PSYB30H3 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Hans Eysenck, Humorism, Ernst Kretschmer
Document Summary
Chapter 4 personality traits: fundamental concepts and issues . The currency of everyday trait talk is the generalization; personality generalizations may be true or useful in a relative sense, but they do not apply to every instance of a person"s behaviour. Trait attributions are very relative, approximate, general and imprecise. Nobody, no matter how strong a given trait, is consistent; no single trait can characterize any person as life offers too many different situations for people to do the same thing in each one. Traits may be useful in providing better than chance predictions about how a person may behave, but they may also become labels" and stereotypes" that objectify people. Psychologists generally conceive of traits as internal dispositions that are relatively stable over time and across situations. Second, traits are conceived in bipolar terms, and can be understood as a continuum ranging from one extreme to the other.
