Phenomenological and Humanistic Perspectives in Personality

Phenomenological Approach

Core premise: Understanding a person requires grasping their subjective perspective. Key emphasis: Present-focused experience — what the individual is thinking, feeling, and perceiving right now. Individual’s unique reality — each person constructs their own view of the world.

Sub-orientations within Phenomenology

• Humanistic orientation — a subset of phenomenology; emphasizes personal growth and self-actualization.
• Existential psychology — explores meaning, freedom, and responsibility.
• Eastern philosophical influences — integrate concepts from non-Western traditions to broaden personality theory.

Phenomenology is a methodological orientation that prioritizes subjective experience and personal interpretation in the study of personality. It focuses on how individuals experience and emphasizes self-determination.

Subjective Experience and Interpretation

Subjective experience: the unique, personal way each person gives meaning to life events. Interpretation variability: no two people experience the same situation identically.

Anthropological Approaches and Thrownness

Anthropological approaches: broad, overarching frameworks that encompass multiple sub-orientations within phenomenology. Thrownness: the recognition that, despite freedom of choice, individuals are situated within circumstances that influence possibilities. This perspective acknowledges that external conditions (culture, environment) shape but do not fully determine personal decisions. Birth circumstances — time and culture — shape how we experience the self. Recognizing this shows we choose our paths.

Existential Concepts: Angst and Related States

Angst — the feeling when we reflect on the nature and finitude of our existence. Triggered by questions such as: Is my life meaningful? It leads to anxiety and a sense of burden about the limited time we have.

• Anguish — the discomfort felt when seeing that each option has no perfect solution. Feelings often include anger and frustration at the need to sacrifice.
• Forlornness — the loneliness that arises from being the sole author of our life’s direction. Even external advice cannot eliminate the personal weight of decision-making.
• Despair — the sorrow that emerges from acknowledging elements outside our control. It highlights the importance of exercising agency over the choices we can control.

Authenticity and Agency

Authentic existence — living in alignment with one’s true desires, accepting freedom, and embracing responsibility. Authentic living is not a guarantee of constant happiness; it coexists with anxiety and boredom. Humans possess the awareness to choose their direction. Every act of not deciding (avoiding thought) is a choice that reflects one’s stance toward authenticity. The measure of a person is the quality of their choices regarding meaning.

Phenomenology and the Humanistic Orientation

Phenomenology focuses on subjective experiences and how individuals interpret their world rather than seeking a single objective truth. The humanistic orientation emphasizes subjective experience and the inherent drive toward growth and self-actualization. Applied to personality, it assumes people actively construct meaning, contrasting with more deterministic or trait-based models.

Humanistic: Abraham Maslow

Abraham Maslow focused on the positive potential of humans rather than on behavior alone. His theory proposed that human motivation is driven by a hierarchy of needs, which people strive to satisfy in a specific order, including love needs.

Characteristics of Needs

1. Basic needs — arise from deprivation, must be at least partly satisfied, and include things like food, water, and safety. When unmet, they dominate people’s thoughts and behavior.
2. Higher needs (growth needs) — motivate people to grow and become more important after basic needs are met; these include love and esteem and enable development and fulfillment.

Satisfaction sequence: lower needs must be satisfied first before focusing on higher needs. Ongoing process: self-actualization is never fully satisfied. Meta-needs: go beyond basic survival and psychological satisfaction; they relate to people’s desire for personal growth, emerge after self-actualization, and are linked to higher human potential.

Humanistic: George Kelly

George Kelly emphasized that individuals are active interpreters of their life experiences rather than passive reactors.

Personal Construct Theory: Core Concepts

• Personal constructs: bipolar dimensions (e.g., supportive vs. unsupportive) that individuals use to evaluate and organize experiences. Every person possesses a unique set of constructs.
• Constructs are mental categories people use to interpret events and to predict future experiences based on past observations.
• Constructive alternativism — the belief that there are many possible ways to interpret reality; no single truth. People can reconstruct their experiences in different ways, which supports personal growth.
• Using constructs: they predict and guide behavior; maladaptive constructs can lead to misunderstanding or psychological distress.
• Sociality corollary: to understand a person, uncover the constructs they employ to present the world to themselves and others.
• Anxiety source: occurs when an individual lacks adequate constructs to make sense of a situation. Adaptive response: anxiety signals the need to expand the construct system leading to personal growth. Maladaptive response: failure to develop new constructs leads to persistent anxiety.
• Fixed-role therapy aims to move clients out of habitual constructs toward a broader repertoire of interpretations and behaviors.

Phenomenological Approach to Personality

The phenomenological approach studies personality by examining how individuals perceive and interpret the world, rather than seeking an objective reality. Personality is understood through individual lived experience; the meaning a person assigns to events shapes behavior.

Subjective Well-Being (SWB)

Subjective well-being is a multidimensional construct that captures how individuals evaluate their own happiness and life satisfaction.

• Positive affect — high levels of joy, excitement, and enthusiasm.
• Negative affect — feelings such as sadness, worry, anger, and depression.

Reinforcement: Deliberate and Naturally Occurring

Deliberate: a parent or teacher intentionally supplies a reward or punishment. Naturally occurring: the environment automatically produces a consequence. Example: walking while texting leads to a fall; the injury punishes the texting behavior without anyone delivering a punishment.

Social Learning Theories

Radical behaviorists explain behavior solely via observable experiences and reject mental states. Social learning theory bridges behaviorist observation with cognitive mechanisms, offering a comprehensive framework for predicting behavior.

Julian Rotter’s Expectancy-Value Theory

The behavioral potential is the probability that a person will perform a particular behavior in a given situation.

• Expectancy — a belief about the likely outcome of a behavior. The belief itself drives action.
• Reinforcement value — how desirable the expected outcome is to the individual.

Albert Bandura: Observational Learning

Key processes of observational learning:

1. Attention — the learner must notice the model’s behavior; attractiveness of the model can increase attention.
2. Retention — the observed behavior must be encoded and stored in memory.
3. Reproduction — the learner must possess the physical ability to replicate the behavior.
4. Motivation — the learner’s desire to reproduce the behavior, often shaped by anticipated reinforcements or punishments.

The Bobo doll experiment demonstrated that children imitate aggressive behavior observed in an adult model, highlighting the role of observational learning and vicarious reinforcement/punishment. Physical capability and personal motivation are critical bottlenecks; mere observation does not guarantee behavior change.

Observational learning requires attention, retention, reproduction, and motivation. The Bobo doll experiment provides empirical support that children imitate observed aggression, and that vicarious reinforcement or punishment modulates this effect. Social learning theory bridges behaviorist observation with cognitive mechanisms, offering a comprehensive framework for predicting behavior.

Quasi-Experimental Designs

Quasi-experiments explore non-equivalent control groups, interrupted time series, real-world applications, alternative explanations, and causal inference.

Key points: Quasi-experimental designs enable researchers to infer effects when randomization isn’t feasible, but they require careful consideration of alternative explanations. Multiple data points are essential; relying on a single pre/post comparison can produce misleading conclusions.