Psychology Culture and Personality, Assessing Personality & Review
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Culture and Personality
Cultural psychologists have noted that some aspects of personality differ across cultural groups. For example, Americans and Asians have slightly different conceptions of self. American culture promotes a view of the self as independent. American children tend to describe themselves in terms of personal attributes, values, and achievements, and they learn to be self-reliant, to compete with others, and to value their uniqueness.
Many Asian cultures, such as those of Japan and China, promote a view of the self as interdependent. Children from these cultures tend to describe themselves in terms of which groups they belong to. They learn to rely on others, to be modest about achievements, and to fit into groups.
Researchers believe that culture influences aggressiveness in males. In places where there are plentiful resources and no serious threats to survival, such as Tahiti or Sudest Island near New Guinea, males are not socialized to be aggressive. Culture also influences altruism. Research shows that children tend to offer support or unselfish suggestions more frequently in cultures where they are expected to help with chores such as food preparation and caring for younger siblings.
Challenges for Cultural Psychology
Cultural psychologists face the difficult challenge of studying and describing differences among cultures without stereotyping any particular culture. Ideally, cultural psychologists acknowledge that all members of a culture don’t behave similarly. Variation exists within every culture, in terms of both individuals and subcultures. Cultural psychologists also try not to exaggerate differences among cultures.
Assessing Personality
Doctors, researchers, and employers use personality assessments for a variety of reasons:
- Clinical psychologists often use assessments as aids for diagnosing psychological disorders.
Example: A psychologist might administer personality tests to a patient with a varied set of symptoms to narrow down possible diagnoses. In such a case, a psychologist would typically use a battery of tests in addition to interviewing the patient.
- Some mental health providers use tests to decide how best to counsel people about normal problems of daily living.
Example: A counselor might administer a personality test in order to help a person choose a career.
- Some organizations use assessments to select personnel to hire, although this practice is decreasing in popularity.
Example: A consulting firm might assess job candidates in order to decide which candidates would be likely to perform well under pressure.
- Researchers frequently use tests in the course of studying personality traits.
Example: A researcher studying the correlation between risk taking and criminality might administer a personality test to a sample of prison inmates.
Three important ways of assessing personality include objective tests, projective tests, and assessment centers.
Objective Personality Tests
Objective personality tests are usually self-report inventories. Self-report inventories are paper-and-pen tests that require people to answer questions about their typical behavior. Commonly used objective tests include the MMPI-2, the 16PF, and the NEO Personality Inventory.
The MMPI-2
The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory(MMPI) was developed in the 1940s and revised in the 1980s. The revised version is called the MMPI-2. The MMPI-2 contains a list of 567 questions. People taking the test must answer these questions with true, false, or cannot say.
The MMPI was originally developed to help clinical psychologists diagnose psychological disorders. To interpret the MMPI-2, psychologists divide the answers to questions into fourteen subscales. Ten of these subscales are clinical subscales, which give information about different aspects of the test taker’s personality. The other four subscales are validity subscales, which indicate whether the test taker was careless or deceptive when answering questions. A score on any single subscale doesn’t provide a clear indication of a specific psychological disorder. Rather, the score profile, or pattern of responses across subscales, indicates specific psychological disorders.
The 16PF
The Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire(16PF) is a test that assesses sixteen basic dimensions of personality. It consists of a list of 187 questions.
The NEO Personality Inventory
The NEO Personality Inventory measures the Big Five traits: extraversion, openness to experience, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and neuroticism.
Advantages and Disadvantages of Self-Report Inventories
Self-report inventories are useful because they allow psychologists to get precise answers to standardized questions. In other words, all subjects who take a test answer the same questions, and all subjects have to select answers from the same range of options. Inventories are also objective, which means that different people scoring the same test would score them in the same way. However, these scores might be interpreted differently by different people.
There are several disadvantages to self-report inventories as well:
- Self-report inventories often contain transparent questions, which means subjects can figure out what a psychologist wants to measure. Therefore, subjects can lie intentionally and fake personality traits they don’t really have. Researchers who develop tests address this problem by including lie scales in tests, which provide information about the likelihood that a subject is lying.
- The social desirability bias can affect responses on self-report inventories. In other words, when filling out an inventory, people might state what they wish were true, rather than what is true. Test developers can minimize this bias by dropping questions that are likely to evoke it.
- People sometimes don’t understand the questions on the test. Test developers try to address this issue by wording questions very clearly so that they have only one possible interpretation.
- People sometimes don’t remember aspects of the experience they are asked about.
Projective Personality Tests
Projective personality tests require subjects to respond to ambiguous stimuli, such as pictures and phrases, that can be interpreted in many different ways. Projective tests are based on the projective hypothesis, which is the idea that people interpret ambiguous stimuli in ways that reveal their concerns, needs, conflicts, desires, and feelings.
Clinical psychologists and researchers often use two projective tests: the Rorschach test and the Thematic Apperception Test.
The Rorschach Test
The Rorschach test consists of a series of ten inkblots. Psychologists ask subjects to look at the inkblots and describe what they see, and the psychologists then use complex scoring systems to interpret the subjects’ responses. Scores are based on various characteristics of responses, such as the originality of the response and the area of the blot described in the response. The Rorschach gives psychologists information about the subject’s personality traits and the situational stresses the subject may be experiencing.
