So when we look at all of the
intelligence theories that we have, and we start to look at all of
the personality theories we have you find that it isn't a concluded
topic, right? Personality is complex. I already pointed this out before. There are a lot
of different perspectives on it
but what we're trying to do is a connected series of statements established--
intended to establish a proposition.
It isn't just saying no it isn't. You have to actually have data
to bolster or refute somebody else's argument. You either bolster your own argument
or you're refuting somebody else's argument. So we have all of these kind of
nebulous constructs going around from psychoanalytic
perspectives and humanistic perspectives. But what are these things that we call
personalities, anyway, and as I said before, when you think about your
personality,
you probably start thinking of a few descriptor words, a few adjectives.
When you think about your own best friend or your mother or your father or
somebody you grew up with
or somebody you work with, you don't think about their
id and there ego and their superego, right? You think about these descriptors,
these adjectives, these concepts,
whether they're trustworthy, whether they're friendly, whether they're
whatever, whatever, whatever. The concepts are the labels we apply to what we think
are
relatively stable patterns of behavior,
right, so that we have consistency and that consistency is what we consider to
be identity,
and that identity we think is going to be part of a person's life.
Gordon Allport kicked it off really
in the trait theory, identifying more than 4500 traits on three levels.
4500 traits. How did he do this? He was looking through the dictionary
and what he found was adjective after adjective after adjective that can be used to describe
human beings
to one another or to oneself,
and by looking at that he tried to organize this into what he thought were
cardinal traits.
Cardinal traits are relatively rare.
Cardinal traits dominate most of your life,
so that you are affected by a central
aspect of your personality, I should be careful with word central.
Total pacifism, for example, became the guiding principle
for almost everything that Martin Luther King, Jr.
and Gandhi did in their public lives, right?
They were pushed, like normal human beings,
into some very, very uncomfortable positions
by highly aggressive people, whom most of us would then
react to aggressively or at least offensively. But that cardinal trait
caused them to react differently than most people would
and in that sense they were unique.
But for most of us, we have these
general kind of personality traits
that we engage in on a day-to-day basis.
Let me see if I can get that up here.
For most of us, we have central traits and secondary traits.
In other words, a cardinal trait is rare because there's rarely one trait that guides
almost all of our behavior,
right? Lots of traits, theoretically,
contribute to who we conceive ourselves to be.
Central traits would be prominent and general traits, building blocks
of personality where Gordon Allport thought most people had five to ten of these.
Secondary traits are dispositions that vary from situation
to situation that often flow out
of these central traits. You display them occasionally
depending on the situation but they're not totally inconsistent
with your central traits. Raymond Cattell
came along and used a technique we call factor analysis,
it's a statistical approach to understanding and analyzing data,
to take this massive number of traits
and reduce them into what he thought were sixteen
basic traits, the ones that for him
are central traits. Now, for each of those 16 traits he would have thought there were
other sub-traits that were important to understand. Now,
I just highlight these because that's the history of it,
and then we move on to more test relevant material
and we get into Hans Eysenck.
Hans Eysenck looked at traits
slightly differently. It's almost like a... there's that old game show,
Name That Tune. You said, I could name that tune in eight notes, somebody else goes I could do it in five notes in my ass cuz I could do in five
notes, somebody
else goes I could do it in four notes, and they go, name that tune. See if you could name that tune in four notes,
right?
And it's almost like, you got Allport saying, it's a bunch of traits, and
and then you got Cattell going, it's sixteen traits, and then you got Eysenc going, it's three traits, but I'm think a long history traits but I'm
really going to emphasize two traits
So you're looking at different people arguing
over very similar principles and looking for evidence.
So he says there's three bipolar trait dimensions and when I say bipolar I mean one
extreme
versus the other extreme. When we get to the
Big Five it should become apparent what I'm talking about. But one
bipolar dimension that he thought was prominent
in all human beings was introversion versus extroversion.
Now most people say, oh yeah, he's extroverted or she's kind of shy, she's
sort of introverted.
And they have a general sense of what that means. Those descriptors have been
around a long time, since at least the
Socratic school of philosophy, Aristotle and the like.
For Eysenck, it's really about physiological levels of arousal.
For him, it's looking at what kind of state of arousal are you typically in,
and you usually seek its opposite. So that if you have low levels of
physiological arousal
characteristically, you would seek higher levels of arousal
by engaging the social world or being really outgoing
or bravado might be part of that. That gets into some subdivisions of these.
