Psychology Personality Behaviorist & Humanistic Theories & Biological Approaches
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Behaviorist Theories
The school of behaviorism emerged in the 1910s, led by John B. Watson. Unlike psychodynamic theorists, behaviorists study only observable behavior. Their explanations of personality focus on learning. Skinner, Bandura, and Walter Mischel all proposed important behaviorist theories.
B. F. Skinner’s Ideas
As described in Chapter 7, “Learning and Conditioning,” B. F. Skinner is well known for describing the principles of operant conditioning. Skinner believed that the environment determines behavior. According to his view, people have consistent behavior patterns because they have particular kinds of response tendencies. This means that over time, people learn to behave in particular ways. Behaviors that have positive consequences tend to increase, while behaviors that have negative consequences tend to decrease.
Skinner didn’t think that childhood played an especially important role in shaping personality. Instead, he thought that personality develops over the whole life span. People’s responses change as they encounter new situations.
Example: When Jeff was young, he lived in the suburbs. He developed a liking for fast driving because his friends enjoyed riding with him and he never got speeding tickets. After he left college, though, he moved to the city. Whenever he drove fast, he got a speeding ticket. Also, his new friends were much more cautious about driving in fast cars. Now Jeff doesn’t like to drive fast and considers himself to be a cautious person.
Albert Bandura’s Ideas
Albert Bandura pointed out that people learn to respond in particular ways by watching other people, who are called models. See Chapter 7, “Learning and Conditioning,” for more information on Bandura’s research on observational learning.
Although Bandura agrees that personality arises through learning, he believes that conditioning is not an automatic, mechanical process. He and other theorists believe that cognitive processes like thinking and reasoning are important in learning. The kind of behaviorism they advocate is called social-cognitive learning.
Whom Do We Imitate?
Research has shown that people are more likely to imitate some models than others. People tend to imitate models they like or admire and models they consider attractive and powerful. People are also more likely to imitate models who seem similar to themselves. Furthermore, if people see models being rewarded for their behavior, they will be more likely to imitate those models. Advertisers often use these research results when they design ads. For example, ads that try to persuade young adults to purchase a certain brand of soft drink often show young, attractive models who are being rewarded with good times for their soda-drinking behavior.
Walter Mischel’s Ideas
Walter Mischel, like Bandura, is a social-cognitive theorist. Mischel’s research showed that situations have a strong effect on people’s behavior and that people’s responses to situations depend on their thoughts about the likely consequences of their behavior. Mischel’s research caused considerable debate because it cast doubt on the idea of stable personality traits. Mischel himself did not want to abandon the idea of stable personality traits. He believed that researchers should pay attention to both situational and personal characteristics that influence behavior.
Today, most psychologists acknowledge that both a person’s characteristics and the specific situation at hand influence how a person behaves. Personal characteristics include innate temperaments, learned habits, and beliefs. The environment includes opportunities, rewards, punishments, and chance occurrences. Personality results from a two-way interaction between a person’s characteristics and the environment. This process of interaction is called reciprocal determinism. People’s characteristics influence the kind of environment in which they find themselves. Those environments, in turn, influence and modify people’s personal characteristics.
Criticisms of Behavioral Approaches
Critics of the behavioral approach to personality maintain three arguments:
- Behaviorist researchers often do animal studies of behavior and then generalize their results to human beings. Generalizing results in this way can be misleading, since humans have complex thought processes that affect behavior.
- Behaviorists often underestimate the importance of biological factors.
- By emphasizing the situational influences on personality, some social-cognitive theorists underestimate the importance of personality traits.
Humanistic Theories
Some psychologists at the time disliked psychodynamic and behaviorist explanations of personality. They felt that these theories ignored the qualities that make humans unique among animals, such as striving for self-determination and self-realization. In the 1950s, some of these psychologists began a school of psychology called humanism.
Humanistic psychologists try to see people’s lives as those people would see them. They tend to have an optimistic perspective on human nature. They focus on the ability of human beings to think consciously and rationally, to control their biological urges, and to achieve their full potential. In the humanistic view, people are responsible for their lives and actions and have the freedom and will to change their attitudes and behavior.
Two psychologists, Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers, became well known for their humanistic theories.
Abraham Maslow’s Theory
The highest rung on Abraham Maslow’s ladder of human motives is the need for self-actualization. Maslow said that human beings strive for self-actualization, or realization of their full potential, once they have satisfied their more basic needs. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs theory is described on page 247.
Maslow also provided his own account of the healthy human personality. Psychodynamic theories tend to be based on clinical case studies and therefore lack accounts of healthy personalities. To come up with his account, Maslow studied exceptional historical figures, such as Abraham Lincoln and Eleanor Roosevelt, as well as some of his own contemporaries whom he thought had exceptionally good mental health.
