Personality and Cognition Flashcards
Field Dependance
1940s-1950s
People who are highly field dependent are very influences in their problem solving by aspects of the context (or field), in which the problem occurs, that are salient (highly noticeable) but not directly relevant to the solution
Can be tested with a rod and frame test and embedded figures tests
Field-Dependant people:
- have a greater sensitivity to the context
- tend to be more holistic and intuitive
- show greater sensitivity to social contexts
- sit closer to conversational partners and have more eye contact
Field-Independent people
- more analytical
- favour solitary play (children)
- socialised with emphasis on autonomy (children)
- in technological rather than humanitarian occupations
- sit farther away from conversational partner
- less eye contact
Cognitive Complexity
- Cognitive complexity is the degree to which someone makes distinctions
- It is also how much they can integrate those distinctions by drawing connections between them
- People low in cognitive complexity see the world in more absolute and simpler terms, preferring unambiguous problems and straightforward solutions
Verbal vs Visual
Some students are most comfortable and adept at thinking in words, while others prefer to use imagery:
“…ample evidence that children and adults will, if asked, express preferences about how they prefer information to be presented to them. There is also plentiful evidence arguing that people differ in the degree to which they have some fairly specific aptitudes for different kinds of thinking and for processing different types of information.”
- BUT there is no strong or consistent evidence that matching teaching style to learning style improves learning
- Some Certificate IV in Training and Assessment courses teach that you should match teaching style or learning style
- There is, as yet, no credible evidence for this
Schema theory
- Piaget studied for a while with Carl Jung
- Schemas are the cognitive structures that organise our knowledge and expectations about our environments
- Complex Schemas (also called scripts) guide our behaviour in social situations
- Children progress through a series of cognitive stages, getting progressively more sophisticated in their thinking
- New cognitive structures (schemas), build on earlier structures
- Our ways of understanding unfold in a fairly logical order
Categorisation
- Categorisation processes are central to human cognition
- Our perceptual processes take in cast number of bit of information
- We simplify all this information through categorisation
- This efficient, but it leads us to miss details.
- People often consider something or someone by first putting them in a category
- Social Cognition - the categorization and interpretation processes involved when a person interacts with another
- For example, many people find that their normal modes of interaction are disrupted when one of the most salient characteristics of a person, gender, is difficult to determine
- We perceive emotions without consciously analysing the details that conveyed that information
- Automatic processes of categorisation are useful, but it doesn’t take much to go from useful category to a harmful stereotype
Personal Construct Theory
(Personal Construct Psychology - PCP, George Kelly)
- Kelly’s (1955) key claim is that “a person’s processes are psychologically channelled by the ways in which he anticipates events”
- Kelly proposed that we all have a unique system of constructs that we use to understand and predict behaviour
- We can view people as scientists or theorists, trying to make sense of the world around them. We construct our own versions of reality that we use to understand and predict people’s behaviour (self and others)
Social Intelligence
Social intelligence theory suggests people vary in the abilities needed to understand and influence other people
A strong influence on the idea of different types of intelligence was Howard Gardner’s multiple intelligences:
- knowing the world through language
- logical-mathematical analysis
- spatial representation
- musical thinking
- bodily-kinesthetic intelligence
- understanding of the self
- understanding of others
Emotional Intelligence
- people vary in the capability to navigate the emotional realm
- Core components of El tend to be:
- Recognizing emotions in oneself and in others
- interpreting emotions in oneself and others
- managing one’s emotions and being resilient
- using emotions
Three broad models of EI:
- trait model
- ability model
- mixed model
- Emotional intelligence has fairly small correlations with other criteria, such as job performance, once cognitive ability and personality have been taken into account
- Maybe emotional intelligence is important but its just that we don’t have good measure with which to capture it in people
Explanatory Style
Explanatory style is a set of cognitive personality variables that captures a persons habitual means of interpreting events in his or her life.
Examples are:
- Optimism and pessimism
- Learned Helplessness (Seligman) and fixed versus growth mindset (Dweck)
- Self-efficacy (Bandura)
- Locus of Control (Rotter)
Optimism and Pessimism
- People with an optimistic explanatory style tend to interpret events in their lives with a positive perspective, even perceiving neutral events as positive.
- Those with a pessimistic style tend to focus on the negative potential in a situation
- In general. having an optimistic explanatory style is associated with better outcomes, especially in times of challenge
Learned Helplessness and Learned Optimism
(Seligman)
- When an individual learns that they cannot control any of the things that are important they may develop learned helplessness
- In animals, repeated exposure to unavoidable punishment leads them to accept later punishment even when its avoidable
- Once a person learns he or she is not in control, motivation to seeks control may shut down, even when control later becomes possible
- Teaching children to challenge pessimistic thoughts can “immunize” them against depression
- Learned Optimism is achieved by training people to think differently about themselves and their situation
Mastery-Oriented Versus Helpless Response
(Dweck)
- Children who are helpless tend to attribute their failure to internal characteristics and inadequacies such as low intelligence, poor memory, or poor problem-solving capacity.
- These attributions accompany low expectations for the future successes. These children who tend to experience anxiety or boredom. Helpless children’s performance tend to sink into a slow decline, and helpless children often interpret even successful performance as a deficient in some way.
- Children who are mastery-oriented, however respond to difficulty differently, tending to view difficulty as a failure.
Fixed Versus Growth Mindset
(Dweck)
Fixed Mindset - Intelligence and ability is fixed/innate
- Tend to avoid challenges, give up easily, ignore useful feedback and see it as criticism, feel threatened by others’ success
Growth Mindset - Intelligence and ability can be developed through effort
- Tend to try challenges, persist, view effort as useful to develop skills, learn from feedback
Self-Efficacy
(Bandura)
- Albert Bandura describes self-efficacy as an individual’s belief (expectation) that he or she can successfully perform a particular action
- Self-efficacy beliefs affect people’s achievement
- They are more likely to do activities that thy believe they can successfully accomplish
Outcome Expectancy and Reinforcement
(Julian Rotter)
Rotter’s social-cognitive theory:
- Our behaviour depends on how strongly we expect out performance will have a positive result (outcome expectancy) and how much we value the expected reinforcement (reinforcement value)
- The likelihood that particular behaviour will occur in a specific situation is its behaviour potential.
