PSYB30- Lectures| Study Guide
Two Fundamental Questions-
- Our goal is to focus on how people differ
1. How do people differ?
2. Why do people differ?
How do we come to have the personalities that we do?
- Examples include…
o Parents that read to their children tend to have better literacy
o Parents that are violent and aggressive in punishment have children that are
aggressive
- Role of parenting
o We often fail to recognize that parents also share same genes as children
▪ Most effects are correlational
o Twin studies have addressed this problem
▪ Genes are so much more powerful than environments
Twin Studies-
- MZ twins v. DZ twins’ studies suggest heritability
o Estimates about .5 for personality traits
- Two types of environmental contributions
o Shared environment = what siblings share, parenting practices, neighborhood,
family life
o Nonshared environment is everything else, more important than shared
environment
▪ Importance of the nonshared environment…
• Adult siblings’ personalities are about equally correlated whether
they grew up together or apart
o We know this from adoption studies
• Adoptive siblings are not much similar than two random people
from the same culture
• MZ twins are not much more similar than the effect of shared
genes
o Differences may be due to random events that people
experience
Two Fundamental Questions-
- So, from twin studies we know that there is high heritability for just about everything
o Not everything is due to genes
▪ There is the Flynn effect, which suggests that people are getting smarter
over time/history
o But counter-intuitively almost everything that is not genetic is due to non-shared
environment
- This is an important puzzle in the field of personality research
o Why doesn’t the family environment account for more?
▪ Do you believe that your parents have not had a significant impact in the
development of your personality beyond the genes that they/ve given to
you?
,PSYB30- Lectures| Study Guide
- In this course, we will further explore what makes people differ and why people differ
o Why is it important to know this?
o Why do we study these questions?
▪ It helps us to understand one another to help us achieve harmony as well
as communicate well
• It is so difficult for us to be with people who are dissimilar to us
▪ The more we understand the personality trait the more potentiality to
intervene
Personality is Important-
- Personality influence how we act, see ourselves, think about the world, interact with
others, feel, select our environments, what goals and desires we pursue in life and how
we react to our circumstances
- Personality plays a key role in affecting how we shape our lives, influencing how we
think, act and feel
- We are constantly making decisions about who we want to be friends with, associate
with, etc. based on predictions about how others will behave
- We make these judgements by assuming that people have a personality
- What does personality predict?
o How much of your life circumstances are due to your personality?
▪ How long you will live
▪ Happiness
▪ Success
▪ Likelihood of getting married/staying married and being satisfied with
your marriage
▪ How much sex you will have?
▪ How you communicate
▪ What sort of job you will have?
▪ Your mental and physical health
▪ Political attitudes
▪ Risk taking
▪ Likelihood of dying in an accident
▪ Religiousness
▪ Educational achievement
What is Personality?
- When we talk about personality, we’re talking about a stable trait across different
situations
o Lasting, enduring traits
Personality- the set of psychological traits and mechanisms within the individual that are
organized and relatively enduring and that influence his or her interactions with and adaptations
to the, the intrapsychic, physical and social environment
Traits- the average tendencies of a person
What are the basic building blocks of personality?
- Psychological traits are useful for three reasons…
1. They help describe and understand the different dimensions that differentiate
people
,PSYB30- Lectures| Study Guide
2. They help explain behaviour
3. They help predict future behaviour
o We need to have a sense of personality to feel comfortable
▪ We need to see how people will behave or do well in certain contexts
▪ Will we be able to get along with these people?
- A central question asked by personality psychologists; what are the basic building blocks
of personality?
o Most personality psychologists believe there is a certain number of fundamental
traits to make up personalities
- Personality psychologists often try to answer the following important questions?
o How many traits are there?
o How are the traits organized?
o What are the origins of traits?
o What are the correlations and consequences of traits?
Personality Taxonomies- can psychologists reliably identify a basic set of trait categories
(dimensions) upon which all personality dispositions can be placed on or understood?
An example would be the Big Five
Personality Typologies- can psychologists identify a manageable set of personality types (groups
of people) representing unique combinations of basic traits?
An example would be the Myers Briggs test
- Current consensus (or closest thing to a consensus) is the big five
o Tests of the big five tend to have good test/retest reliability over a five-year
person, particularly over the age of 30
o These measures also predict real world outcomes
▪ Conscientiousness predicts faithfulness to one’s spouse
▪ Openness predicts likelihood of changing jobs
▪ Extraversion predicts more sexual partners
Three Levels of Analysis-
- Personality can be analyzed at three levels:
1. Like all others (the human nature level)
2. Like some others (the level of groups and individual differences)
3. Like no others (the level of human uniqueness)
- In this course, we will mostly be focusing at the level of individual differences and
group differences
o Level of group differences; the homogeneity of groups
▪ People differ in their moral values
▪ People with different moral values tend to form different groups of people
• And then, in certain circles there will be more people who are
similar to their moral values
, PSYB30- Lectures| Study Guide
o People may actually be missing something because they are
so focused on their single group
• Nearly every social psychologist identifies as politically left-wing
o We can see this as a problem that people do not share their
moral values with most of the world
▪ Studying personality at the group level
• Looking at individual differences in a group
Discussion Question One:
Is the lack of moral diversity among social and personality psychologist a problem? Why or why
not?
o Level of individual differences; the authoritarian personality
▪ In the 1950s, psychologists wanted to understand how the Nazis could
commit genocide
• Is there a pre-fascist personality?
