Personality

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 Defining Personality: Consistency and
distinctiveness
• The concept of personality is used to explain
(1) the stability in person’s behavior over time
and across situations (consistency) and (2) the
behavioral differences among people reacting
to the same situation (distinctiveness).
• Personality refers to an individual’s unique
collection of consistent behavioral traits.

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 Personality Traits
• A personality trait is a durable disposition to behave
in a particular way in a variety of situations.
• Adjectives such as honest, dependable, impulsive,
anxious, excitable, friendly describe dispositions that
represent personality traits.
• Some traits are more basic than others.
• A number of psychologists have taken on the
challenge of identifying the basic traits that form the
core of personality.

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 The Five factor model of Personality traits
• McCrae and Costa (1999) have used factor analysis to
arrive at five factor model of personality.
• Factor analysis: In FA, correlations among many
variables are analyzed to identify closely related
clusters of variables.
• McCrae & Costa maintain that most personality traits
are derived from just five higher order traits that
have come to be known as the “Big Five.”
• They are Extraversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism,
Openness, and Conscientiousness.

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 Psychodynamic Perspective
• Psychodynamic theories include all the diverse theories descended from the
work of Sigmund Freud, which focus on the unconscious mental force.
• Freud was a physician specializing in neurology when he began his medical
practice in Vienna toward the end of the 19th century. Like other neurologists
in his era, he often treated people troubled by nervous problems such as
irrational fears, obsessions, and anxieties. Eventually he devoted himself to
the treatment of mental disorders using an innovative procedure he had
developed, called psychoanalysis, that required lengthy verbal interactions
with patients during which Freud probed deeply into their lives.
• psychoanalytic theory grew out of his decades of interactions with his clients
in psychoanalysis. Psychoanalytic theory attempts to explain personality,
motivation, and psychological disorders by focusing on the influence of early
childhood experiences, on unconscious motives and conflicts, and on the
methods people use to cope with their sexual and aggressive urges.

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• Structure of Personality: Freud divided personality structure
into three components; the id, ego, and the superego. He saw
a person’s behavior as the outcome of interactions among
these three components.
• ID: The id is a primitive, instinctive component of personality
that operates according to the pleasure principle which
demands immediate gratification. It is illogical, irrational and
fantasy oriented.

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 Structure of personality….
• Ego: The ego is the decision making component of personality
that operates according to the reality principle. It considers
social realities, society’s norms, etiquette, and customs in
deciding how to behave. It delays the gratification of id’ urges.
Ego is rational, realistic, oriented towards problem solving.
• Superego: The superego is the moral component of
personality that incorporates social standards about what
represents right and wrong. It emerges out of the ego at
around 3 to 5 years of age. It could also become unrealistically
demanding in its striving for moral perfection leading the
person to excessive guilt.

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 Levels of awareness
• Freud contrasted the unconscious with the conscious
and the preconscious, creating three levels of
awareness.
• The conscious consists of whatever one is aware of at
a particular point in time.
• The preconscious contains material just beneath the
surface of awareness that can easily be retrieved.
• The unconscious contains thoughts, memories, and
desires that are well below the surface of conscious
awareness but that nonetheless exert great influence
on behavior.

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 Psycho-sexual stages of development
• According to Freud, these sexual urges shift in focus
as children progress from one stage of development
to the other.
• Psychosexual stages are developmental periods with
a characteristic sexual focus that leave their mark on
the adult personality.
• Fixation: It is a failure to move forward from one
stage to another as expected. It could be caused by
excessive frustration or excessive gratification.
• These stages are:

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• 1. Oral stage: This stage encompasses the first year of life. The main
source of erotic stimulation is the mouth. If oral needs are not met
properly the individual may develop such habits as thumb sucking,
fingernail biting & pencil chewing overeating and smoking in later
life.
• 2. Anal stage: In the second year the children draw their erotic
pleasures through either expulsion or retention of feces( bodily
waste). The crucial event at this time is toilet training which
represents society’s first systematic effort to regulate the child’s
biological needs. (extreme orderliness and cleanliness or messiness
and disorder)
• 3.Phallic stage: Around are 4, the genitals become the focus for
child’s erotic energy largely through self stimulation. During this
stage oedipal complex emerges. Children feel a sexual desire for the
opposite gender parent. And to avoid punishment they adopt same
gender characteristics and value
• 4. Latency (6-11 years):From age 6 to puberty, the child’s sexuality is
largely suppressed. In this stage they center on expanding social
contacts beyond the immediate family.
• Genital stage: With puberty the child progresses into the genital
stage. Sexual urges reappear. If development has been successful it
leads to marriage mature sexuality and birth and rearing of 11
children.
 Jung’s Analytical Psychology
• He proposed that the unconscious consists of two layers:
• The personal unconscious houses material that is not within
one’s conscious awareness because it has been repressed or
forgotten.
• The collective unconsciousness is a store house of latent
memory traces inherited from people’s ancestral past. He
called these ancestral memories archetypes.
• Archetypes are emotionally charged images and thought
forms that have universal values.
• Jung was the first to describe Introverts and extroverts.
Introverts tend to be preoccupied with the internal world of
their thoughts, feelings, and experiences.
• Extroverts tend to interested in the external world of people
and things.
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 Adler’ Individual Psychology
• According to Adler the foremost source of
human motivation is a striving for superiority.
• He saw striving for superiority as the universal
drive to adapt, improve oneself, and master
life challenges.

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 Criticism on psychodynamic
• Poor testability
• Inadequate evidence
• Sexism

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 Behavioral Perspective
• In Skinner’s view, people show some
consistent patterns of behavior because they
have some stable response tendencies that
they have acquired through experience.
(operant conditioning) LEARNING.
• Bandura’s Social learning theory/Social
cognitive theory:
• He added the flavor of cognition in
behaviorism.

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 Bandura’s Social Learning…..
• Observational learning occurs when an organism’s
responding is influenced by the observation of others
called models. And traits are learnt through
modeling.
• Self efficacy refers to one’s belief about one’s ability
to perform behaviors that should lead to expected
outcomes.
• When self efficacy is high individuals feel confident
about their abilities to perform a task in case of low
self efficacy it is the opposite.
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 Humanism
• Humanism is a theoretical orientation that
emphasizes the unique qualities of human, especially
their freedom and their potential for personal growth.
• Carl Roger viewed personality structure in terms of a
construct now called self concept.
• A self concept is a collection of beliefs about one’s
own nature, unique qualities, and typical behavior. It
is a collection of self perceptions. For examples self
concept might include beliefs such as’ I am an easy
going person, I am hardworking etc.’
• Rogers believes that your self concept may not be
entirely consistent with one’s actual experience.e.g
you may believe that you’re friendly and cooperative
whereas you’re friend believe you are argumental.
• Roger called the gap between the self concept and
reality incongruence. 17
 Carl Rogers….
• Incongruence is the degree of discrepancy between one’s self
concept and one’s actual experience.
• In terms of personality development Rogers believed that
unconditional love from parents foster congruence and the
conditional love fosters incongruence.
• A person’s self concept evolves throughout childhood and
adolescence.
• As individual’s self concept gradually stabilizes, they begin to
feel comfortable with it and are usually loyal to it.
• Thus people become resistant to information that contradicts
their self concept, because it threatens their comfortable
equilbrium.

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 Maslow’ Theory of Self Actualization

• Maslow proposed that human motives are organized

into a hierarchy of needs—a systematic arrangement
of needs, according to priority, in which basic needs
must be met before less basic needs are aroused.
1. Physiological needs, 2. Safety and security needs, 3.
belongingness and love needs, 4. Esteem needs, 5.
Cognitive needs, 6. Aesthetic needs, 7. Need for self
actualization

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 Maslow’ Theory of Self Actualization
• Need for self actualization is the need for
fulfill one’s potential.
• Criticism on humanistic perspective:
- Poor testability
- Unrealistic view of human nature
- Inadequate evidence

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