Psychology · Ch 2 — Self and Personality
Major Approaches to the Study of Personality
Major Approaches to the Study of Personality
Why Do People Differ? The Big Question
Two children raised in the same family can turn out dramatically different — not just in looks, but in how they react to the same situation. One loves adventure; the other prefers reading. One is outgoing; the other is shy. Are these differences permanent or just passing phases? Psychologists have developed several approaches to answer these questions, each offering a different lens through which to understand personality.
The major approaches can be grouped into type approaches, trait approaches, and the interactional approach. A fourth major perspective, the psychodynamic approach, focuses on unconscious forces.
Type vs. Trait: The Basic Distinction
Before diving into specific theories, it is essential to understand the difference between a 'type' and a 'trait'.
A type approach looks at broad, overall patterns of behaviour. People are placed into categories based on how similar their behaviour is to a particular pattern. You are either one type or another.
A trait approach focuses on specific psychological attributes (like shyness or friendliness) along which people differ in consistent and stable ways. Instead of putting you in a box, it measures how much of a quality you possess. One person may be less shy, another more shy — shyness is a trait.
The interactional approach adds a crucial third factor: the situation. It argues that behaviour is not just about internal personality. People may act dependent or independent not because of a fixed trait, but because of external rewards or threats in a particular situation. The cross-situational consistency of traits is actually quite low. A person in a courtroom behaves very differently from the same person at a party.
Type Approaches
Efforts to classify people into types are ancient.
Ancient Typologies
Hippocrates (Greek physician) proposed a typology based on four bodily fluids or 'humours':
- Sanguine: Cheerful and optimistic
- Phlegmatic: Calm and sluggish
- Melancholic: Sad and thoughtful
- Choleric: Irritable and hot-tempered
In India, the Charak Samhita (a foundational Ayurvedic text) classifies people into vata, pitta, and kapha based on the tridosha (three humoural elements). This is called a person's prakriti (basic nature).
Another Indian typology is based on the trigunas:
- Sattva guna: Cleanliness, truthfulness, dutifulness, detachment, discipline
- Rajas guna: Intense activity, desire for sense gratification, dissatisfaction, envy, materialistic mentality
- Tamas guna: Anger, arrogance, depression, laziness, helplessness
All three gunas are present in every person in different degrees. The dominance of one guna leads to a particular type of behaviour.
Sheldon's Body Typology
Using body build and temperament, Sheldon proposed three types:
- Endomorphs: Fat, soft, round. Temperament: relaxed and sociable.
- Mesomorphs: Strong musculature, rectangular, strong body build. Temperament: energetic and courageous.
- Ectomorphs: Thin, long, fragile. Temperament: brainy, artistic, introvert.
These body typologies are simple and have limited use in predicting behaviour. They are more like stereotypes.
Jung's Introverts and Extraverts
Carl Jung proposed a widely recognised typology:
- Introverts: Prefer to be alone, avoid others, withdraw in the face of emotional conflict, shy.
- Extraverts: Sociable, outgoing, drawn to occupations dealing with people, react to stress by losing themselves among people and social activity.
Friedman and Rosenman: Type-A and Type-B
These researchers were identifying psychosocial risk factors when they discovered these types.
- Type-A personality: High motivation, lack of patience, always in a hurry, feel burdened with work, find it hard to slow down. More susceptible to hypertension and coronary heart disease (CHD). The risk of CHD from Type-A personality is sometimes greater than from high blood pressure, high cholesterol, or smoking.
- Type-B personality: Essentially the absence of Type-A traits.
This typology has been extended:
- Type-C personality (Morris): Prone to cancer. Cooperative, unassertive, patient. Suppress negative emotions (like anger) and show compliance to authority.
- Type-D personality: Characterised by proneness to depression.
Personality typologies are appealing but too simplistic. Human behaviour is highly complex. People do not fit neatly into such simple categories.
Trait Approaches
Trait theories are concerned with the 'building blocks' of personality. They try to identify the primary characteristics of people. A trait is a relatively enduring attribute or quality on which one individual differs from another. Traits include a range of possible behaviours that are activated according to the demands of the situation.
