PSYC 100 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Barnum Effect, Trait Theory, Conscientiousness
8 Oct 2016
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PSYC100 Lecture 5 Notes
Personality
- What is personality
• A characteristic pattern of thinking, feeling, and behaving that is unique to each
individual and remains relatively consistent over people
Personality trait
- A person’s habitual patterns of thinking feeling and behaving
• How that person is most of the time?
• Summarizes a lot of information about a person
• Helps predict how that person will behave across a range of different situations
• Extroverted vs. introverted
→ Extrovert = likes talking and being in social situations
→ introvert = likes to be alone and only be with a few people not large groups
- State
• A temporary physical or psychological engagement that influences behaviour
• Being in a place where it makes you act different being at frosh week and drinking you
may act a little more extroverted if you were normally an introvert
→ if an extrovert was in a large lecture hall they might not want to raise their hand in
front of a class of 700 and so they don’t ask a question, but wait until after the class
where they would then go ask the prof in a private setting and act normally again
- Personality traits how to measure them? (personality tests?)
• Many of them exists
• Although they all measure personality they do it in different ways
o Adjectives and rating scales
→ I’m fun and love to be silly
o Statements and agreement ratings
→ I’m the life of the party
→ very much like me to not at all like me
o Images
→ projective tests – ink blots for adults and have the child tell us a story about
what the image is about
• Many are standardized, reliable, and valid
o These are helpful to see when people with mesh and if they will do well together
• Others (e.g., those found in magazines/online) are not
o They aren’t standardized and they haven’t been tested like the others have been
and they don’t actually have real information
The Barnum Effect
- Circus showman P.T Barnum “there’s a sucker born every minute” (but he never said this instead
B. Forer did) → people will believe what they want to and what slightly fits in with their
personality
- Forer: psychologist, personality test, generic description believed to be one’s own based on their
profile generated by the test
o 4.62/5 (0= very poor, 5= excellent)
- beware of horoscopes, online personality tests ect.
- He never actually scored these tests and actually gave everyone the exact same results and asked
them to score the personality profile they were given on a scale of 1-5 and in most cases people
said it was very accurate
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
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