Why are we different?

We exist in an unstable and turbulent environment bombarded with a multitude and diversity of

dynamic forces and stimuli acting on us, regulating the way we ought to behave and conduct our

way of life. There is no avenue to escape from these forces. We are caught and trapped in it by our

existence to survive and grow in our life processes. We are compelled to discriminate, choose, cope,

accept, resist and adapt to them for survival and growth. The way we go around coping with these

forces varies from one individual to another shaping the way we think, feel and do, and that makes

us different from each other.

By an act of God, we are thrown into our mother’s womb, and in that life process, we inherited some

genes from the family tree of our ancestors; and that makes us different the day we are born.

We grow up in our family within a society with unique, beliefs, traditions, norms and values. They

design life support systems called culture, to regulate and condition our conduct of life. They taught

us how to behave, think, feel and do things. Due to our genetic differences, our approach to be

conditioned and regulated by these systems varies from individual to individual. Some of us accept,

some fight these systems while others adapt. Those who accept are rewarded with the pleasures of

life while those who fight means pain and to some even death. Those who adapt learn the pains and

pleasures of life. Pain is learnt through resistance while pleasure is learnt through conformity. It is

these life experiences that make our gap of differences even bigger and wider.

This gap becomes greater for those who are exposed across a variety of cultural experiences. The

exposure to different ways of life enables our phenomenal field to look at the world from different

perspectives.

How we view the world determines why and how we do, feel and think about things around us. What

to do with them varies from one individual to another, making us so unique from each other in our

species.

Why do we need to understand human differences?

We are social beings living in an organized and dynamic world, interdependent on each other to

support our daily needs and necessities for our survival and comfort. By virtue of being a part of a

massive entity and our role-relationship with others beings, we need to play our roles in supporting,

changing and improving these necessities to improve our quality of life. We organize ourselves into

groups known as organizations to produce the necessities to meet our daily support system. And to

play our roles well, we need to socialize, communicate, interact and connect with others to

accomplish common goals.

Dealing with all kinds of people is a daily affair. Each of us has a unique pattern of behavior that

constitutes our personality that determines the way we think, feel and do things. The root causes of

all human problems arise from our different perspectives looking at things. We need to know

ourselves and know others to enable us to find effective solutions to problems caused by our

differences.

Personality Psychology - The study of human differences and its contributions and limitations

Personality is the study of human differences. Personality psychologists are interested to know how

and why people behave the way they do, why do we feel the way we feel and why do we think the

way we think. They attempt to unravel the mysteries of the mind and the body to explain who we are,

why are we different and how we how we respond to a variety of situations in our environment.

Over the decades, psychologists vary in their approach to the study of human personality. Some

approaches are idiographic. They study human differences on the traits perspectives. They try to

identify the key traits and characteristics by which each person can be distinguished from other

people. Others are nomothetic and focus on identifying personality types. They focus on

investigating similarities between individuals of large groups of people to find patterns of behavior

that are common and those that are share by some others.

The aims of studying human behavior is to describe, understand, predict and control behavior. The

idiographic approach is useful in describing and understands human behavior while the nomothetic

approach contributes significantly to predict and control behavior. Evidently there is a need to

develop school of personality using both approaches and methods for a complete understanding of

human personality.

Historical Perspectives

The earliest attempt to predict personality begins with the ancient theory that our personality is a

result of some external forces. Our personality is influenced by our name, date of birth (numerology),

physical features, zodiac sign, element, and the influence of the planetary systems. The

classification of personality is based on myth, animism and planetary forces. Over the centuries,

people rely on this ancient theory to predict patterns of behavior. The ancient theory is not scientific.

It is more like fortune telling as it is not based on any empirical data.

Temperamental Theory

The earliest known theory of personality is based on the medical theory. It was the Greek physician

Hippocrates (460-370 BC) who developed the ancient four humors also known as the

temperamental theory. He believed certain human moods, emotions and behaviors were caused by

four body fluids or humors. Galen (AD 131-200) extended this theory and developed the first

typology of personality

into four types. The sanguine, or optimistic, type was associated with blood; the phlegmatic type

(slow and lethargic) with phlegm; the melancholic type (sad, depressed) with black bile; and the

choleric (angry) type with yellow bile. Individual personality was determined by

the amount of each of the four humors.

Over the decades numerous personality theories are emerged. Generally, they can be categories

into six schools of thoughts.

