What is personality?
Personality is a person's relatively stable pattern of thoughts, feelings and behaviour. Several traditions try to explain and measure it.
Trait theories
Trait theorists describe people by how much of each trait they have. The best-supported model is the Big Five, easy to remember as OCEAN:
- Openness to experience
- Conscientiousness
- Extraversion
- Agreeableness
- Neuroticism (emotional instability)
Each is a continuous scale, not a type. Twin studies suggest roughly 40 to 50 percent of the variation in these traits is heritable.
Psychodynamic view (Freud)
Sigmund Freud believed much of behaviour is driven by unconscious conflict. His model has three parts:
- Id: instinctive urges, operating on the pleasure principle.
- Ego: the rational mediator, operating on the reality principle.
- Superego: internalised moral standards, the conscience.
Anxiety arises when these clash, and the ego uses defence mechanisms such as repression (pushing thoughts out of awareness) and projection (attributing your own feelings to others). Freud's ideas are historically important, but many are hard to test scientifically.
Humanistic view
Humanistic psychologists focus on growth and free will. Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs runs from physiological needs and safety, through belonging and esteem, up to self-actualisation, realising your potential. Carl Rogers argued that unconditional positive regard, acceptance of a person's worth whatever they do, helps people grow.
Social-cognitive view
Albert Bandura stressed the interaction of person, behaviour and situation (reciprocal determinism). Self-efficacy is your belief in your ability to succeed at a task. Locus of control is whether you see outcomes as caused by your own actions (internal) or by luck and others (external).
Assessment
- Self-report inventories, such as the MMPI, ask people to answer many structured questions. They are objective to score.
- Projective tests, such as the Rorschach inkblots, ask people to interpret ambiguous stimuli. Their reliability and validity are debated.
Worked example
Maya is organised, reliable, outgoing, often anxious and not very curious about new things. Using the Big Five she would score high on conscientiousness and extraversion, high on neuroticism and low on openness. Notice we describe her with scores, not a single label.
Meanwhile, she believes that practising will improve her piano playing (high self-efficacy) and says her exam results depend on how hard she studies (internal locus of control). Both beliefs predict she will keep trying after setbacks.
Common mistakes
- Treating traits as fixed types rather than scales.
- Confusing the ego (rational) with the superego (moral).
- Calling projective tests proven; their scoring is contested.