lives, he concluded that their disorders had psychological causes. His effort to understand these causes led to his “discovery” of the unconscious. Initially, he thought hypnosis might unlock the door to the unconscious. However, recognizing patients’ uneven capacity for hypnosis, Freud turned to free association, which he believed produced a chain of thoughts in the patient’s unconscious. Freud believed the mind is mostly hidden. Our conscious experience is like the part of the iceberg that floats above the surface. Below the surface is the much larger unconscious, which contains thoughts, wishes, feelings, and memories of which we are largely unaware. Although we repress these thoughts, they seep out, according to Freud, in our beliefs, our daily habits, and our troubling symptoms. Some of these thoughts we store temporarily in a preconscious area from which we can retrieve them into conscious awareness. u Exercises: That’s My Theory!; Demonstrating Personality Structure
14-3. Describe Freud’s view of personality. Freud believed that personality arises from our efforts to resolve the conflict between our biological impulses and the social restraints against them. He theorized that the conflict centers on three interacting systems: the id, which operates on the pleasure principle; the ego, which functions on the reality principle; and the superego, an internalized set of ideals. The superego’s demands often oppose the id’s, and the ego, as the “executive” part of personality, seeks to reconcile the two. 14-4. Identify the developmental stages proposed by Freud. Freud maintained that children pass through a series of psychosexual stages during which the id’s pleasure-seeking energies focus on distinct pleasure-sensitive areas of the body called erogenous zones. During the oral stage (0–18 months), pleasure centers on the mouth; during the anal stage (18–36 months), it centers on bowel/bladder elimination. During the critical phallic stage (3–6 years), pleasure centers on the genitals. Boys experience the Oedipus complex, with unconscious sexual desires toward their mother and hatred of their father. They cope with these threatening feelings through identification with their father, thereby incorporating many of his values and developing a sense of what psychologists now call gender identity. The latency stage (6 years to puberty), in which sexuality is dormant, gives way to the genital stage (puberty on) as sexual interests mature. In Freud’s view, maladaptive adult behavior results from conflicts unresolved during the oral, anal, and phallic stages. At any point, conflict can lock, or fixate, the person’s pleasure-seeking energies in that stage.
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14-5. Describe how Freud thought people defended themselves against anxiety. Defense mechanisms reduce or redirect anxiety in various ways, but always by unconsciously distorting reality. Repression, which underlies the other defense mechanisms, banishes anxietyarousing thoughts, feelings, and memories from consciousness; regression involves retreat to an earlier, more infantile stage of development; and reaction formation makes unacceptable impulses look like their opposites. Projection attributes threatening impulses to others, rationalization offers self-justifying explanations for behavior, displacement diverts impulses to a more acceptable object or person, and denial refuses to believe painful realities. Freud also viewed jokes as expressions of repressed sexual and aggressive tendencies, and dreams as the “royal road to the unconscious.” The remembered content of dreams (their manifest content) he believed to be a censored expression of the dreamer’s unconscious wishes (the dream’s latent content). uE xercise: The Personality of Mr. Grinch u LaunchPad: Psychodynamic Theories of Personality
14-6. Identify which of Freud’s ideas were accepted or rejected by his followers. The neo-Freudians accepted Freud’s basic ideas regarding personality structures, the importance of the unconscious, the shaping of personality in children, and the dynamics of anxiety and defense mechanisms. However, in contrast to Freud, the neo-Freudians generally placed more emphasis on the conscious mind in interpreting experience and coping with the environment, and they argued that we have more positive motives than sex and aggression. Unlike Alfred Adler and Karen Horney, Carl Jung agreed with Freud that the unconscious exerts a powerful influence. In addition, he suggested that the collective unconscious is a shared, inherited reservoir of memory traces from our species’ history. Contemporary psychodynamic theorists and therapists reject the notion that sex is the basis of personality but agree with Freud that much of our mental life is unconscious, that we struggle with inner conflicts, and that childhood shapes our personalities and attachment styles. u Exercise: Inkblots
14-7. Describe projective tests and how they are used, and discuss some criticisms of them. Projective tests provide ambiguous stimuli that are designed to trigger projection of one’s inner dynamics. In Murray’s Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), people view ambiguous pictures and make up stories about them, which are supposed to indicate their inner feelings and goals. The Rorschach inkblot test seeks to identify people’s inner feelings and conflicts by analyzing their interpretations of 10 inkblots. Critics question the validity and reliability of this test. Nonetheless, many clinicians continue to use it. uE xercise: The False Consensus Effect
u LaunchPad: Repression: Reality or Myth?
