19 Module 19: Personality: Who Are You?

A key element of the ways that you think about, influence, and relate to other people is the dispositions that you bring to any situation—in other words, your personality. For example, suppose you are a hostile person in general. You are likely to interpret others’ actions as challenges or threats, you may prefer to use bullying tactics to influence other people, and your relations with other people are likely to be confrontational.

In this module, we will talk about these dispositional factors. We will introduce you to the major approaches that psychologists have used to try to understand personality. These approaches correspond roughly to the ways that you might attempt to learn about the personality of a new friend. First, you would notice that your new friend has certain tendencies; she is pleasant and cooperative, hard-working, and comfortable with routines, for example. This first task, noticing and describing stable tendencies, corresponds to the trait approach. After you have known your friend for a while, you may begin to wonder why she has the tendencies, or traits, that she does. You may wonder, for example, if her comfort with routines results from an overly structured childhood or if she has found that routines help her to complete her schoolwork on time. This search for explanations corresponds to the remaining approaches to understanding personality that psychologists have developed: genetic (which we include as part of the trait approach), psychoanalytic, and cognitive–social learning.

This module has three sections. Section 19.1 introduces you to the important traits that psychologists have identified and the major method that has been developed to measure them. Together, they constitute the trait approach. Although genetic explanations for personality are not strictly part of the trait approach, we have included them in this section because the two camps have grown closer over the past couple of decades. Section 19.2 describes the cognitive–social learning approach to explaining personality, which is really three separate approaches: cognitive, social learning, and the combination of the two. Section 19.3 begins the concerted efforts to explain personality with a discussion of the once-influential ideas of Sigmund Freud.

19.1 Trait approach: Traits, genes, and continuity

19.2 Cognitive–social learning approach: Personality and the environment

19.3 Psychoanalytic approach: Unconscious conflict in personality

READING WITH A PURPOSE

Remember and Understand

By reading and studying Module 19, you should be able to remember and describe:

• Factor analysis (19.1)
• The Big Five personality factors (19.1)
• Self-report personality inventories (19.1)
• Temperament (19.1)
• Learning approach and Cognitive-Social Learning approach to personality: reciprocal determinism, learning through observation (19.2)
• Conscious, preconscious, and unconscious (19.3)
• Defense mechanisms: repression, denial, projection, reaction formation, sublimation, displacement (19.3)
• Criticisms of psychoanalytic approach (19.3)

Apply

By reading and thinking about how the concepts in Module 19 apply to real life, you should be able to:

• Identify where you likely fall on the Big Five personality factors (19.1)
• Recognize examples of learning through reinforcement and punishment, and through observation in personality (19.2)
• Recognize examples of defense mechanisms (19.3)
• Identify examples of consistency and inconsistency in personality (19.1 and 19.2)

Analyze, Evaluate, and Create

By reading and thinking about Module 19, participating in classroom activities, and completing out-of-class assignments, you should be able to:

• Describe examples of reciprocal determinism (19.2)
• Describe interpersonal difficulties that may result from mismatches in personality (19.1 and 19.2)

19.1. Trait approach: Traits, genes, and continuity 

In many cases, the first thing we want to know when we meet a new person is along the lines of “What are they like?” “Are they friendly?” “Do they have a good sense of humor?” A simple description is all we want. When we ask questions like this, we are searching for a person’s personality traits, tendencies that predispose people to act consistently over time and across situations. Instead of describing individual people, many psychologists were interested in coming up with a list of the full range of traits that could be used to describe all people.

In our own lives, after we have formed an impression about the stable traits that describe a particular person, we may turn to a search for explanations. “They sure are a suspicious person; I wonder if they have cheated many times in the past or if they have always been that way, even since childhood.” Traditionally, psychologists taking the trait approach were content to work toward describing people only. More recently, we are beginning to see an explanation component to the trait approach along with the descriptive component. Trait psychologists are most interested in the genetic contribution to personality (answers to questions like “Have they always been this way?”). They do not deny the effects of the environment (as in questions like “What kinds of experiences made a person a certain way?”); they just do not pay as close attention to them as to the possible explanations of persistent, innate tendencies.

