22 Understanding the Personality Puzzle

Personality: Theories, Measurement, and the Elusive Self

This briefing document summarizes key concepts from Dr. Sudheendra S.G.'s research paper "Behavioural Genetics – Session 22 measuring personality," exploring various historical and modern approaches to understanding and measuring personality, and ultimately examining the fundamental question of "who or what is the self."

I. Historical Perspectives on Personality

For centuries, humanity has sought to characterize individual differences. Early theories often linked personality to physical or elemental balances:

• Ancient Greek Humors: Hippocrates believed personality stemmed from the balance of four humors: phlegm, blood, yellow bile, and black bile.
• Traditional Chinese Medicine: Personality depends on the balance of five elements: earth, wind, water, metal, and fire.
• Hindu Ayurvedic Medicine: Individuals are seen as unique combinations of three mind-body principles called doshas.

More recent psychological theories began to delve into mental and developmental processes:

• Sigmund Freud (Psychoanalytic): Personality arises from the "battle of urges between the id, ego, and super-ego."
• Abraham Maslow (Humanistic): Self-actualization, a key to personality, is achieved by "successfully climbing a hierarchy of more basic needs."

The paper also humorously notes the proliferation of informal "BuzzFeed quizzes to determine what kind of pirate, font, or sandwich or Harry Potter character you are," highlighting the widespread human desire to categorize and understand personality.

II. Modern Psychological Theories of Personality

The drive for more "empirical approach[es]" led to two prominent 20th-century theories: Trait Theory and Social Cognitive Perspective.

A. Trait Theory

Trait theory defines personality through "stable and lasting behavior patterns and conscious motivations," moving away from unconscious influences or missed growth opportunities.

• Gordon Allport: Considered the pioneer of modern trait theory. Allport disagreed with Freud's deep psychoanalytic interpretations, believing that sometimes "you just need to look at motives in the present, not the past, to describe behavior." He focused on describing fundamental traits rather than explaining their origins.
• The Big Five (OCEAN/CANOE): Modern trait researchers like Robert McCrae and Paul Costa have organized fundamental characteristics into five broad traits, remembered by the mnemonic OCEAN or CANOE:
• Openness: Ranges from being "totally open to new things and variety" to preferring "strict regular routine."
• Conscientiousness: Spans from being "impulsive and careless" to "careful and disciplined."
• Extraversion: High extraversion means being "sociable," while low extraversion implies being "shy and reserved."
• Agreeableness: An "agreeable person" is "helpful and trusting," whereas someone at the opposite end might be "suspicious or uncooperative."
• Neuroticism: An "emotionally stable person will be more calm and secure," while a "less stable person is often anxious, insecure, and self-pitying."
• Predictive Power: These traits are "hypothesized to predict behavior and attitude." While generally "pretty stable" in adulthood, they can "flex a little in different situations." Trait theories are "better predicting our average behavior than what we do in any specific situation."

B. Social Cognitive Perspective

Originally proposed by Albert Bandura, this theory "emphasizes the interaction between our traits and their social context."

• Observational Learning (Social Part): "We learn a lot of our behavior by watching and imitating others."
• Cognitive Processing (Cognitive Part): "We also think a lot about how these social interactions affect our behavior."
• Reciprocal Determinism: This concept describes the interplay where "people and their situations basically work together to create behavior." For example, the environments we choose (e.g., "kind of books you read or music you listen to or friends you hang out with") reflect and "continue to reinforce our personalities." This means "we're both the creators and the products of the situations we surround ourselves with."
• Personal Control (Locus of Control): A key indicator in this school of thought is "our sense of personal control," which is "the extent to which you perceive that you have control over your environment."
• Internal Locus of Control: Believing "they control their own fate or make their own luck."
• External Locus of Control: Feeling "like they're just guided by forces beyond their control."

III. Measuring Personality

Different personality perspectives employ distinct measurement methods:

• Psychoanalytic/Psychodynamic Camp:
• Rorschach Inkblot Test: Used by Hermann Rorschach to "infer information about a person's personality."
• Dream Analysis & Free Association: Employed by Freud and Jung.
• Thematic Apperception Tests (TAT): Subjects are presented with "evocative but ambiguous pictures" and asked to tell stories about them. The idea is that responses "will reveal something about your concerns and motivations in real life or how you see the world or about your unconscious processes that drive you."
• Trait Theory:
• Personality Trait Inventories: These involve "series of test questions," often "long questionnaires of true/false or agree/disagree questions."
• Examples: Myers-Briggs (though not explicitly endorsed for validity) and the "classic Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI)," which is "probably the most widely used personality test" and often used to "identify emotional disorders."
• Social Cognitive Perspective:
• Situational Assessment: Since this school emphasizes environmental interaction, they "aren't solely into questions and answers." Instead, they "might measure personality in different contexts," understanding that "behavior in one situation is best predicted by how you acted in a similar situation." This can involve observing behavior in real-life or controlled lab experiments.
• Humanistic Theorists (e.g., Maslow):
• Rejection of Standardized Assessments: Humanists "often reject standardized assessments altogether."
• Self-Concept Measurement: They tend to measure "self-concept through therapy interviews and questionnaires that asked subjects to describe both how they would ideally like to be and how they actually are." The principle is that "the closer the actual and ideal are, the more positive the subjects sense of self."

IV. The Question of the Self

All these theories ultimately funnel down to "one big central question: who or what is the self?" The concept of "self" is widely assumed to be "the organizer of our thoughts and feelings and actions, essentially the center of a personality."

• Possible Selves: One way to conceptualize the self is through "possible selves":
• Ideal Self: "Perhaps devastatingly attractive and intelligent, successful and well loved."
• Most Feared Self: "The one who could end up unemployed and lonely and run down."
• This "balance of potential best and worst selves motivates us through life."

The paper concludes by acknowledging the complexity and ongoing debate around defining the self, noting that factors like "environment and childhood experiences, culture, and all that mess, not to mention biology," make it difficult to "firmly define self or answer certainly that we even have one?" This remains "one of life's biggest questions, insofar as it has yet to be universally answered."