PSYC10004 Lecture Notes - Lecture 18: Social Perception, Psychoticism, Conscientiousness
Week 1: Describing Personality
Personality traits & trait psychology
What is Personality?
• Personality as person hood; what makes humans different from non-humans; shared
humanity
• Personality as a character; persona
• Personality as what's behind the mask; authentic "true self"
• Personality as charisma
Social Communication; Gossip
Dunbar argues that human intelligence evolved to handle the complexities of group life, including
learning and communicating about other people's personalities
Impression Formation
Forming impressions or "person perception" is all about making inferences about others'
personalities
• Dispositional inference and correspondence bas
Stereotypes
• largely made of personality traits
Personality Within Psychology
• Focused on how people differ, not how they're the same
• "whole person" approach
• Related to abnormal & clinical psychology
• Emphasis on intrinsic factors of person
• Personality factors internal to person, social psychology focus on factors external to person
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2. Trait Psychology
How should we describe personality?
• Need descriptive unit
• Classification; "taxonomy"
• Requirement for a scientific psychology of personality
Personality Traits
• simplest descriptive unit is "trait"
• Trait: a consistent pattern of behaviour, thinking or feeling
o Stable over time
o Relatively consistent across situations
o Varying between people
o Dispositional
• Trait vary in generality or 'bandwidth': some are broad, others narrow
How are traits organised?
• Are there a few basic dimensions or 'types' of personality
One theory
• Muhammad Ali
o Pomegranate (hard outside, hard on inside)
o Walnut (hard outside, soft inside)
o Prune (soft-hard
o Grape (soft-soft)
The Structure of Personality Traits
• "lexical approach"
• assumes that important distinctions for describing people are incorporated in everyday
speech
Allport & Odbert
• Odbert searched dictionary for words that could describe differences between people
• 18,000 out of 550,000 (around 3%)
• Filtered, removed:
o Physical attributes (eg. Tall)
o Cognitive abilities (eg. Smart)
o Transient states (eg. Sad)
o Highly evaluative terms (eg. Moron)
• 4,500 remained
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find more resources at oneclass.com