Identifying the Range of Human Traits

Take a look at the personal ad that you wrote for yourself. How many different traits did you use to describe yourself? How many do you think you would need in order to do a reasonable job of describing someone’s personality? You could take an entire book to do it; a major part of biographies and memoirs is the description of the personalities of the subjects. In 1961, Gordon Allport, one of the original trait theorists, counted over 4,000 adjectives in English that describe aspects of people’s personalities.

If you think about it, though, many of those words are very similar and probably do not really denote different traits. For example, consider shy, timid, bashful, quiet, reserved, introverted. Although they do not all mean the exact same thing, they are extremely similar. These words may really just indicate versions of the same underlying personality trait.

One way you could determine which words refer to the same trait is to examine the similarities in ratings on a personality test that asks people to rate themselves on the different items. Suppose all of the test takers gave themselves the same ratings for “shy” and “bashful.” That would suggest strongly that these two words are actually measuring the same trait. A statistical technique called factor analysis does a mathematically complicated version of that very examination. In factor analysis, the correlations between ratings for all of the items are computed. Subsets of items that have high correlations with one another are assumed to be measuring the same trait. When personality data are subjected to factor analyses like this, you can reduce hundreds of separate personality terms into a smaller number of dimensions, or factors, as they are called. For example, shy, bashful, reserved, and several other terms might be reduced to a single factor that we could call introversion.

Over the past few decades, there has been a growing consensus that the “correct” number of personality factors is five. In other words, there seem to be five particular personality dimensions that can do a good job of describing anyone’s personality:

(Neuroticism is sometimes called Emotional Stability, but doing so ruins the OCEAN acronym that you can use to remember these five factors.)

These five factors have turned up so many times as the key ones that they have been named the Big Five personality factors (McCrae & Costa, 1985; 1987; 1997; 2003). Keep in mind that these are not the only five personality factors, just that they are the most useful ones. They are the five factors or dimensions that will tell you the most about someone’s personality. Certainly, you can learn more by discovering additional traits, but each new one gives you much less information about the person than the Big Five will.

One important extension that has gotten some attention recently is known as the HEXACO model (Lee & Ashton, 2007). The EXACO part corresponds to the Big Five factors (E for Emotionality and X for eXtraversion), while the H is for Honesty-Humility, a trait that seems both important and somewhat separate from the original five. Honesty-Humility is reflected by a person’s willingness to break rules, willingness to manipulate others for personal gain, interest in wealth, and feelings of self-importance.

Determining Individuals’ Traits: Self-Report Personality Inventories

One of the key contributions of trait psychologists has been the development of methods to describe individuals’ personalities. Self-report personality inventories, or more commonly, personality tests, have been around for years, giving researchers ways to classify people and helping clinical, educational, and organizational psychologists figure out the best ways to help them achieve their potential.

Now you can take hundreds of “psychologist certified” personality tests for free on the internet. We should caution you about taking these tests too seriously. Let us remind you about the 7 “tips” for evaluating psychological information from Module 1, as most of them can be applied to these personality tests:

Tip # 1. Be aware of your pre-conceived ideas

Tip #2. Who is the source?

Tip # 3: What is the purpose of the information?

Tip #4. Is it based on research?

Tip # 5. Beware of oversimplifications

Tip # 6. Beware of distortions of the research process

Tip #7. Beware of persuasion tricks

Many websites that offer free personality tests are peppered with testimonials, and they may claim to be based on “brain science,” which sounds like an oversimplification and distortion of research. And they never do describe the actual research. Although the test itself might be free, you are often invited to purchase a more detailed report of the results, or a book, of course. Although the fact that someone is trying to sell something to you is not an automatic reason for you to reject the results, it is certainly a fact that should make you more cautious.

We are not prepared to condemn all of the free personality tests out there, but we certainly do suggest strongly that you consider them “for entertainment purposes only.” You will find many other personality tests that are accompanied by full disclosure about how they were constructed. In addition, good tests have been “tested,” so to speak, in order to demonstrate that they really do measure what they claim to measure—in other words, they have been tested for validity. Well-constructed tests have been assessed for reliability as well, and their results have been standardized appropriately; in other words, they are consistent and scores are compared to a previous group of test-takers (see Module 8 for details on this). It should not be too difficult for you to discover these facts about a particular test if you are looking for one you can trust.

Let us consider three well-known personality tests.

• Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory
• NEO Personality Inventory (and Five-Factor Inventory)
• Myers-Briggs Type Indicator

All three are self-report personality inventories, meaning that the results are based on what the test-takers themselves think about their traits, not on what an observer thinks (although there is an observer option for the NEO).

Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory

The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), which was originally developed in the 1930s, and is being updated to a third edition, so it is now known as the MMPI-3 (release date is fall 2020). It is expected to have around 350 items, which are grouped into several separate scales (for example, Antisocial Behavior, Self-Doubt, Dominance, Aggressiveness, Compulsivity, Introversion, and many others), each of which functions like a mini-test score for a specific trait. The MMPI was originally developed to measure psychological disorders, and the names of many of the scales reflect that history. The individual scales can also be sorted into different groups to construct larger scales, such as Interpersonal, Internalizing, and Externalizing. If the names of some of the scales sound negative, it is because of the MMPI’s heavy use in clinical settings to help diagnose psychological disorders. The test is also used in non-clinical settings, however. For example, the MMPI is commonly used to help make hiring decisions about candidates for high stress, high-risk jobs, such as police officers and firefighters. Some marriage counselors and career counselors also use the MMPI when they are advising their clients.

The MMPI-3’s greatest strength, perhaps, is its very careful construction. Each individual test item for a particular scale—for example, Depression—was selected for its ability to distinguish those suffering from depression from those who are not. The test developers administered the test to 2,200 people (including 550 Spanish speakers) from throughout the US for their standardization sample. The MMPI-2 also contains scales designed to assess the likelihood that the test taker is being truthful, which helps control for the temptation to make yourself look good when taking self-report tests.

NEO Personality Inventory

The NEO Personality Inventory (Costa & McCrae, 1992; 1995) is used to measure the Big Five factors. There are different lengths of the test, from 60 to 240 items.  The NEO Personality Inventory can be administered as a self-report test, or it can be used to allow an observer, such as a spouse, to make judgments about an individual.

When you shorten a personality test, you usually reduce its reliability, so that is what you give up for the gain in ease of administering when you go for the short version. In addition, the full-version test provides subscales that can give you information about different facets of the Big Five factors. For example, the Neuroticism scale can be subdivided into Anxiety, Angry Hostility, Depression, Self-Consciousness, Impulsiveness, and Vulnerability. The Agreeableness scale is subdivided into Trust, Modesty, Compliance, Altruism, Straightforwardness, and Tender-Mindedness.

Myers-Briggs Type Indicator

The publisher of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) claims that it is the world’s most widely used personality inventory. That is true. This means that if you are familiar with personality tests, it is most likely that it is the MBTI or a test based on its principles. The test sorts people into 16 different personality types based on their placement on four dimensions (Introversion-Extraversion, Sensing-Intuition, Thinking-Feeling, Judging-Perceiving).

Unfortunately, what might NOT be true is that the MBTI is a reliable and valid test of personality. Even the makers of the test themselves seem to be admitting as much when they assert that the MBTI does not measure traits, it measures “preferences” (Kerwin, no date). We are not even sure exactly what that means, but apparently, according to Kerwin, that makes it acceptable to categorize people as introvert versus extravert, for example, rather than to accept that introversion-extraversion is a dimension. In other words, you are not one or the other (which sounds a bit like a false dichotomy, doesn’t it). The reality is that people fit somewhere along a dimension, or continuous distribution, that is labeled introvert on one end and extravert on the other.

Kerwin continues to criticize the critics for using out-dated research to support their viewpoints. Fair point, but then Kerwin goes on to use NO peer-reviewed research to support his viewpoint. Here is an excellent bottom-line summary evaluation of the MBTI that Kerwin does not mention: The test does not agree with known facts and data in psychology, it is not internally consistent, it allows validity reports to be based on self-verification (in other words, it is valid because someone who took the test likes the results and agrees that it is valid), and many of its key claims cannot be tested (Stein & Swan, 2019). Yes, 2019.

The one of the seven tips you might not have learned about yet is Beware of Persuasion Tricks. One key persuasion trick is to use social proof, essentially trying to persuade you by pointing out that other people agree with the persuader. The MBTI is taken by two million people per year and is used by people in 89 of the Fortune 100 companies (also from Stein & Swan, 2019). All those people can’t be wrong, can they? Yes, they can.

