Lecture 2 Flashcards
How can we (start to) describe an individual’s personality?
Learn to use the Big 5 Trait system to organize your personality trait judgments
Focus on consistencies in social and emotional behaviors and on things where we notice individual differences
Myers-Briggs history
1940s
Mother and daughter
Katherin Briggs
Isobel Myers-Briggs
Liked Jung’s work
Made 4 dichotomies 1 - introversion, extroversion 2 - Sensing. intuitive 3 - Perceiving, Judging 4 - Feeling, thinking
Then gives you one of 16 types
Myers-Briggs evaluation
Is not valid
Questions do not have face validity: the degree to which a procedure, especially a psychological test or assessment, appears effective in terms of its stated aims.
Questions are not things you would think of normally
Hence, you might choose randomly because you have never thought about it
So next time, you will pick different ones
Hence, no reliability
Myers-Briggs: Why is it popular
Allows for categorization and only gives nice answers
Uses the Forer effect - general enough that anyone can agree to it (like astrology)
Differences between MB and Big 5
Big 5 uses a numbered scare (eg least to most true)
MB does not
MB givers categories, big 5 give normally distributed spectrums
Big 5 can be bad
Big 5 basics
Valid and reliable
Measures something that is useful - has face validity
Each category has plus and minus questions in the inventory and each is equally represented
Development of the Big 5
1940s
Initially took a lexical approach
18000 adjectives to describe peoples personalities in the dictionary
Many describe people only momentarily or are evaluative, not descriptive.
Removing these gives 4000
Removing synonyms and antonyms gives 180
Switch to factor analysis = grouping into common themes: Are there meaningful clusters which capture something?
5 left
Big 5 Trait Taxonomy
Openness to experience: tendency to be receptive to new ideas, approaches and experiences
Conscientiousness: tendency towards organization, persistence and motivation in goal-directed behavior
Extroversion: tendency to (1) be outgoing/sociable and (2) be socially dominant
Agreeableness: Tendency to ave concern for others, to have warm and trusting sentiments (empathy et al)
Neuroticism: tendency to experience negative emotions
OCEAN
Formal definition of traits
Dimensions of individual differences in tendencies to show consistent patterns of thought, feelings and actions
Dimensions, not types
Tendencies, not dispositions
Consistencies across situations and time
Bianca Andreescu
Extroverted in both senses
Agreeable
Comforted Serena Williams as she got injured while playing her
Only child of two Romanian immigrants. Speaks Romanian to them at home
Dan McAdams on Extraversion and the breadth of the big 5
Like with all of the big 5 traits we should think of E as a large factor in personality composed of many smaller facets, Extraversion is really a family of smaller related traits (such as sociability, assertiveness, and excitement seeking), all sharing a resemblance to each other, but each carving our something of its own identity within the broader family constellation
Repeating the big 5
Good to repeat
Good to get other ppl to do it for you too
Bianca big 5
Extroversion 97% Neuroticism 5% Open To Experience 70% Agreeableness 50% Conscientiousness 95%
Two people focused, social traits
Extroversion
Agreeableness
Charlie Brown
Lucy
Linus
CB neurotic Moderate extroversion (low social dominance)
Lucy
Disagreeable
Linus
Agreeable
Lucy and Linus are siblings but very different, its possible
