Psychology 2550A/B Chapter Notes -Personality Psychology, Social Skills, Twin Study
3 Mar 2013
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Popular usage - it is equated with social skill and effectiveness. Less superficially - personality may be taken to be an individual"s most striking or dominant characteristic. One goal of personality psychology is to find and describe those individual differences between people that are psychologically meaningful and stable. Personality refers to qualities of individuals that are relatively stable. So if a person"s behavior changes from time to time, then it may not be indicative of personality. But sometimes the change in the person"s behaviour can also be meaningful and tell you something more about the individual. Another key component of personality is coherence in the pattern of change in an individual"s behaviour. The term personality usually implies continuity or consistency in the individual. Personality psychologists try to understand what it is that underlies these differences between people in terms of their characteristic ways of behaving.
