20-05-2013, 04:22 PM
Introduction to Personality Psychology
Introduction to Personality.pdf (Size: 1.73 MB / Downloads: 208)
Aristotle, in The Nicomachean Ethics, expressed these wise observations on the
subject of humor and people who do and do not indulge in it. In this quote we
see Aristotle behaving much as a personality psychologist. Aristotle is analyzing
the characteristics of persons who have an appropriate sense of humor, providing
some details on what features are associated with a sense of humor. Aristotle adds
to this description by comparing people who are extreme, having either too much
or too little sense of humor. In his book on ethics, Aristotle described and analyzed
many personality characteristics, including truthfulness, courage, intelligence, selfindulgence,
anger-proneness, and friendliness.
We might conclude that Aristotle was an amateur personality psychologist. But
aren’t we all amateur personality psychologists to some extent? Aren’t we all curious
about the characteristics people possess, including our own characteristics?
Don’t we all use personality characteristics in describing people? And haven’t we
all used personality characteristics to explain behavior, either our own or others’?
Personality Defined
Establishing a definition for something as complex as human personality is difficult.
The authors of the first textbooks on personality—Gordon Allport (1937) and Henry
Murray (1938)—struggled with the definition. The problem is how to establish a definition
that is sufficiently comprehensive to include all of the aspects mentioned in
the introduction to this chapter, including inner features, social effects, qualities of the
mind, qualities of the body, relations to others, and inner goals. Because of these complexities,
some texts on personality omit a formal definition entirely. Nonetheless, the
following definition captures the essential elements of personality: Personality is the
set of psychological traits and mechanisms within the individual that are organized
and relatively enduring and that influence his or her interactions with, and adaptations
to, the intrapsychic, physical, and social environments. Let’s examine the elements
of this definition more closely.
Personality Is the Set of Psychological Traits . . .
Psychological traits are characteristics that describe ways in which people are different
from each other. Saying that someone is shy is to mention one way in which
he or she differs from others who are more outgoing. Traits also define ways people
are similar. For example, people who are shy are similar to each other in that they
are anxious in social situations, particularly situations in which there is an audience
focusing attention on them.
Consider another example—the trait of talkativeness. This characteristic can be
meaningfully applied to persons and describes a dimension of difference between
them. Typically, a talkative person is that way from day to day, from week to week,
and from year to year. Certainly, even the most talkative person can have quiet
moments, quiet days, or even quiet weeks. Over time, however, those with the trait
of talkativeness tend to emit verbal behavior with greater frequency than those who
are low on talkativeness. In this sense, traits describe the average tendencies of a
person. On average, a high-talkative person starts more conversations than a lowtalkative
person.
And Mechanisms . . .
Psychological mechanisms are like traits, except that the term mechanisms refers more
to the processes of personality. For example, most psychological mechanisms involve
an information-processing activity. Someone who is extraverted, for example, may look
for and notice opportunities to interact with other people. That is, an extraverted person
is prepared to notice and act on certain kinds of social information.
Most psychological mechanisms have three essential ingredients: inputs, decision
rules, and outputs. A psychological mechanism may make people more sensitive to certain
kinds of information from the environment (input), may make them more likely to
think about specific options (decision rules), and may guide their behavior toward certain
categories of action (outputs). For example, an extraverted person may look for
opportunities to be with other people, may consider in each situation the possibilities
for human contact and interaction, and may encourage others to interact with him or
her. Our personalities contain many psychological
mechanisms of this sort—information-processing procedures
that have the key elements of inputs, decision
rules, and outputs (see Figure 1.1).