PSYC 2740 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Differential Psychology, Trait Theory, Extraversion And Introversion

• School: University of Guelph
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 2740
• Professor: Stephen Lewis

Document Summary

3 important assumptions about personality traits form the basic foundation of trait psychology: meaningful individual differences, stability or consistency over time, consistency across situations. Strong situations almost all people react similarly because of the strength of the situation: ex. pop quiz in class most people will be nervous and panic. Situational specificity: ex. someone is laid back and calm but has to ask someone out on a date, so their anxiousness il increase, certain situations can provoke out of character behaviours. Both personality and situations interact to produce behaviour: b=f (p x s) Indeed, fleeson and noftle have argued that studying people over time and aggregating the frequency of certain traits is the bets way to study people over time. Carelessness: some people may not be motivated to answer carefulness or truthfully: infrequency scales: has questions that all or almost all people will have the same answer to.