PSYC 2740 Lecture 3: Personality - Lecture 3, Chapter 3
30 Jan 2018
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Document Summary
Trait: a characteristic describing how people differ (or are similar) and refer to an average tendency, and is relatively enduring. Traits as internal casual properties: traits are presumed to be "internal, desires/needs carry across settings and are presumed to be casual, traits may lie dominant, all of these things help to rule out other causes for behaviour. Traits as descriptive summaries: traits are descriptive summaries of one"s attributes without assuming internality/causality, they summarize behavioural trends. Act frequency research program: traits = categories of acts, act nomination, prototypically judgment, recording of act performance. Identifies acts relating to most traits, identifies behavioural regularities, helps study the meaning of hard to study traits. Cons: no account for amount of context, applies only to overt acts, may prove difficult with complex traits. 3 main approaches: lexical, lexical hypothesis: all key individual differences are encoded within our language over time, traits --> important in communication, criteria for identifying traits: synonym frequency (multiple terms), cross-cultural universality.