14-8. Discuss how contemporary psychologists view Freud’s psychoanalysis. Critics contend that many of Freud’s specific ideas are contradicted by new research and that his theory offers only after-the-fact explanations. More recent findings question the overriding importance of childhood experiences, the degree of parental influence, the timing of gender-identity formation, the significance of childhood sexuality, and the existence of hidden (latent) content in dreams. Many researchers now believe that repression, if it ever occurs, is a rare mental response to terrible trauma. Nevertheless, Freud drew psychology’s attention to the unconscious and to our struggle to cope with anxiety and sexuality. Today’s psychologists view the unconscious not as seething passions and repressive censoring but as information processing that occurs without our awareness.
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14-9. Discuss how modern research has developed our understanding of the unconscious. Contemporary research provides some support for Freud’s idea of defense mechanisms. For example, his idea of projection is what researchers now call the false consensus effect. That we defend against anxiety is also evident in tests of terror-management theory. Findings indicate that thinking about one’s mortality provokes enough anxiety to increase contempt for others and esteem for oneself. Freud also focused attention on the conflict between biological impulses and social restraints. He reminds us of our potential for evil. Unquestionably, his cultural impact has been enormous.
Humanistic Theories and Trait Theories Humanistic Theories u Lecture: Obstacles to Self-Actualization u Exercise/Project: Perceived Self Versus Ideal Self
14-10. Describe how humanistic psychologists view personality, and explain their goal in studying personality.
Humanistic theories view personality with a focus on the potential for healthy personal growth. According to Maslow, self-actualization is the motivation to fulfill one’s potential, and selftranscendence is the desire to find meaning and purpose beyond the self. It is one of the ultimate psychological needs that arises after basic physical and psychological needs are met and selfesteem is achieved. In his effort to turn psychology’s attention from the baser motives of troubled people to the growth potential of healthy people, who are thought to be basically good, Maslow reflects the humanistic perspective.
Carl Rogers, in his person-centered perspective, agreed with Maslow that people are basically good and are endowed with self-actualizing tendencies. To nurture growth in others, Rogers advised being genuine, empathic, and accepting (offering unconditional positive regard). In such a climate, people can develop a deeper self-awareness and a more realistic and positive self-concept. 14-11. Explain how humanistic psychologists assessed a person’s sense of self. Humanistic psychologists assessed personality through questionnaires on which people reported their self-concept. One questionnaire asked people to compare their actual self with their ideal self. Other humanistic psychologists maintained that we can only understand each person’s unique experience through interviews and intimate conversations. 14-12. Describe how humanistic theories have influenced psychology, and discuss the criticisms they have faced. Maslow’s and Rogers’ ideas have influenced counseling, education, child raising, and management. Critics complain that the humanistic perspective’s concepts are vague and subjective. For example, the description of self-actualizing people seems more a reflection of Maslow’s personal values than a scientific description. Critics also argue that the individualism promoted by humanistic psychology may promote self-indulgence, selfishness, and an erosion of moral restraints. A final complaint is that humanistic psychology fails to appreciate the reality of our human capacity for evil. Its naive optimism may lead to apathy about major social problems.
