Personality Psychology Fundamentals: Core Concepts & Approaches
Understanding Personality Psychology: Core Concepts
Goal of Personality Psychology
The goal of personality psychology is to understand and explain individual differences in behavior, thoughts, and feelings, and to explore how these traits emerge and develop over time. It aims to understand the consistency and individual uniqueness in how people think, act, and feel across different situations and over time.
Defining Personality: Funder’s Perspective
Funder defines personality as the individual differences in characteristic patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving. In other words, personality refers to the consistent and unique ways people react to the world around them, influenced by both internal factors (like biology) and external factors (like environment).
Five Basic Approaches to Personality
The five basic approaches introduced in this chapter, and how they differ, are:
- Psychoanalytic Approach: Focuses on unconscious processes, such as early childhood experiences, and their role in shaping personality. It was pioneered by Freud and emphasizes the influence of the unconscious mind and defense mechanisms.
- Trait Approach: Focuses on identifying and measuring individual differences in personality traits, such as introversion, extroversion, openness, etc. It examines how these traits influence behavior and consistency over time.
- Biological Approach: Investigates the biological underpinnings of personality, including genetics, brain structure, and hormonal influences. It explores how these factors shape behavior, emotions, and thought patterns.
- Phenomenological/Humanistic Approach: Examines the role of conscious experience, including self-concept and cultural factors. This approach emphasizes personal experiences, perspectives, and how cultural context shapes individual differences.
- Behavioral/Cognitive Learning Approach: Focuses on how learning through interactions with the environment shapes personality. It looks at how behaviors are learned through rewards, punishments, and observation, and how cognitive processes affect learning and behavior.
Most Influential Personality Approach
The Trait Approach is considered the most important, being the largest and most dominant approach in contemporary psychology. It also helps organize the other approaches.
Father of Personality Psychology: Gordon Allport
Gordon Allport is considered the “father” of Personality Psychology. He played a crucial role in shifting the focus of psychology from studying pathology (like mental disorders) to studying healthy personality traits and individual differences. His work on traits and the development of trait theory was foundational in shaping modern personality psychology.
Galen’s Temperament Humors Model
Galen’s Temperament Humors Model is based on the idea that human behavior is influenced by the balance of four bodily fluids, or humors:
- Blood (Sanguine): Warm-hearted, cheerful, optimistic
- Phlegm (Phlegmatic): Slow to act, cool, calm
- Black Bile (Melancholic): Sad, melancholic
- Yellow Bile (Choleric): Quick to anger
According to Galen, the dominance or imbalance of these humors affects an individual’s temperament and behavior. For example, an excess of blood was thought to make a person more sanguine (optimistic), while too much black bile could make someone more melancholic (sad and reflective).
Elephant and Blindfolded Persons Metaphor
The Elephant and Blindfolded Persons Metaphor is used to illustrate the idea that different approaches to studying personality might focus on different aspects or “parts” of the full picture of personality. Just like blindfolded individuals touching different parts of an elephant (trunk, legs, ears, etc.) and forming different conclusions, each personality approach may emphasize different aspects of personality (e.g., traits, behaviors, biology) without capturing the full complexity of an individual. This metaphor emphasizes the limited scope of any single perspective in understanding the entire complexity of personality.
Strengths and Weaknesses of Personality Study
The strengths of personality psychology include its appreciation of individual differences as important and its ability to provide in-depth understanding of individuals. However, its weaknesses include:
- A potential over-focus on the individual, sometimes neglecting broader social and environmental influences.
- Difficulty in generalizability across individuals, despite providing in-depth insight.
- Challenges in integrating findings from different approaches.
- Potential to overlook the dynamic and changing nature of personality over time.
- Struggles with reliably measuring abstract concepts.
Key Concepts and Important Terms
- Personality Traits
- Psychological Triad
- Trait Approach
- Biological Approach
- Psychoanalytic Approach
- Phenomenological/Cultural Approach
- Behavioral/Cognitive Learning Approach
- Humors
- Melancholic
- Choleric
- Sanguine
- Phlegmatic
- Phrenology: A now-outdated theory that suggested personality traits and mental abilities could be determined by the shape and bumps on the skull. Although phrenology is no longer valid, it was an early attempt to understand how brain functions might relate to personality.
- The Elephant and Blindfolded Persons Metaphor: This metaphor highlights the idea that personality psychology involves multiple perspectives that can each provide partial insights into the full complexity of human personality. Each approach offers valuable insights, but no single approach captures all the dimensions of personality.