But if you already have lots of internal arousal and you already have
this kind of characteristic
high level of arousal, you seek the opposite. You seek calm.
You seek serenity. You seek not necessarily social isolation because
introverts aren't people who don't have any social relationships, they have
chosen relationships. They... it's not that they can't engage
in social activities but they prefer more often than not
more solitary activities. Now if you see these as extremes,
then you can imagine a normal distribution being laid on that bipolar
dimension
where very few people are extremely extroverted all the time
and very few people are extremely introverted all the time.
Where would you expect them to be? Toward the middle.
Maybe leaning this way or leaning that way, predominantly.
But situationally, we might see people, for example at a job interview.
If you're very introverted you might be assertive in a job interview for
example.
Somebody who gets up on stage and talks a lot in front of large numbers of people
doesn't do that all the time. Sometimes they like to just have a quiet book,
and sit at home, and maybe watch Jeopardy or something like that.
Just quiet time reading or watching some kind of TV or listening to music.
So you see that nobody seems to display all of these traits in all situations,
but that you have a characteristic level of preference for
introversion versus extroversion which he's explaining
as a genetic basis, saying that there's some
heredity involved here. He also
looked heavily at this neuroticism and emotional stability. Now you see I've got
these
two bolded in addition to having Eysenck
being white fonted. So neuroticism and emotional stability really looks at a
person's reactivity to life.
Some people are pretty stoic.
It takes a lot to rattle them and even when they get rattled they don't look that
rattled to the rest of us, right?
They seem to take everything in stride, maybe aren't that emotional at all.
Could that be problematic, to show no emotion?
It could be if you were extreme on the trait
because that would make it hard to connect to other people
but very few people are that stoic or that stable.
On the other side you have people that might be easily rattled,
easily flip out over quite little problems that come up in their life and
they have
a lot of lability meaning they move up and down in their emotions all the time
and that can be
an instability and that instability could be problematic.
Now most people aren't extremely unstable or
extremely stable. Most people toward the middle,
and lean towards one or towards the other depending on the situation,
and he looked at these two different traits as
explaining a lot of personality. He had this other thing called psychoticism
and impulse control.
Impulse control: the ability to restrain one's impulses,
right? Where people you could be over controlled, right? You never take a chance,
you never take a risk, you never
go outside your comfort zone. You don't grow cause you're
rigid, and the other side would be, you do anything that comes to mind
regardless of the consequences, overly impulsive,
and, of course, most people aren't one extreme or the other. They're towards
the middle, leaning one way or the other . Well, for your own tests and knowledge,
he really emphasized more the one and the two
and I'll show you a graphic here how that works. He thought there were
higher-order traits. A major trait would be
extroversion, for example, but he didn't think that was the only trait,
if you have somebody who's extroverted, it gives rise to these
kind of secondary or sub-order traits, lower order traits
like assertiveness, right? So out of extroversion, you could get assertiveness
or aggressiveness. They're not the same thing,
and not everybody who's extroverted would be aggressive and not extroversion
does not guarantee assertiveness in every situation, and so he looks at these
first two domains as really explaining
habit, which is to say our stable aspects of personality
and specific responses which is to deal with situations.
How we, as people, deal with situations. So higher-order
govern lower-order traits.
When you look at his two dimensional model
of personality where we have
stability versus instability,
right, what he would call neuroticism,
and you have introversion versus extroversion.
On this graph you can kind of look and see it as a normal distribution. Very
few people are extremely introverted or extremely extroverted
or extremely stable or extremely instable. Most people are going to be
tending towards the middle
leaning towards introversion or towards extroversion. Leaning towards instability
or leaning towards stability. But he would say that you could map these out,
that a person who was
highly extroverted and highly stable,
right, be sociable, maybe even a leader,
right, responsive, talkative, so you see this quadrant
is a combination of people who have stable emotional natures
who are also extroverted. Fllip that over and people who are
introverted and unstable, you have that kind of moodiness, anxiousness, rigidness,
social isolation, pessimism.
But again, most people aren't extreme. But you swing it around from
introverted to stable and you see that these become
different adjectives. We're looking at thoughtful, peaceful, controlled, reliable,
even-tempered, and
on the flip side of extroverted and unstable we start going to impulsive,
excitable, aggressive, restless.
That's an interesting concept because it explains a lot with two bipolar
dimensions or traits.