The Thematic Apperception Test
The Thematic Apperception Test(TAT) consists of a series of pictures containing a variety of characters and scenes. Psychologists ask subjects to make up stories about each picture and look for themes that run through the subjects’ responses. For example, a person with a high need for achievement may consistently come up with stories that have achievement-related themes.
Advantages and Disadvantages of Projective Tests
Projective tests are useful because they allow psychologists to assess unconscious aspects of personality. Projective tests are also not transparent: subjects cannot figure out how their responses will be interpreted. Therefore, subjects cannot easily fake personality traits on a projective test.
A serious disadvantage of projective tests is that they have questionable reliability and validity. Despite this flaw, many researchers and clinicians find that such tests give them useful information.
Assessment Centers
Assessment centers allow psychologists to assess personality in specific situations. In assessment centers, subjects are made to face situations in which they must use particular types of traits and skills, and their performance is then assessed. Assessment centers work on the well-accepted idea that the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior in similar situations. For example, a corporation may select a person for a managerial position by placing candidates in a simulated managerial situation for half a day and assessing their performance.
Assessment centers are useful for selecting personnel for positions of responsibility because they predict how people will act in challenging situations. However, assessment centers are expensive and time consuming.
Quick Review
Personality Traits
- Personality is the collection of characteristic thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that make up a person.
- Personality traits are consistent and long lasting, while states are temporary.
- The Greeks thought that four types of humors corresponded to personality types.
- Raymond Cattell used factor analysis to cluster traits into sixteen groups.
- Many psychologists believe that there are five basic traits.
- These Big Five traits include neuroticism, extraversion, openness to experience, agreeableness, and conscientiousness.
Psychodynamic Theories
- Psychodynamic theories are based on Sigmund Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis and emphasize unconscious motives and the importance of childhood experiences in shaping personality.
- Freud believed that the mind has three levels of awareness: the conscious, the preconscious, and the unconscious.
- Information in the unconscious emerges in slips of the tongue, jokes, dreams, illness symptoms, and associations between ideas.
- The personality is made up of three components that are in constant conflict: the id, the ego, and the superego.
- The id contains biological impulses, is governed by the pleasure principle, and is characterized by primary process thinking.
- The ego manages the conflict between the id and reality. It is governed by the reality principle and is characterized by secondary process thinking.
- The superego is the moral component of the personality.
- Anxiety arises when the ego is unable to balance adequately the demands of the id and superego.
- People use defense mechanisms to protect themselves from anxiety.
- Freud proposed that children go through five stages of development, each characterized by sexual gratification from a particular part of the body.
- Fixation is an inability to progress normally from one developmental stage to another.
- The Oedipus complex is a critical phase of development that occurs in the phallic stage. It refers to a male child’s sexual desire for his mother and his hostility toward his father.
- According to Carl Jung’s analytical psychology, people have a personal unconscious and a collective unconscious. The latter contains universal memories of people’s common human past.
- According to Alfred Adler’s individual psychology, the main motivations for behavior are strivings for superiority.
- Object relations theorists believe that people are motivated most by attachments to people.
- Critics of psychodynamic theories argue that these theories are not falsifiable, that they generalize from a few patients to all people, and that they rely on retrospective accounts.
Behaviorist Theories
- Behaviorist explanations of personality focus on learning.
- B. F. Skinner believed that people’s personalities arise from response tendencies and that consequences shape the responses.
- Albert Bandura said that people learn responses by watching others. He believes that thinking and reasoning are important in learning.
- Walter Mischel’s research showed that people behave differently in different situations.
- Psychologists agree that personality is formed through a two-way interaction between personal characteristics and the environment. This interaction is called reciprocal determinism.
- Critics argue that behaviorists often generalize inappropriately from animal studies to humans and that they often underestimate biological factors.
Humanistic Theories
- Humanistic theories emphasize subjective viewpoints when studying personality. They have an optimistic view that focuses on humans’ rationality, consciousness, and freedom.
- Abraham Maslow studied the healthy personality and described the characteristics of the self-actualizing personality.
- Carl Rogers’s person-centered theory suggests that the self-concept is the most important feature of personality. Children’s self-concepts match reality if their parents give them unconditional love. Rogers said that people experience anxiety when reality threatens their self-concepts.
- Critics argue that humanistic theories and concepts are too naïvely optimistic, vague, difficult to test, and biased toward individualistic values.
Biological Approaches
- Hans Eysenck believes that genetics largely determine personality.
- Studies of temperament and heritability provide the most empirical evidence for genetic contributions to personality.
- Environment influences peer relationships and situations.
- Sharing a family environment does not lead to many similarities in personality.
- Evolutionary theorists explain personality in terms of its adaptive value.
Culture and Personality
- American culture promotes a view of the self as independent, while Asian cultures generally promote a view of the self as interdependent.
- Culture influences both aggressiveness in males and altruism.
- Cultural psychologists face the challenge of avoiding stereotypes and acknowledging universal features while studying differences among cultures.
Assessing Personality
- Personality assessments are used to help diagnose psychological disorders, counsel people about normal day-to-day problems, select personnel for organizations, and conduct research.
- Objective personality tests are usually self-report inventories. They include the MMPI-2, the 16PF, and the NEO Personality Inventory.
- Projective personality tests require subjects to respond to ambiguous stimuli. They include the Rorschach test and the Thematic Apperception Test.
- Assessment centers allow psychologists to assess personality in specific situations.
- Each way of assessing personality has its advantages and disadvantages.
