PSYC 2130 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Surgency, Schizotypal Personality Disorder, Eysenck Personality Questionnaire
7 Nov 2017
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Document Summary
What the development of current thinking about traits have in common is that they all consider traits to be real, psychologically meaningful entities. Strategy; gordon allport, described this approach as heuristic realism. Allport did not believe that traits are physical entities, like glands or organs. He did, however, believe that psychological traits are real attributes of people; they serve to explain behavior rather than merely to describe it. For example, a 5-year-old girl and a 25-year-old woman are given a 50-pound barbell to lift. Assuming that both subjects are motivated, it is a safe bet that the woman will succeed but the girl will fail. Most people would say this is because the woman is stronger than the girl. The difference in strength is a real characteristic of the people involved. Therefore, pointing out that the woman is much stronger than the girl explains why she succeeded and the girl failed.