1. Trait theory

2. Psychodynamic theory

3. Behaviorist theory

4. Cognitive theory

5. Humanistic theory

6. Evolutionary and Genetic Perspectives

Trait Theory

The first school of theory is initiated by Gordon Allport, (1897 – 1967) the father of the trait theorists.

He hypothesized that: “Those individual differences that are most salient and socially relevant in

people’s lives will eventually become encoded into their language; the more important such a

difference, the more likely is it to become expressed as a single word.”

From the above lexical hypothesis, he located every term that he thought could describe a person in

the dictionary to identify a list of 4500 traits and organized them into three categories to identify an

individual personality.

1. Cardinal Traits – traits that dominates the personality across time and situations.

2. Central Traits – common traits that are consistent across time and situations. They form the

building blocks of personality.

3. Secondary Traits – Traits that are less evident and inconsistent across time and situations.

Raymond Cattell organized the thousands of traits described by Allport and condensed them down

to 16 primary traits using the statistical method of factor analysis into 16 PF (Personality Factors) to

explore the basic dimensions of personality. Hans Eysenck further simplified the traits into three

fundamental factors: psychotics (such antisocial traits as cruelty and rejection of social customs),

introversion-extroversion, and emotionality-stability (also called neuroticism). Eysenck also

formulated a quadrant based on intersecting emotional-stable and introverted-extroverted axes.

Goldberg and Costa & McCrae simplified the trait theories using factor analysis to develop the Big

Five OCEAN (Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism)

Contribution of the trait theories

1. It provides a scientific method of classify traits using factor analysis under their adjective

descriptors.

2. The use of idiographic and nomothetic approach to identify human differences.

Limitations of the traits theories

1. Classifying personality based the composition of traits is too simplistic. The lexicon approach

to a certain degree may enable them to understand and describe behavior that is stable and

persistent and not affected by the environment.

2. The development of trait theories is not based on any psychological construct. Apparently,

they cannot explain how traits are developed.

3. Trait theorists cannot explain adaptive behavior where a person pattern of behavior varies

across situations and over time.

4. Traits theorist can explain what you are but cannot explain why you behave, feel and think

the way you do

5. The trait theorists are interested in the conscious awareness where behavior is overt and

observable

6. The trait theory does not inherently provide an avenue of personality change.

7. The use of adjectival descriptors to cluster traits is not inclusive of all psychological traits

The above pitfalls need to be addressed to provide a complete and accurate picture of a person’s

personality.

Psychodynamic Theories

Towards the twentieth-century Sigmund Freud became the pioneer of the second school of

personality theories. He attempts to unravel the mysteries of the psyche by structuring our mind into

three levels, conscious, pre-conscious and unconscious. Conscious deals with the part of our

awareness in touch with the reality of our life. It explains our mental activity in which all thought

processes occur. The pre-conscious is where information on our past experiences is stored away,

but it is easily retrievable. The unconscious is a reservoir of our inner states such as desire, wants,

needs and motives. It is also storage of information of our painful past that is being repressed and

cannot be accessed readily.

Freud investigated the interplay of our conscious awareness and unconsciousness to explain

personality.

He proposed a three-part personality structure consisting of the id (concerned with the gratification of

basic instincts), the ego (which mediates between the demands of the id and the constraints of

society), and the superego (through which parental and social values are internalized). In contrast to

type or trait theories of personality, the dynamic model proposed by Freud involved an ongoing

element of conflict, and it was these conflicts that Freud saw as the primary determinant of

personality. His psychoanalytic method was designed to help patients resolve their conflicts by

exploring unconscious thoughts, motivations, and conflicts through the use of free association and

other techniques. Another distinctive feature of Freudian psychoanalysis is its emphasis on the

importance of childhood experiences in personality formation.

Carl Jung

Carl Jung, a follower of Sigmund Freud went against his teacher by modifying the three structure of

the mind. According to Jung: Ego is conscious mind – anything which we are aware of what is

happening around in our environment. He replaced the pre-conscious and unconscious with the

concept of personal conscious. Personal unconscious is anything which is not presently conscious,

but can be. The personal unconscious is like most people’s understanding of the unconscious in that

it includes both memories that are easily brought to mind and those that have been suppressed for

some reason. Jung introduced the concept of collective unconscious – the part of the unconscious

from our cultural heritage. It is the reservoir of our experiences as a species, a kind of knowledge we

are all born with. And yet we can never be directly conscious of it.

It influences all of our experiences and behaviors, most especially the emotional ones, but we only

know about it indirectly, by looking at those influences.

