PSYC 217 Lecture : Week 3 Lecture Notes - 1
Document Summary
Traits & trait taxonomies; coherence, stability, and change over time. 10 adjectives to describe steve jobs: ambitious, passionate, aggressive, creative, persistent. The basic building blocks of personality; universal dimensions with individual differences. Almost any adjective (or sometimes noun) that describes the way some people are and others are not. Traits are not: states, attitudes, cognitive ability (iq), physical attributes (short, tall), social categories (bull, nerd). Which traits are most important: lexical approach, statistical, theoretical approach. Lexical hypothesis: all important individual differences have become encoded within language over time. A good starting point, but many limitations exist with language, and personality can be described in many other ways. Starts with large, diverse pool of personality items. Most researchers rst use lexical approach to come up with pool of items, then apply statistical methods in order to organize and categories items based on their degree of covariance. Factor analysis: the primary statistical method used.