Debating the Trait Approach

Go back to the personal ad that you wrote down for yourself in the Activate section at the beginning of the Module. Did you find it easy to come up with a set of personality traits? Many people do not. Even if you did, reconsider some of them. Maybe you wrote down that you are serious; in reality, it depends largely on the situation. When you are relaxing at home or hanging out with friends, perhaps you are quite playful. At work or school, you are serious. When you exercise, you are somewhere in the middle. At church, you are very serious. Ouch! What is the good of using the trait “serious” to describe yourself if your seriousness depends so much on the situation?

This is a problem that critics of the trait approach have pointed out over the years. When you use personality traits to describe someone, you are assuming that traits are stable, that they apply to people consistently over time and in most, if not all, situations. The critics have argued that traits are not so consistent. Walter Mischel (1968; 1990), for instance, argued for many years that advocates of the trait approach have gone too far with their claims. Behavior, Mischel noted, is far too variable from situation to situation for psychologists to use a single personality test score to predict anything about an individual person with much confidence. Despite this supposed limitation, however, many psychologists do just that; for example, they make psychological diagnoses, hiring decisions, and career recommendations on the basis of personality test scores at a single time and place. As early as 1928, researchers discovered that behavior varies considerably from situation to situation (Hartshorne & May, 1928), so there is clearly merit to Mischel’s arguments.

Trait theorists have countered that no one claims that traits are completely consistent (no one is always serious) but that it is impossible to imagine that there is no consistency (Epstein, 1980; 1983). They point out that if there were no consistency at all, a person’s current behavior would have no relationship to her or his prior behavior, making social interaction very difficult. Imagine someone being helpful, kind, and considerate on Tuesday and suspicious, mean, and vindictive on Thursday. Clearly, say the trait theorists, there is more consistency to an individual’s personality traits than that.

Although it is dangerous, as the critics say, to predict a person’s specific behavior from a trait, if you look at the “big picture,” you will see that traits can be quite useful. Although you might be an introvert according to a trait measurement, at any given moment you might appear outgoing and sociable; perhaps you are excited about some good news or with someone who encourages you to be open. If we look at you over a two-week period, however, we would probably discover that you exhibit more reserved behaviors than someone whose test indicated that he or she was an extravert (Epstein, 1979).

Investigating Trait Consistency: Temperament and Genes

In the past couple of decades, the trait approach has become increasingly associated with a biological, or genetic, explanation for personality. This is not an automatic or necessary association. Personality traits could arise from many different combinations of genetic and environmental causes or, for that matter, entirely from environmental causes. It seems very likely that, just like everything else we have examined in psychology, personality does result from the interaction of genes and environment. Many psychologists have begun to pay a great deal of attention to the genetic side of this equation, however. Two key ideas that have helped out with the development of genetic explanations of personality are temperament and the Big Five traits.

We first saw the concept temperament in Module 17. You may recall, then, that temperament refers to biological differences in a person’s emotional and motor reactions to new stimuli, and tendencies regarding self-regulation (Rothbart & Bates, 1998). In Module 17, we noted that early excitement about the role of temperament in childhood attachment faded as the accumulation of research suggested a relatively minor role of genetics and temperament. The role of biologically based temperament on personality is still an unsettled question. Many psychologists believe that biologically based dispositions provide the basis for the development of consistent personality traits; others believe that the role of temperament in the development of personality is quite limited.

Behavior geneticists have determined that the heritabilities for many personality traits are about 50%, meaning that about half of the variation in a group can be explained by differences in the genes of the group members. In other words, of the differences in a trait such as extraversion among the students in your class, about half of the variation results from differences in genes across students.  Some research has even found heritability estimates for the Big Five traits in the range of 66% to 79% (Reimann et al., 1997). Robert McRae, Paul Costa, and their colleagues have gone so far as to assert that the Big Five factors—openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism—are the key dimensions of childhood temperament (and adult personality, of course). They note that research has found evidence for the existence of the Big Five factors throughout the world (Martin et al., 1997; McRae et al., 1998; 2000; McRae & Costa, 1997).