Jung replaced the Freudian structure of personality with the processes of the psyche and its

functions to explain human behavior. He developed four pairs of polar traits from the eight mental

functions to interpret personality

Perceiving Vs Judging – How people prefer to deal with the outer world?

Sensing Vs Intuition – How people prefer to take in information?

Thinking Vs Feeling – How people prefer to make decision?

Extroversion Vs Introversion – how people prefer to focus their attention and energy

Jung sequences the 4 pairs of mental processes:

How people direct their energy?

Observable Behavior (Extroversion Vs Introversion)

Dominant Function (Sensing Vs and Intuition)

Auxiliary Function (Thinking and Feeling)

Inferior Function (Judging Vs Perceiving)

Contributions of the psychodynamic theorists

It provides a distinct structure of the mind and its mental processes to understand human personality

It helps us to understand the underlying causes of abnormal behavior and how to treat them

Limitations of Carl Jung

1. The psychodynamic theories assume behavior is stable and consistent. It is not sensitive to

the environmental influences that may cause the behavior patterns to vary over time and

across situations.

2. It does not differentiate positive and negative behavior. Hence it is good only to predict

positive behavior. Negative behavior are being left out

3. Psychodynamic theories investigate the mind to predict human behavior. How the mind work

is extremely complex. For example, preference for thinking and feeling depends on the

situations. If an issue is important a person may think a lot before he makes a decision. If the

issue is unimportant he may use his gut feeling. Likewise being an extrovert or an introvert is

on the situation basis. In the midst of very important people, a person may choose to be an

introvert while in the midst of friends he may prefer to be an extrovert.

4. Classifying human characteristics under the four polar traits is debatable and can be mooted.

It does not necessary that a person with a deep well for feeling is compassionate,

empathetic, tender hearted and fair. A person who is emotionally unstable and neurotic may

not possess the characteristics mentioned above.

5. It does not differentiate simple and complex human

6. Human being is not that simple to slot them into preferred 16 types.

Behaviorist Theorist

Behaviorist theorists believe that Human Personality can be best understood by our learning,

cognition and the laws in the natural environment. They focus on objectively observable behaviors

and discount the interplay of the psyche of the psychodynamic theorists. Behavior theorists define

learning as nothing more than the acquisition of new behavior based on environmental conditions.

The environment is perceived as a set of stimuli for an individual to interact (response). The

response between the individual and the stimuli of the environment provides an avenue for us to

learn from our actions. The oldest theory of behaviorism dates back to Descartes, who introduced

the idea of a stimulus. He posits that “human personality is rooted in the mind or rational soul. It is

distinct from but related to the body. Its essential attribute is thought and its association with the

body is primarily in the pineal gland of the brain. The mind has a cognitive faculty of understanding

for acquiring knowledge and a free will towards our feelings or emotions. Other behaviorists doing

researches include:

1. Dollard and Miller’s Stimulus-Response Theory focusing on the law of action (response) and

reactions (stimuli) in the natural environment.

2. Ivan Pahlov’s Classical Conditioning in his drooling dog experiments developed a technique

used in behavioral training in which a naturally occurring stimulus is paired with a response.

Next, a previously neutral stimulus is paired with the naturally occurring stimulus. Eventually, the

previously neutral stimulus comes to evoke the response without the presence of the naturally

occurring stimulus.

The two elements are then known as the conditioned stimulus and the conditioned response.

1. Skinner’s Operant Condition using pigeons and rats in his experiment developed a method

of learning that occurs through rewards and punishments for behavior. Through operant

conditioning, an association is made between a behavior and a consequence for that

behavior.

2. Thornsdikes in his experiment on cats discovered behavior become dominant and habits are

formed when behavior produced the desired effect. He proposed that humans and animals

acquire behaviors through the association of stimuli and responses. He advanced two laws

of learning to explain why behaviors occur the way they do: The Law of Effect specifies that

any time a behavior is followed by a pleasant outcome, that behavior is likely to recur. The

Law of Exercise states that the more a stimulus is connected with a response, the stronger

the link between stimulus and response.

Contributions of the behaviorist theories

1. Behavior can be learned. It provides us a method and choice to develop our positive

behavior and defreeze our negative behavior

2. Behavior can be nurtured. It helps us to develop, motivate and control the behavior of a

significant other

3. It provides a medium for personality changes for better or for worse. Behavior can be

reinforced, strengthened and sustained by rewards and diminished by punishment and

extinction.

Limitations of behaviorism

The approach is nomothetic in that it is investigating animals and people to try to find general

laws of behavior that apply to both people and brutes. It is not idiographic and is unable to

help us to understand and describe the unique patterns of behavior of an individual.

