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Personality Trait Structure and Consequences (Disposition and traits) -…
Personality Trait Structure and Consequences (Disposition and traits)
The Great Person-Situation Debate: Person or Situation factors?
Trait psychologists: People have enduring personality characteristics, are different from one another, and these differences have important consequences in life
Behavioural fluidity and consistency: Behaviour is influenced by both situation and person variables
Funder and Colvin: Participants interacted with strangers across two sessions. Participants on average felt more at ease in the second session (situational variables changed behaviour), but characteristics of persons still remained relatively the same across both sessions
Fleeson: Asked for Big 5 states. Found substantial intraindividual variation (due to changing contexts), but meaningful interindividual variation
Situationist argument: People's behaviours are conditioned responses to situations
Mischel: Correlations between behaviour and personality rarely exceed 0.30
Rebuttal: Selective and biased review.
Weak findings do not mean that personality is not important
Situationists assume that anything not predicted by personality must be predicted by situational factors by default (too convenient)
Situationists are vague about which aspects of situations are really affecting behaviour
Effect sizes of social psychology experiments are also around 0.30 to 0.40
Rebuttal: Trait means reacting consistently to the same situation. Traits predict overall trends in behaviour rather than single instances of behaviour. Even in the most powerful situations, people's responses will still differ as a function of personality
Abu Ghraib Prison Abuse: Carnahan and McFarland put up two ads for two different studies, one for a prison study and one for another psychological study. Those who volunteered for the prison study were higher on aggression, narcissism, authoritarianism, social dominance, and lower on altruism
People with certain traits are drawn to certain situations
Milgram's obedience study: It is not just the commands and the obedience of the subject that are involved. It is also the victim's pleas and the subject's empathy. There are two competing traits and two competing situational cues.
Conclusion: Both personality and situational factors are important determinants of behaviour. There is an overall mean level to fluctuations in behaviour. People differ on these mean levels of fluctuations. These mean levels become the defining and stable features of personality
Personality traits: Organised dispositions within the individual which are assumed to have some generality in their manifestations across variety of stimulus situations.
Hypothetical latent construct
Predisposition to act in a certain manner
Hierarchy
Predicts overall behavioral trends
History
Lexical tradition: All important individual differences will have been noted by speakers of a natural language at some point of evolution of the language and encoded in trait terms. Basic dimensions of personality can be extracted by decoding these representations
Advantages: Unbiased and objective. If an attribute is represented within or across languages, it signals importance
Disadvantages: Atheoretical and descriptive. Emphasis on lay person's conceptualisation of personality. Assumption that less words means less importance of the trait is not valid all the time (e.g. masculinity and femininity)
English language has 4 categories of person descriptors:
Stable traits
States (moods)
Evaluative terms (e.g. wicked, awesome)
Other adjectives other than personality (e.g. describing physical attributes)
Factor analysis conducted on trait terms and found the Big 5
Recovered in studies of other languages as well, less so for openness. But some African countries are less conforming to this structure.
Questionnaire tradition: Questionnaire items were written to reflect traits proposed based on theory and tested empirically
Advantages: Rich theorising from many perspectives. Little reliance on folk concepts
Disadvantages: Confusing because different theorists have different ideas about personality. Different labels to denote similar traits (jingle-jangle fallacy)
Marrying both: McCrae and Costa developed the NEO-PI
Hierarchical Model of Personality Structure: Traits are arranged in a hierarchy. There are different levels of prediction depending on which level of the hierarchy a trait is on.
Factor level (Big-5)
Trait level (E.g. responsibility)
Habitual response level
Specific response level
Broad level: Factor or domain
Fidelity vs Broadband in prediction
Narrow level: Facet (narrow and specific traits that subsume under each of the broad big 5 factors
HEXACO (Honesty-Humility, Emotionality, Extraversion, etc.) model: Ashton & Lee added an Additional Honesty-Humility factor because some traits are not captured by the FFM
HH factor: Honesty and fair-mindedness vs Greed and hypocriticality
Tendency to exploit others
A factor: Patient, tolerant vs ill-tempered, quarrelsome
Tendency to be exploited by others and be chill about it
Supernumerary traits: 10 facets outside of the FFM space (e.g. seductiveness, manipulativeness, egotism, femininity, integrity, humorousness, etc.) Some facets correlate strongly with HH
Consequences of personality
Subjective well-being (SWB): Trivial correlations between SWB and objective measures of life circumstances; the level of SWB will return to the baseline after the event passed.
Higher correlations between SWB and extraversion and neuroticism (.40 - . 55)