PSYC 2740 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Psychoticism, Cold Hearted, Likert Scale
26 Dec 2015
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Document Summary
Personality week 2: the dispositional domain: traits and trait taxonomies. Trait: a characteristic describing how people differ (or are similar), refers to an average tendency and is relatively enduring. We interpret traits as internal causal properties and as descriptive summaries. They are desires/needs that are carried across settings and are presumed to be causal, but traits may also lie dormant. Help to rule out causes for behaviour. Traits are descriptive summaries of one"s attributes without assuming internality/causality. Traits: categories of acts: act nomination, prototypicality judgement, recording of act performance. Helps study the meaning of hard to study traits. All key individual differences are encoded without our language over time. The criteria for identifying traits = synonym frequency, and cross cultural universality. Factor analysis: identi es groups of traits that covary (group together). We do this to reduce traits into meaningful groups or clusters of traits. *we can see what the major dimensions of personality are.
