PSYB30H3 Chapter Notes - Chapter 3: Sociosexual Orientation, Creative Commons, Toyota Electronic Modulated Suspension
Chapter 3 notes.
Dispositional domain
- Concerned with aspects of personality that are stable over time, relatively consistent over
situations, and make people diff from each other.
- Traits are seen as the building blocks of personality.
- Trait descriptive adjectives: words that describe attributes of a person that are characteristic of
a person and perhaps enduring over time. Words like “oh shes FRIENDLY and GENEROUS”
What are Traits? 2 Different views.
1. Traits as Internal Causal Properties
- See traits as something that cause people to act in certain way in order for them to attain their
desires, or needs.
2. Traits as purely descriptive summaries
- Traits are only used to describe someones expressed behaviour. No assumption about what
causes the behaviour. We must first describe the traits and then develop causal theories to
explain them
Descriptive formulation: act frequency approach
- Starts with notion that traits are CATEGORIES OF ACTS. i.e., category of dominance (trait) may
consist of acts like “controls outcomes of business meeting, issued orders that keep group
organized)
- Act frequency approach has 3 key elements:
o Act nomination:
▪ Procedure designed to find which acts belong in which trait categories
▪ Coming up with acts that would fit in specific categories. Like brainstorming
o Prototypicality judgment
▪ Identifying which acts are the most central (or prototypical) of each trait
category.
o Recording act performance
▪ Securing info on the actual performance of indivs in their lives.
- Criticism:
o Most have been about the technical aspects. Questions like how much context should
be included in the description of a trait relevant act.
o Seems applicable to overt actions, but what about failures to act or covert acts that are
not directly observable.
- Accomplishments: making really clear what behavioural phenomena is associated to each trait.
has helped identified behavioral regularities. Helpful for exploring meaning of some traits that
are difficult to study LIKE IMPULSIVITY. Good for finding cultural similarities and diffs. Found to
be good at predicting outcomes in life like job success.
- Found that the more observable the actions, the higher the agreement between self-report and
observer codings in traits.
Identifying the most important traits
- Three approaches
o Lexical approach - The approach to determining the fundamental personality traits by
analyzing language. For example, a trait adjective that has many synonyms probably
represents a more fundamental trait than a trait adjective with few synonyms.
o Statistical approach - Having a large number of people rate themselves on certain items,
and then employing a statistical procedure to identify groups or clusters of items that go
together. The goal of the statistical approach is to identify the major dimensions or
“coordinates” of the personality map.
o Theoretical approach - The theoretical approach to identifying important dimensions of
individual differences starts with a theory, which then determines which variables are
important. The theoretical strategy dictates in a specific manner which variables are
important to measure.
- Lexical approach
o All important indiv diffs have become encoded into our natural language
o Over time diffs among people that are important are noticed and then words are
invented to talk about those diffs.
o Two diff criteria for identifying important traits
▪ Synonym frequency: in the lexical approach, synonym frequency means that if
an attribute has not merely one or two trait adjectives to describe it, but rather
six, eight, or ten words, then it is a more important dimension of individual
difference
▪ Cross-cultural universality: In the lexical approach, cross-cultural universality
states that if a trait is sufficiently important in all cultures so that its members
have codified terms within their own languages to describe the trait, then the
trait must be universally important in human affairs. In contrast, if a trait term
exists in only one or a few languages but is entirely missing from most, then it
may be of only local relevance.
- Stats approach
o Start with a diverse tems that people have used to describe themselves and then using a
stats procedure to identify groups or clusters of items.
o Usually use factor analysis
▪ A commonly used statistical procedure for identifying underlying structure in
personality ratings or items. Factor analysis essentially identifies groups of items
that covary (i.e., go together or correlate) with each other, but tend not to
covary with other groups of items. This provides a means for determining which
personality variables share some common underlying property or belong
together within the same group
▪ Factor loadings: indexes of how much of the variation in an item is “explained”
by the factor. Factor loadings indicate the degree to which the item correlates
with or “loads on” the underlying factor
• Ex: the items humorous, amusing, and popular have high loadings on
the extraversion factor.
Document Summary
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