PSYC 2740 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Barnum Effect, Robert Sternberg, Nomothetic
1 Jul 2016
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Document Summary
Personality: relatively stable individual differences that are believed to present early in life and involves characteristics that generalize across time and across situations. When examining someone"s personality, we primarily focus on the ways that they are difference from other people, but we sometime also consider commonalities and similarities among people. Term personality" comes form the greek word persona. Persona stems from the public masks that were used to display and express different personalities. Have a great interest in finding out how people differ and why they differ. Two main approaches to the study of personality: Incorporating the three goals of description, explanation, and prediction: Would focus on how this person came to have these particular characteristics. Descriptive level = could chart shaq"s scoring to determine whether it varied as a function of variability in his weight. Explanatory level = consideration of the motivational factors that may have influenced his scoring output, and his weight fluctuations.