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Trait Theories uL ecture: Personality Traits of U.S. Presidents uL aunchPad: Trait Theories of Personality; Genes and Personality: Personality and the Brain
14-13. Explain how psychologists use traits to describe personality. Trait theorists attempt to describe personality in terms of stable and enduring behavior patterns, or dispositions to feel and act. Some theorists use dominant traits and their associated characteristics to describe personality “types.” One technique trait theorists use to identify basic traits is factor analysis, a statistical procedure that identifies clusters of behaviors that tend to appear together. For example, through factor analysis, Hans and Sybil Eysenck reduced normal variations to two or three genetically influenced dimensions, including extraversion–introversion and emotional stability–instability. Brain activity scans suggest that extraverts and introverts differ in their level of arousal, with extraverts seeking stimulation because their normal brain arousal level is relatively low. Jerome Kagan maintains that, by influencing autonomic nervous system reactivity, heredity also affects our temperament and behavioral style, which help define our personality. 14-14. Identify some common misunderstandings about introversion, and discuss whether extraversion leads to greater success than introversion. People tend to equate introversion with shyness, but the two concepts differ. Introverted people seek low levels of stimulation from their environment because they’re sensitive. Shy people, in contrast, remain quiet because they fear others will evaluate them negatively. People may also believe that introversion acts as a barrier to success. On the contrary, introversion has its benefits; as supervisors, introverts show greater receptiveness when their employees voice their ideas, challenge existing norms, and take charge. Under these circumstances, introverted leaders outperform extraverted ones. uL ecture: MMPI-2 uP roject: What Makes a Test a Good Test?
14-15. Describe personality inventories, and discuss their strengths and weaknesses as trait-assessment tools. Psychologists assess several traits at once by administering personality inventories on which people respond to items designed to measure a wide range of feelings and behaviors. The classic personality inventory is the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI). Although it assesses “abnormal” personality tendencies rather than normal personality traits, the MMPI illustrates a good way of developing a personality inventory. The MMPI items were empirically derived—that is, from a large pool of items, the test developers selected those on which particular diagnostic groups differed. The objective scoring of the test does not guarantee its validity. For example, those taking the MMPI for employment screening may give socially desirable responses that create a good impression. uL ectures: The NEO Personality Inventory; Personality Traits in the Workplace; The HEXACO Model of Personality Structure; Personological Epidemiology
uE xercises: Brief Big Five Inventory; Longer Big Five Inventory; Behavior and the Big Five uE xrcises/Projects: Big Five Inventory Online; Applying Big Five Scores to Daily Living uP sychSim 6: What Kind of Person Are You? u Video: The Power of Introverts
14-16. Identify the traits that seem to provide the most useful information about personality variation.
Researchers have isolated five distinct personality dimensions, dubbed the Big Five: conscientiousness, agreeableness, neuroticism (emotional stability versus instability), openness, and extraversion. These traits appear to be stable in adulthood, about 50 percent or a tad more heritable, descriptive of others around the world, and predictive of other personal attributes. Locating an individual on these five dimensions provides a comprehensive picture of personality.
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uE xercises: Can Students Guess Your Big Five Scores?; Can Students Guess Your Colleagues’ Big Five Scores?; The Barnum Effect; The “Validity” of Astrology
14-17. Discuss whether research supports the consistency of personality traits over time and across situations. Although people’s traits seem to persist over time, critics of the trait perspective note that human behavior varies widely from situation to situation. Thus, traits are weak predictors of behavior. For example, being conscientious on one occasion is only modestly related to being conscientious on another occasion. Defenders of the trait perspective note that, despite these variations, a person’s average behavior across different situations is fairly consistent. We do have distinct personality traits. Moreover, research suggests that our traits are socially significant; they influence our health, our thinking, and our job performance. In informal social situations, our expressive styles—our animation, manner of speaking, and gestures—are impressively consistent. Moreover, we can judge individual differences in expressiveness in a matter of seconds. Thus, we may form lasting impressions within a few moments of meeting someone.