Although using the Big Five factors as the key dimensions of temperament creates an obvious link between biology and adult personality, not all researchers agree with this choice. There have been many alternative proposals through the years regarding the key aspects of childhood temperament. Many recognize that infants differ reliably in their dispositions toward positive emotions, anger, fear, excitability, and ability to focus attention (Caspi, 2000; Belsky et al., 1996; Rothbard & Bates, 1998). These characteristics, then, are also good candidates for stable dimensions of infant temperament.

There is some research support for the idea that childhood temperament is related to adult personality and for the idea that both childhood temperament and adult personality are fairly stable. For example, several of the infant temperament measures (along with parent personality) appear important in the development of the parent-child relationship (Kochanska et al., 2004). In addition, longitudinal research has demonstrated consistency in temperament throughout early childhood, consistency from preschool temperament to personality traits in middle childhood, and consistency in adult personality over periods ranging from 6 to 30 years (Costa & McRae, 1992; Emde, et al. 1992; Finn, 1986; HageKull & Bohlin, 1998; Saudino & Cherney, 2001; Siegler & Costa, 1999). It is true that there have been few demonstrations of direct links between infant temperament and adult personality, but there is substantial indirect support for the existence of those links (McRae et al. 2000; Rothbart, Ahadi, & Evans, 2000).

But fairly stable does not mean that personality cannot change. In fact, it can. One key precursor to personality change is major life events, such as marriage, divorce, becoming a parent, starting a new career, and retirement (Bleidorn, Hopwood, & Lucas, 2018). Other non-genetic factors can contribute to the development of, and changes to, personality as well. To explore some of those, we will turn to the cognitive-social-learning approach in the next section.

19.2. Cognitive–Social Learning Approach: Personality and the Environment

During his first couple of years teaching full-time, Edward, a psychology professor, was disappointed that he did not meet many people. His college is a large commuter school; he rarely saw his students outside of the classroom, and informal encounters with colleagues were rare. Then, one day, he made two simple changes to his daily routine. First, instead of parking in the lot nearest to his office, he began parking in a faraway lot, so he would have to walk across campus to reach his office. Second, he made a special effort to notice the people he was passing in the halls (he had a tendency to be unobservant). The effect was immediate. He began to recognize and greet familiar faces every day. Emboldened by his success, he made more changes to his typical behavior. He began to purposely arrive at school between classes so that he could walk through the halls when they were filled with people. He started eating an occasional lunch in the main campus cafeteria. Over time, he developed to the point where he almost never makes it to his office without exchanging smiles and hellos with colleagues and with current and former students. He frequently arrives at his office later than intended because he stopped to chat with someone for a few minutes. A “before” and “after” examination would look as if he had undergone a magical, almost Ebenezer Scrooge-like, transformation. But no ghosts were required to turn Edward from quiet, surly, unfriendly passerby to a sociable and outgoing colleague and professor.

To be sure, the transformation was not complete. Edward still struggles with many leftovers of days past, such as an awkward feeling when someone fails to return his greeting (and an uncertainty about whether he should try to get people’s attention to greet them if they do not see him). These feelings are internal, however, and as such are invisible to others. As a consequence, despite having his own very clear answer to the question of whether he is introverted or extraverted, others are not so sure. His students are typically split about 60-40 when he asks them (the slight majority peg him as introverted, as he pegs himself).

It is these types of transformations that the cognitive–social learning view of personality intends to explain. Originally, psychologists developed a social learning perspective as a straightforward application of learning principles, which you learned about in Module 6. In essence, social learning psychologists proposed that personality emerged as a person learned to respond to the environment. For example, when a particular behavior, such as bullying on the playground, was reinforced (for example, other children are intimidated into handing over their lunch money), that behavior becomes more likely in the future, and a personality trait—in this case, aggressiveness—is born.

Often a behavior may be reinforced in one kind of situation but not another. For example, maybe the playground bully gets rewarded at school for his behavior but not at home. According to the principle of stimulus discrimination, the child would learn to be aggressive on the playground but not at home. In this way, the social learning perspective can account for some of the inconsistencies in people’s behavior across situations.

