PSYC 305 Chapter Notes - Chapter 3: Surgency, Extraversion And Introversion, Machiavellianism
Document Summary
Focus on: a bit of everything, including both approaches to determining taxonomies and basic aspects of leading taxonomies/models. Trait-descriptive adjectives: words that describe traits, attributes of a person that are reasonably characteristic of the person and enduring over time. View traits as internal dispositions believe that traits can lie dormant in the sense that capacities remain present even when particular behaviors are not actually expressed. Traits as internal causal properties of persons that affect overt behavior. View traits as descriptive summaries and trends of attributes of a person: make no assumption about internality or causality. Traits to be descriptive summaries of overt behavior. Act of frequency approach: starts with notion traits are categories of acts category. Lexical approach: all traits listed and defined in dictionary form the basis of describing differences among people. All important individual differences have become encoded within the natural language. Usage of trait terms spreads and becomes common within group.