It excludes the functions of the human psyche and its mental processes of explaining human

behavior

It does predict human difference as it does not classify personality in personality traits or

types.

It assumes that the general laws relating to the behavior of animals can be applied to

describe human beings. This assumption is debated by the cognitive theorists that there is a

gap for the intellect (mind) to mediate between stimulus and response.

It is unable to explain complex behavior where an individual response to stimuli varies with

the situations and across time

Social Cognitive Theory

Social cognitive theories focus the importance of socialization and the effect of thought processes to

create one’s unique patterning of behavior.

Cognitive psychologists attempt to explain human behavior by understanding the mental learning

processes. They assume that human beings are rational beings capable of making sensible choices

that benefits them.

Cognitive psychologists view behavior as a function of cognition, learning and experiences in the

environment.

They assert that people organize their values, expectations and goals to guide and direct their

behavior.

This set of personal standards is unique in each person and grows out of one’s life experiences.

Over the past few decades, social cognitive psychologists have been developing theories in an

attempt to explain the complexities by careful observation of the human behaviors with the

environment and their relations. They posit that each of the mechanisms, for examples, self-

regulatory, goals mechanisms, self-reflective capabilities and cognitive constructs possesses a

spectrum of possible inputs. These mechanisms are contextualized by these social-learning

processes, which cause some inputs to become particularly salient to an individual or are grouped

with other inputs into an equivalent class and are domain-specific.

1. Albert Bandura, (1977) Social Cognitive Theory

Bandura, a follower of behaviorism attempts to integrate the behavioral and cognitive perspectives to

explain personality. He found the Stimulus- Response Theory that pleasure begets pleasure and

pain begets pain too simplistic and can be mooted.

He creates a gap between stimulus and response. The gap is to allow the intellect to predict the

motives of a stimulus generate alternatives and anticipate the outcomes of each alternative before

choosing a response that makes the most sense in a situation.

Bandura perceives individual functioning as a continuous interaction among behavioral, cognitive

and environmental factors. The three fundamental principles of the social cognitive approach are

Personality is a complex system

Reciprocal interactionism

Personality variables

Furthermore, social cognitive theorists postulate that the intuitive and perceived sense of coherence

and consistency in personality/self/character can arise from three sources:

How people assign meanings to social stimuli

How people establish causal linkage over their lives through self-reflective and self-

knowledge processes; and

How people organize disparate and multiple experiences and life events within a larger

cognitive framework of goals, expectation and aspirations.

1. Mischel

Mischel created a paradigm crisis in personality psychology that changed the agenda of the field for

decades. Mischel showed that researches failed to support the fundamental traditional assumption

of personality theory, that an individual’s behavior with regard to a trait is highly consistent across

diverse situations. Instead, Mischel’s analyses revealed that the individual’s behavior, when closely

examined, was highly dependent upon situational cues, rather than expressed consistently across

diverse situations that differed in meaning.

Mischel made the case that the field of personality psychology was searching for consistency in the

wrong places. Mischel’s work proposed that by including the situation as it is perceived by the

person and by analyzing behavior in its situational context, the consistencies that characterize the

individual would be found. He argued that these individual differences would not be expressed in

consistent cross-situational behavior, but instead, he suggested that consistency would be found in

distinctive but stable patterns of if-then, situation-behavior relations that form contextualized,

psychologically meaningful “personality signatures” (e.g., “she does A when X, but B when Y”).

These signatures of personality were in fact revealed in a large observational study of social

behavior across multiple repeated situations over time (Mischel & Shoda, 1995). Contradicting the

classic assumptions, the data showed that individuals who were similar in average levels of

behavior, for example in their aggression, nevertheless differed predictably and dramatically in the

types of situations in which they aggressed. As predicted by Mischel, they were characterized by

highly psychologically informative if-then behavioral signatures. Collectively, this work has allowed a

new way to conceptualize and assess both the stability and variability of behavior that is produced

by the underlying personality system, and has opened a window into the dynamic processes within

the system itself.

1. Julian Rotter

Julian Rotter defines personality as a function of the individual experiences and the environment. To

understand behavior, he focused on the interaction of the individual with his or her environment. The

environment provides the stimuli both painful and pleasurable. The individual response to the stimuli

leads to either reinforce (positive outcome) or punishment (negative outcome). The whole process

becomes an experience. The individual learns from experiences. One learns that both pleasurable

and painful experiences can lead to positive and negative outcomes. Julian B. Rotter introduced the

concept of generalized expectancies for control of reinforcement, more commonly known as locus of

control.