Now, these are terrific ideas; we are sure you can think of dozens or hundreds of examples of personality-like behavior that is rewarded or punished. Still, the approach is limited. There are many cases of behavior that become common without it being rewarded, and how can you explain two people who experience the same environment yet come away from it with different behaviors? To help out the straightforward learning explanations, psychologists expanded them by turning to cognition. Basically, it is the way that people think about the environment (and the rewards and punishments therein) that determines their typical behaviors in different situations—and hence their personalities.

Reciprocal Determinism

Because people think about the environment, they behave in ways that will change it, which will then later affect their behavior. The result is a slightly complex, but very interesting, interaction among cognition, behavior, and environment. Albert Bandura, one of the pioneers of this view, coined the term reciprocal determinism  to describe the way that personal factors (for example, traits, predispositions, and styles of thinking or cognition) and behavior interact with the environment. To illustrate, we will use “expectation” as a kind of personal factor. Because of experiences, traits, predispositions, or styles of thinking, you have a great many expectations about events. It was professor Edward’s expectation that he would run into people in the halls that led him to change his parking space. That change had the desired effect, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Let us look at another example so you can see how reciprocal determinism works. As you read the example, look for the following kinds of interactive effects:

• Expectations influence our behaviors
• Behaviors influence our environment
• Environments influence our behaviors
• Behaviors influence expectations
• Environments influence expectations

It is 7:55 on Monday morning, the first day of the semester, and you are walking to your first class, History 333, The Detailed History of Boring Speeches. Because of your obvious expectation that you will be bored to tears, you decide to sit in the back row, behind a very tall student just in case you need to doze off (expectation influences behavior). From your obstructed-view seat, you find that you can neither hear what the professor is saying clearly nor see the board where she is writing (behavior influences environment). Then, the environment influences another behavior, as you fall asleep because there is nothing to see, hear, or do (environment influences behavior). Because you are falling asleep in this class, you become even more convinced that 8:00 AM on Mondays and Wednesdays is nap time (behavior influences expectations). On your way out of class one day, you overhear two students who had been sitting in the front row, bright-eyed and wide-awake. “I just love this class,” says the first. “Yes, you were right,” her companion replies. “Professor Jones has a way of making the course material fascinating.” The front-row students’ different expectations led to different behaviors and a different environment, which in turn influenced their expectations.

This is an important aspect of reciprocal determinism. Personal factors can lead to unique expectations, which will lead different people to experience a completely different environment in the same situation.

Learning Through Observation

Another key contribution of the combined cognitive-social learning perspective is the realization that learning can occur even though a behavior has not been specifically reinforced. In particular, you can learn to engage (or not engage) in a behavior by observing someone else engage in the behavior (remember, you first learned about this concept in Module 6). If you can also observe the consequences of that behavior—that is, does the behavior lead to reinforcement or punishment?—you are likely to learn very effectively whether and how to engage in it.

As a parent, you should keep in mind that modeling appropriate behavior can be more effective than using other forms of influence. For example, a naturalistic observation conducted throughout the U.S. found that only 41% of children under 14 wear helmets while biking, skating, skateboarding, or riding a scooter. Fifty percent of children wore helmets when they were with adults who were not wearing helmets, presumably because the adults tried to influence the children to wear a helmet. If the adults themselves were wearing helmets, 67% of the accompanying children did too (Cody et al., 2004). Very likely, much of the increase in children’s helmet wearing results from the modeling of the appropriate behavior by adults. Modeling is the scientific equivalent of the well-known phrase “actions speak louder than words.”

As we noted above, the cognitive-social learning perspective suggests that, because behavior is (in part) determined by the environment and the environment is quite varied, personality would not be completely stable. Psychologists from the social learning perspective are indeed more likely to point out that behavior can be somewhat inconsistent across situations. That is not the same thing as saying behavior is unpredictably random, however. Remember, according to the cognitive–social learning perspective, individuals choose some aspects of their environment. Most people are likely to choose environments that led to rewarding outcomes in the past, so the similarity in chosen environments will lead to some consistency in behavior. In addition, learning principles such as generalization would lead to increased consistency across similar situations.

Finally, we should note that, just as a social learning perspective may exist without reference to cognition, there is a cognitive perspective that makes little reference to social learning. It is an important current area of research among personality psychologists, as you will discover in discussions of the self-concept in Module 25.

19.3. Psychoanalytic Approach: Unconscious Conflict in Personality