Module 2 - Intro to Personality Psych Flashcards
What is personality?
regularities in behaviour / experience (DeYoung & Gray)
a person’s typical mode of response (Pervin)
our identity + reputation (Hogan)
an individual’s unique variation on the general evolutionary design for human nature, expressed as a developing pattern of dispositional traits, characteristic adaptations, and self-defining life narratives complexly & differentially situated in culture and social context (McAdams & Pals)
What are the 3 levels of personality
1) Dispositional traits - broad descriptions of patterns of behaviour and experience.
Relatively decontextualized. E.g. shy, bold, warm, aloof, disciplined, impulsive etc.
2) characteristic adaptation - concerns an individual’s particular life circumstances.
Highly contextualized (e.g. specific goals (e.g. to become a doctor), social roles (e.g. as a medical student), ‘stages of life’ tasks).
3) life narratives - the story we have constructed about who we are. Highly/completely individualized.
The earliest known attempt to offer some descriptions of personality was. . .
The Characters of Theophrastus (c. 371 – c.287 BC), containing the 30 archetypes of
ancient Greece – the flatter man, the reckless man, the chatty man, the gossip, the
surly man, the distrustful man, the mean man etc.
What is the lexical hypothesis?
important characteristics will, over human history, be coded in language
about 18,000 personality descriptors were collected
Perhaps useful for rating personality.
§ However, was very unwieldy, more of a ‘laundry list’ rather than a system.
What is factor analysis and what was it used for?
A statistical method (a data reduction technique that looks through a correlation
matrix) that reduces many correlated variables to much fewer composite variables
or ‘factors’.
Developed by Spearman & Thurstone to explore the structure of MENTAL ABILITIES.
® Cattell (1943) reduced Allport & Odbert’s (1936) list through many and varied
techniques, including factor analysis.
® The eventual result was a 16-factor solution.
What are 3 problems with Cattell’s 16 traits?
1) subjectivity: different people reach a different reduced set of Allport & Odbert’s descriptors.
2) poor replicability / reproducibility: using Cattel’s 171 personality descriptors, many people failed to obtain his same 16 factors.
3) redundancy: correlations amongst many of the 16 factors were very high,
suggesting that they might not be distinct.
Mot replicable factors structures for personality descriptors suggested. . .
3-6 traits
Goldberg & colleagues argued for a ‘big five’ model
Parallel to this ‘lexical tradition’ was the ‘questionnaire tradition’:
® Originally developed out of analysis of clinical questionnaires and symptom
checklists (1940s-1960s)
® Converged on 2-5 factors
® Costa & McCrae argued for a ‘five factor’ model
3 themes from the Big Five
1) Affective/emotional tendencies: extraversion – involves feelings of positive affect and energy; neuroticism – involves feelings of worry and negative mood;
openness/intellect – involves feelings of interest, awe and curiosity.
2) Behavioural tendencies – extraversion describes being bold & assertive, talkative and outgoing; agreeableness describes being cooperative and generous, willingness to
help; conscientiousness describes being industrious, hardworking, persisting with
tasks, being organized.
3) Cognitive tendencies – conscientiousness describes planful, sustained attention,
attention to detail, being orderly; neuroticism describes rumination, perceiving things through a more negative lens, having more rigid & compulsive thinking; openness/intellect
describes being artistic, creative, intellectually curious, inquisitive, introspective, imaginative
How can reliability be measured using Cronbach’s alpha?
do the measures perform consistently? Are they relatively free from
error? Measured using Cronbach’s alpha (α).
§ General model of reliability: observed score = true score + measurement error.
What is test-retest reliability?
measuring the correlation between T1 & T2 scores. This will tell us the temporal stability (stability over time).
§ The rationale here is a reliable measure is a repeatable measure – you should be able to verify the score.
§ The caveat here is that this is not applicable to all psychological phenomena
(e.g. states vs traits) – however personality traits are relatively stable.
What is split-half reliability?
the correlation between the score from one half of
the scale and another half.
§ A measure of internal consistency
What are some features of Cronbach’s alpha?
- The average of all possible split halves.
- A measure of internal consistency.
- The most widely reported measure of reliability.
- Requires at least 3 items or scales.
- Calculated by the average covariance of item pairs divided by the total
variance. - Ranges from 0 – 1.0 (with 0 meaning the measure is completely unreliable;
1.0 being completely reliable, with perfect correlations between the items
[i.e. covariance = variance]). - Cronbach’s alpha (α) directly represents the proportion of reliable variance
(e.g. a value of 0.7 means 70% reliable variance, 30% error variance). - Greatly influenced by the number of items – increasing the number of items
can produce high reliability, even if correlations among items are not large.
This is why scales often have very large numbers of items/questions.
What is validity?
do trait questionnaires measure what they are intended to?
whereas reliability is do the measures perform consistently? Are they relatively free from
error?
Face validity
does the questionnaire appear valid ‘at face value’?
- Limited use, but can prompt evaluation of other kinds of validity.