To summarise the key features of traits:
- They are relatively stable over time.
- They are generally consistent across situations.
- Their strengths and combinations vary across individuals, leading to individual differences.
Allport's Trait Theory
Gordon Allport is the pioneer of the trait approach. He argued that the words people use to describe themselves and others provide a basis for understanding personality. He categorised traits into three levels:
- Cardinal traits: Highly generalised dispositions around which a person's entire life seems to revolve. Examples: Mahatma Gandhi's non-violence, Hitler's Nazism. Such traits become so strongly associated with a person that they derive identities like 'Gandhian' or 'Hitlerian'.
- Central traits: Less pervasive but still generalised dispositions. These are the traits (e.g., warm, sincere, diligent) used in writing a testimonial or job recommendation.
- Secondary traits: The least generalised characteristics. Examples: 'likes mangoes', 'prefers ethnic clothes'.
Allport acknowledged the influence of situations, but held that a person's traits determine how they react to a given situation. He considered traits as intervening variables between the stimulus and the response.
Cattell: Personality Factors
Raymond Cattell believed there is a common structure on which people differ. He used factor analysis (a statistical technique) on a huge array of descriptive adjectives to discover this structure. He found 16 primary or source traits, which are stable and considered the building blocks of personality. Surface traits result from the interaction of source traits. He developed the Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire (16PF) to assess these traits.
Eysenck's Theory
H.J. Eysenck proposed that personality can be reduced to two broad, biologically and genetically based dimensions, each subsuming a number of specific traits:
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Neuroticism vs. Emotional Stability: The degree to which people have control over their feelings.
- High neuroticism: Anxious, moody, touchy, restless, quickly lose control.
- High emotional stability: Calm, even-tempered, reliable, remain under control.
-
Extraversion vs. Introversion: The degree to which people are socially outgoing or withdrawn.
- High extraversion: Active, gregarious, impulsive, thrill-seeking.
- High introversion: Passive, quiet, cautious, reserved.
Later, Eysenck proposed a third dimension: Psychoticism vs. Sociability. A person scoring high on psychoticism tends to be hostile, egocentric, and antisocial. The Eysenck Personality Questionnaire is used to study these dimensions.
The Five-Factor Model (Big Five)
Paul Costa and Robert McCrae examined all possible personality traits and found a set of five factors, now called the Big Five. This is considered the most promising empirical approach to the study of personality.
| Factor | High Scorers | Low Scorers |
|---|---|---|
| Openness to experience | Imaginative, curious, open to new ideas, interested in cultural pursuits | Rigid |
| Extraversion | Socially active, assertive, outgoing, talkative, fun-loving | Shy |
| Agreeableness | Helpful, cooperative, friendly, caring, nurturing | Hostile, self-centered |
| Neuroticism | Emotionally unstable, anxious, worried, fearful, distressed, irritable | Well-adjusted |
| Conscientiousness | Achievement-oriented, dependable, responsible, prudent, hardworking, self-controlled | Impulsive |
This model is consistent with analysis of personality traits across different languages and is supported by studies using different methods.
Psychodynamic Approach
This highly popular approach owes largely to Sigmund Freud, a physician who developed the theory during his clinical practice. He used free association (asking a person to openly share all thoughts, feelings, and ideas), dream analysis, and analysis of errors to understand the internal functioning of the mind.
Levels of Consciousness
Freud visualised the human mind in three levels:
- Conscious: Thoughts, feelings, and actions of which people are aware.
- Preconscious: Mental activity of which people may become aware only if they attend to it closely.
- Unconscious: A reservoir of instinctive or animal drives. It stores all ideas and wishes that are concealed from conscious awareness, often because they lead to psychological conflicts. Most of these arise from sexual desires that cannot be expressed openly and are therefore repressed.
The goal of Freud's therapeutic procedure, psychoanalysis, is to bring repressed unconscious materials to consciousness, helping people live in a more self-aware and integrated manner.