Social-Cognitive Theories and the Self Social-Cognitive Theories uL ecture: Self-Monitoring u Exercise: Blindness to One’s Own Incompetence uE xercise/Project: Reciprocal Determinism uF eature Film: The Shawshank Redemption and Reciprocal Influences u Feature Film/Exercise: Schindler’s List and Personal Control
14-18. Discuss how social-cognitive theorists view personality development, and describe how they explore behavior. The social-cognitive perspective, proposed by Albert Bandura, applies principles of learning, cognition, and social behavior to the understanding of personality. Reciprocal determinism refers to the interacting influences between personality and environmental factors. Interactions between individuals and environments occur when different people choose different environments, when our personalities shape how we interpret and react to events, and when our personalities help create situations to which we react. Social-cognitive researchers observe how people’s behaviors and beliefs both affect and are affected by their situations. They have found that the best way to predict someone’s behavior in a given situation is to observe that person’s behavior pattern in similar situations. 14-19. Discuss the criticisms social-cognitive theorists have faced. Critics argue that the social-cognitive perspective focuses so much on the situation that it fails to appreciate the importance of the person’s inner traits, emotions, and unconscious motives. Indeed, research indicates that our biologically influenced traits predict behavior at work, love, and play. At the same time, the social-cognitive perspective builds on psychology’s well-established concepts of learning and cognition and reminds us of the power of social situations.
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Exploring the Self uL ectures: Contingencies of Self-Worth; The Dark Side of Self-Esteem; The Sociometer Theory of Self-Esteem; Self-Concept Clarity uE xercise: A Single-Item Measure of Self-Esteem (SISE) u Exercise: Exploring Possible Selves as Roadmaps to the Future
14-20. Explain why psychology has generated so much research on the self, and discuss the importance of self-esteem to psychology and to human well-being. The self is one of Western psychology’s most vigorously researched topics. Underlying this research is the assumption that the self, as organizer of our thoughts, feelings, and actions, is the center of personality. One example of research on the self is the study of possible selves. It explores people’s visions of the self they dream of becoming. Such possible selves motivate us by laying out specific goals and calling forth the energy to work toward them. Another example is the study of the spotlight effect, which reflects our tendency to overestimate others’ noticing and evaluating our appearance, performance, and blunders. People who have high self-esteem have fewer sleepless nights, are less conforming, make more positive Facebook posts, are more persistent at difficult tasks, are less shy, anxious, and lonely, and are just plain happier. Self-efficacy, our sense of competence on a task, also pays dividends. Some research shows a destructive effect of low self-esteem. For example, temporarily deflating people’s self-esteem can lead them to disparage others and express heightened racial prejudice. Other researchers suggest that self-esteem reflects reality; thus, feeling good about oneself follows doing well. According to this explanation, the best way to foster self-esteem in children is to help them meet challenges, not reward them despite their failures. uE xercises: The Name-Letter Effect; Biased Self-Ratings; Self-Handicapping; Taking Credit for Success, Denying Responsibility for Failure
14-21. Discuss how excessive optimism, blindness to one’s own incompetence, and self-serving bias reveal the costs of self-esteem, and describe how defensive and secure self-esteem differ.
Success requires enough optimism to provide hope and enough pessimism to prevent complacency. Excessive optimism can blind us to real risks. People also display illusory optimism about their groups. Our natural positive thinking bias does seem to vanish, however, when we are bracing ourselves for feedback. Positive illusions also vanish after a traumatic personal experience.
Ironically, people often are most overconfident when most incompetent. To judge one’s competence and predict one’s future performance, it pays to invite others’ assessments. Self-serving bias, our readiness to perceive ourselves favorably, is evident in our tendency to accept more responsibility for good deeds than for bad and more for successes than for failures. Most people also see themselves as better than average. In fact, today’s new generation— Generation Me, according to Jean Twenge—expresses more narcissism (excessive self-love and self-absorption) than previous generations. Defensive self-esteem is fragile and focuses on sustaining itself, which makes failure and criticism feel threatening. Like low self-esteem, defensive selfesteem correlates with antisocial behavior. In contrast, secure self-esteem is less fragile because it depends less on external evaluations. Feeling accepted for who we are enables us to lose ourselves in relationships and purposes larger than self.