Maslow described several characteristics that self-actualizing people share:
- Awareness and acceptance of themselves
- Openness and spontaneity
- The ability to enjoy work and see work as a mission to fulfill
- The ability to develop close friendships without being overly dependent on other people
- A good sense of humor
- The tendency to have peak experiences that are spiritually or emotionally satisfying
Carl Rogers’s Person-Centered Theory
Carl Rogers, another humanistic psychologist, proposed a theory called the person-centered theory. Like Freud, Rogers drew on clinical case studies to come up with his theory. He also drew from the ideas of Maslow and others. In Rogers’s view, the self-concept is the most important feature of personality, and it includes all the thoughts, feelings, and beliefs people have about themselves. Rogers believed that people are aware of their self-concepts.
Congruence and Incongruence
Rogers said that people’s self-concepts often do not exactly match reality. For example, a person may consider himself to be very honest but often lies to his boss about why he is late to work. Rogers used the term incongruence to refer to the discrepancy between the self-concept and reality. Congruence, on the other hand, is a fairly accurate match between the self-concept and reality.
According to Rogers, parents promote incongruence if they give their children conditional love. If a parent accepts a child only when the child behaves a particular way, the child is likely to block out experiences that are considered unacceptable. On the other hand, if the parent shows unconditional love, the child can develop congruence. Adults whose parents provided conditional love would continue in adulthood to distort their experiences in order to feel accepted.
Results of Incongruence
Rogers thought that people experience anxiety when their self-concepts are threatened. To protect themselves from anxiety, people distort their experiences so that they can hold on to their self-concept. People who have a high degree of incongruence are likely to feel very anxious because reality continually threatens their self-concepts.
Example: Erin believes she is a very generous person, although she is often stingy with her money and usually leaves small tips or no tips at restaurants. When a dining companion comments on her tipping behavior, she insists that the tips she leaves are proportional to the service she gets. By attributing her tipping behavior to bad service, she can avoid anxiety and maintain her self-concept of being generous.
Criticisms of Humanistic Theories
Humanistic theories have had a significant influence on psychology as well as pop culture. Many psychologists now accept the idea that when it comes to personality, people’s subjective experiences have more weight than objective reality. Humanistic psychologists’ focus on healthy people, rather than troubled people, has also been a particularly useful contribution.
Biological Approaches
Psychologists agree that environmental factors interact with genetic factors to form personality. Some psychologists have proposed theories that emphasize these genetic influences on personality.
Hans Eysenck’s Theory
Psychologist Hans Eysenck believes that genetics are the primary determinate of personality, although he thinks conditioning also plays a role. According to Eysenck, personality traits are hierarchical, with a few basic traits giving rise to a large array of more superficial traits. Genetically determined differences in physiological functioning make some people more vulnerable to behavioral conditioning. Eysenck suggests that introverted people have higher levels of physiological arousal, which allows them to be conditioned by environmental stimuli more easily. Because of this, such people develop more inhibitions, which make them more shy and uneasy in social situations.
Empirical evidence for genetic contributions to personality comes mainly from two kinds of studies: studies of children’s temperaments and heritability studies.
Studies of Temperament
Temperament refers to innate personality features or dispositions. Babies show particular temperaments soon after birth. Temperaments that researchers have studied include reactivity, which refers to a baby’s excitability or responsiveness, and soothability, which refers to the ease or difficulty of calming an upset baby.
Researchers have studied children from infancy to adolescence and found that temperaments remain fairly stable over time. However, temperaments can also be modified over time by environmental factors.
Heritability Studies
Heritability studies also provide evidence for genetic contributions to personality. Heritability is a mathematical estimate that indicates how much of a trait’s variation in a population can be attributed to genes.
Twin studies help researchers to determine heritability, as described in Chapter 2, “Evolution and Genes.” Researchers have shown that identical twins raised together are more similar than fraternal twins raised together in traits such as positive emotionality, negative emotionality, and constraint. Identical twins separated early in life and raised apart are more similar in these traits than are fraternal twins raised together. Both of these research findings suggest the existence of a genetic component to personality.
Behavioral geneticists have shown, after doing studies in many different countries, that the heritability of personality traits is around .5, which means that 50 percent of the variation in personality traits in a group of people can be attributed to genetic differences among those people.
The Influence of Family Environment
Surprisingly, research shows that sharing a family environment doesn’t lead to many similarities in personality. There is no or little correlation between the personality traits of adopted children and their adoptive parents. Researchers think this is because parents don’t act the same way with all their children. Children’s temperaments influence how a parent behaves toward them, and a child’s gender and place in a birth order can also affect how that child is treated.
Environmental Influences
The environment also has important influences on personality. These include peer relationships and the kinds of situations a child encounters. As described on page 277, under “Walter Mischel’s Ideas,” the interactions between innate characteristics and environmental factors are two-way. Children’s temperaments are likely to influence their peer relationships and the situations they encounter. Similarly, peers and situations can modify children’s personality characteristics.
Evolutionary Approaches
Evolutionary theorists explain personality in terms of its adaptive value. Theorists such as David Buss have argued that the Big Five personality traits are universally important because these traits have given humans a reproductive advantage.