Locus of control refers to people’s very general, cross-situational beliefs about what determines

whether or not they get reinforced in life. People lie in the continuum of internal locus of control and

external locus of control.

People with a strong internal locus of control believe that the responsibility for whether or not they

get reinforced ultimately lies with themselves. Internalizers believe that success or failure is due to

their own efforts. They are master of their own destiny. On the contrary, externalizer believe that

their reinforcements are controlled by luck, chance, or powerful others. They are the victims of fate.

Therefore, they see little impact of their own efforts on the amount of reinforcement they receive.

Rotter provides an agent for personality change. Change the mindset of a person, or change the

environment the person is responding to, and behavior will change.

Rotter describes personality as a relatively stable set of potentials for responding to situations in a

particular way.

Rotter categorizes his theory into four main components. These are as follow:

1. Behavior Potential

Behavior potential is the likelihood of engaging in a particular behavior in a specific situation. In other

words, what is the probability that the person will exhibit a particular behavior in a situation? In any

given situation, there are multiple behaviors one can engage in. For each possible behavior, there is

a behavior potential. The individual will exhibit whichever behavior has the highest potential.

1. Expectancy

Expectancy is the subjective probability that a given behavior will lead to a particular outcome, or

reinforcer.

How likely is it that the behavior will lead to the outcome?

Having “high” or “strong” expectancies means the individual is confident the behavior will result in

the outcome. Having low expectancies means the individual believes it is unlikely that his or her

behavior will result in reinforcement. If the outcomes are equally desirable, we will engage in the

behavior that has the greatest likelihood of paying off (i.e., has the highest expectancy).

Expectancies are formed based on past experience. The more often a behavior has led to

reinforcement in the past, the stronger the person’s expectancy that the behavior will achieve that

outcome now.

1. Reinforcement Value

Reinforcement is another name for the outcomes of our behavior. Reinforcement value refers to the

desirability of these outcomes. Things we want to happen, that we are attracted to, have a high

reinforcement value. Things we don’t want to happen, that we wish to avoid, have a low

reinforcement value. If the likelihood of achieving reinforcement is the same, we will exhibit the

behavior with the greatest reinforcement value (i.e., the one directed toward the outcome we prefer

most).

1. Psychological Situation

Rotter believes that different people interpret the same situation differently. Again, it is people’s

subjective interpretation of the environment, rather than an objective array of stimuli, that is

meaningful to them and that determines how they behave.

Contributions

1. The theory has been demonstrated to make powerful predictions and has generated useful

applications in a large number of areas of human behavior.

Probably the most significant contribution of social cognitive theory is its applied value.

1. It enables us to understand complex behavior

Limitations

it cannot predict the specific behavior of an individual whose behavior varies with the situations.

Evolutionary and Genetic Perspectives

The study of genes and its contributions on the understanding of human personality can be traced

back to Darwin’s theory of evolution that the behavior of all life forms including human is related and

has descended from the family tree of a common ancestor. Darwin posits that complex creatures

evolve from more simplistic ancestors through the process of natural selection over time. As a

theory, the origin of instinct by means of natural selection was one of Darwin’s most significant

contributions to examine human behavior. These instincts include many reflexes impervious to the

influence of learning and experience. At birth, every individual starts from scratch, with a unique

genotype, some innate instincts and inbuilt capacity to learn certain kinds of behaviors. The

evolutionary perspective views personality as the product of a long history during which it was

beneficial for humans to adopt adaptive behavior for their survival.

Evolutionary personality theory emphasizes on the why of behavior. It provides the link between the

processes that govern all forms of life and the central human goals and the psychological and

behavioral strategic means deployed to obtain these goals.

The extension of the evolution theory leads to the study the hereditary factors of behavior. Humans

vary in the expression of certain behaviors because of variations in their genes. The science of

behavior genetics is an extension of these ideas and seeks to determine the extent of individual

differences due to genetic processes.

With advances in genetic technology, it is possible to observe genetic variation more directly by

locating, identifying, and characterizing genes themselves and the effects of each single gene on

behavior.

Contributions

Behavior is a function of the genes. A significant part of our behavioral traits are inherited from the

family of our ancestors,

Limitations

it is not supported by any empirical scientific evidence.

Conclusion:

In view of the limitation of above theories, there is an urgent need to develop a model of personality

incorporating the concepts of the six personality perspectives to predict human differences.