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PSYC30022 - Trends in Personality and Social Psychology

WEEK 1

Fleeson & Gallagher (2009) -

The Implications of Big Five Standing for the Distribution of Trait Manifestation in Behavior: Fifteen Experience-Sampling Studies and a Meta-Analysis

LECTURE 1 - Personality Processes and Dynamics

Personality constructs are descriptions...

What is Personality?

regularities in behaviour and experience

How people are alike or different → e.g. anxiety - anxiety about COVID is a state, but an individual’s susceptibility to anxiety is a pattern, hence part of their personality.

How to operationalise? (easy)

Ask people to describe themselves (one way)

How to conceptualise? (harder)

Harder to conceptualise what differences in personality mean and measure how people are different from one another.

Describing Personality:

The Big 5: a taxonomy of personality, provides an overarching framework to organise different trait descriptors.

Extraversion – sociable, outgoing, experience positive emotions, talkative

Neuroticism – anxious, irritable, experience negative emotions, sensitivity to negative affect, worry and stress

Openness/Intellect – intellectually curious, creative, unconventional, artistic

Agreeableness – empathic, cooperative, polite, interpersonal harmony

Conscientiousness – hard working, diligent, disciplined, self-regulation of behaviour.

Not five individual traits, rather, more analogous to the kingdoms of life = they organise many traits.

Difficult to work with raw data (left) and measure - hence, psychologists tried to identify the dimensions that best describe personality space.

Through correlations amongst trait terms, clusters formed - terms that capture the common concepts within these clusters (e.g. compassion, withdrawal, politeness).

The big 5 is one way of clustering different trait tendencies / one way of structuring relationships among traits.

Various Five Factor Models:

Different models that people have come up with.

Debate about how we should best structure personality.

Each row of this table is a different model from a different author.

Top = big 5

Various 5 dimensions have been proposed, but they have a lot of similarity to the big 5

Within many of the models – there is something like neuroticism or concern with emotion.

Conscientiousness – orderly/disciplined/hardworking – similar terms for these.

Conformity is a bit different to agreeableness

Dimension with a conceptualisation similar to agreeableness is proposed in the literature

Big 5 used so much because – the many different solutions to organising traits (factor analyses) look very much like the big 5.

HEXACO - Alternative Six Factor Model:

Big 5 – not a definitive solution

Hexaco taxonomy – similar to the big 5 – organises trait space over 6 rather than 5 dimensions.

Arguments that this provides a better fit to the data

Big 5 emerges reasonably well

Some argue that a 6 factor solution is more robust / model has a better fit across a wider range of language groups

Some definitely have parallels to big 5

Neuroticism and agreeableness is split.

Important point to make = both the big5 and hexaco – provide a framework for organising trait descriptions

No one framework is perfectly correct, frameworks can be preferred because they are more useful

Parsimony vs Completeness:

Exact sciences can work toward parsimonious and complete theories and descriptions

Balance parsimony and completeness.

Parsimonious model = organises the traits in a way that is easier to deal with (must be careful because it could mean that you end up with 2 people - e.g extraverts and introverts = misses a lot of info).

Complete theories – completeness is essentially labelling all of the traits = this is not practical (mega data).

The Big Five provide a relatively parsimonious and relatively complete system for describing personality structure

captures major lines of differences among the description

More precision obtained through assessing ‘lower order’ traits - big 5 trait = Neuroticism – specifically interested in a more narrow trait of vulnerability

can move down the hierarchy to get greater precision = lose parsimony, but helps with comprehensiveness.

The ‘bandwidth-fidelity’ trade-off… (hierarchical structure of traits):

Big 5 – tries to balance parsimony with completeness

Bandwidth = how broad a coverage a trait construct has.

E.g. Neuroticism = broad bandwidth = everything concerned with negative emotions.

Higher fidelity = precision = move down the neuroticism hierarchy to aspects (sub-traits) and then get to specifics (facets)

Much more specific and more concrete descriptions.

Can move up and down the hierarchy.

Example:

Extraversion = very broad – parsimonious.

Being talkative is much more specific and concrete = complete

Traits provide just one “level of description” in personality:

Personality traits = stable.

Relatively decontextualized – don’t refer to a specific context, just talking about the individual GENERALLY.

Expect them to be talkative whether it is Monday or Friday.

Characteristic adaptations = People’s roles, goals identities, life tasks = e.g. describing a lecturer – doesn’t apply to when the individual is by themselves or with family.

Top level = integrative life narratives = the personal story that we construct, why we are the people that we are.

Dispositional traits seem simplistic.

There is more to people than how bold they are, that is true – dispositional traits are just initial descriptors – people are different across their lives and in different contexts.

Most of the research however is done at trait level.