What is PERSONALITY?F&G Textbook:

• The characteristic ways of thinking, feeling and acting that make a person an individual.

Psychology for the VCE student

• An individual’s unique and relatively consistent group of characteristics that determine patterns of thoughts, feelings and behaviour when alone or with others.

TRAIT THEORY of Personality Development

1930’s - Present

THEORISTS:GORDON ALLPORTHANS EYSENCKROBERT McCRAE & PAUL COSTA

General Principles

AIM: Identify, describe and measure individual differences

Personality Traits – enduring characteristics that determine behaviour

Personality traits are described on a continuum i.e. from one extreme to its opposite

General Principles

Basic Assumptions:

1. Traits are stable, hence, predictable over time.

2. Traits are consistent across situations

3. Individual differences arise because personality consists of a combination of different traits expressed in different degrees.

Trait Theorist: GORDON ALLPORT (1897-1967)

• American Psychologist

Defined personality as:“the dynamic organisation within an individual of those psychosocial systems that determine one’s unique adjustment to his environment.”

Allport’s Personality TraitsTraits or Dispositions – individual differences arising

from experience but represent consistencies in one’s behaviour.

• Cardinal Traits – core traits, basic building blocks for personality development

• Central Traits – building blocks of personality more commonly recognised

• Secondary Traits – more inconsistent and less obvious

Trait Theorist:HANS EYSENCK (1916-1997)

• German Psychologist, practiced in England

• Published with wife, Sybil• Identified 2 dimensions of

personality (1963) + 1 added laterIntraversion – ExtraversionNeuroticism – Emotional StabilityPsychoticism (1976):Toughmindedness – TendermindednessAntisocial, cold, insensitive – friendly,

warm, caring

• Character traits account for consistency of behaviour in different situations

• Traits can be quantified using personality inventories

Eysenck’s Wheel

Trait Theorists:

• Robert McCrae • Paul Costa

1990 - PresentIdentified the Big Five Personality Trait Dimensions:

O – C – E – A – NN-E-O-F-F-I

Five Factor Model of Personality

Contributions:

• Stability and enduring quality of personality supports new evidence that certain traits have genetic basis.

• Standardised method for measuring personality through personality inventories

• Widespread acceptability• Stimulated lots of new research

Criticisms/Limitations• Traits identified may not be personality but simply

predispositions to behave in certain ways in different situations

• Simply describing Personality as inherited and environmentally influenced does not explain about its nature and how individual differences develop (i.e. Not Falsifiable!)

• Does not account for unconscious processes, beliefs and motives that may influence personality development

• Does not account for the potential for behaviour to change in different situations