▪ Psychologists began to study the individual difference traits that might
make some people susceptible to prejudice and extreme dehumanization
▪ In 1950, Adorno et al. published “The Authoritarian Personality”
• The authoritarian personality is characterized by a rigid adherence
to middle class values, submissiveness to authority, closed-
mindedness, black and white thinking, preoccupation with power
relationships and condemnation of those who are perceived to be
violating traditional values
▪ Hypothesized that this personality types stems from early experiences with
parents
• Raised in an authoritarian household in which parents are
demanding and non-responsive
▪ It’s important to note that there’s nothing wrong with Germans in
particular; psychologist believe that under the right circumstanced any
society is capable of genocide (an example includes the Stanley Milgram
experiment)
o In essence, the authoritarian personality is still studied by psychologists today-
particularly in the realm of political psychology
Two Fundamental Questions-
- Our goal is to focus on how people differ
1. How do people differ?
2. Why do people differ?
How do we come to have the personalities that we do?
- Examples include…
o Parents that read to their children tend to have better literacy
o Parents that are violent and aggressive in punishment have children that are
aggressive
- Role of parenting
o We often fail to recognize that parents also share same genes as children
▪ Most effects are correlational
o Twin studies have addressed this problem
▪ Genes are so much more powerful than environments
Twin Studies-
- MZ twins v. DZ twins’ studies suggest heritability
o Estimates about .5 for personality traits
- Two types of environmental contributions
o Shared environment = what siblings share, parenting practices, neighborhood,
family life
o Nonshared environment is everything else, more important than shared
environment
▪ Importance of the nonshared environment…
• Adult siblings’ personalities are about equally correlated whether
they grew up together or apart
o We know this from adoption studies
• Adoptive siblings are not much similar than two random people
from the same culture
• MZ twins are not much more similar than the effect of shared
genes
o Differences may be due to random events that people
experience
Two Fundamental Questions-
- So, from twin studies we know that there is high heritability for just about everything
o Not everything is due to genes
▪ There is the Flynn effect, which suggests that people are getting smarter
over time/history
o But counter-intuitively almost everything that is not genetic is due to non-shared
environment
- This is an important puzzle in the field of personality research
o Why doesn’t the family environment account for more?
▪ Do you believe that your parents have not had a significant impact in the
development of your personality beyond the genes that they/ve given to
you?
,PSYB30- Lectures| Study Guide
- In this course, we will further explore what makes people differ and why people differ
o Why is it important to know this?
o Why do we study these questions?
▪ It helps us to understand one another to help us achieve harmony as well
as communicate well
• It is so difficult for us to be with people who are dissimilar to us
▪ The more we understand the personality trait the more potentiality to
intervene
Personality is Important-
- Personality influence how we act, see ourselves, think about the world, interact with
others, feel, select our environments, what goals and desires we pursue in life and how
we react to our circumstances
- Personality plays a key role in affecting how we shape our lives, influencing how we
think, act and feel
- We are constantly making decisions about who we want to be friends with, associate
with, etc. based on predictions about how others will behave
- We make these judgements by assuming that people have a personality
- What does personality predict?
o How much of your life circumstances are due to your personality?
▪ How long you will live
▪ Happiness
▪ Success
▪ Likelihood of getting married/staying married and being satisfied with
your marriage
▪ How much sex you will have?
▪ How you communicate
▪ What sort of job you will have?
▪ Your mental and physical health
▪ Political attitudes
▪ Risk taking
▪ Likelihood of dying in an accident
▪ Religiousness
▪ Educational achievement
What is Personality?
- When we talk about personality, we’re talking about a stable trait across different
situations
o Lasting, enduring traits
Personality- the set of psychological traits and mechanisms within the individual that are
organized and relatively enduring and that influence his or her interactions with and adaptations
to the, the intrapsychic, physical and social environment
Traits- the average tendencies of a person
What are the basic building blocks of personality?
- Psychological traits are useful for three reasons…
1. They help describe and understand the different dimensions that differentiate
people
,PSYB30- Lectures| Study Guide
2. They help explain behaviour
3. They help predict future behaviour
o We need to have a sense of personality to feel comfortable
▪ We need to see how people will behave or do well in certain contexts
▪ Will we be able to get along with these people?
- A central question asked by personality psychologists; what are the basic building blocks
of personality?
o Most personality psychologists believe there is a certain number of fundamental
traits to make up personalities
- Personality psychologists often try to answer the following important questions?
o How many traits are there?
o How are the traits organized?
o What are the origins of traits?
o What are the correlations and consequences of traits?
Personality Taxonomies- can psychologists reliably identify a basic set of trait categories
(dimensions) upon which all personality dispositions can be placed on or understood?
An example would be the Big Five
Personality Typologies- can psychologists identify a manageable set of personality types (groups
of people) representing unique combinations of basic traits?
An example would be the Myers Briggs test
- Current consensus (or closest thing to a consensus) is the big five
o Tests of the big five tend to have good test/retest reliability over a five-year
person, particularly over the age of 30
o These measures also predict real world outcomes
▪ Conscientiousness predicts faithfulness to one’s spouse
▪ Openness predicts likelihood of changing jobs
▪ Extraversion predicts more sexual partners
Three Levels of Analysis-
- Personality can be analyzed at three levels:
1. Like all others (the human nature level)
2. Like some others (the level of groups and individual differences)
3. Like no others (the level of human uniqueness)
- In this course, we will mostly be focusing at the level of individual differences and
group differences
o Level of group differences; the homogeneity of groups
▪ People differ in their moral values
▪ People with different moral values tend to form different groups of people
• And then, in certain circles there will be more people who are
similar to their moral values
, PSYB30- Lectures| Study Guide
o People may actually be missing something because they are
so focused on their single group
• Nearly every social psychologist identifies as politically left-wing
o We can see this as a problem that people do not share their
moral values with most of the world
▪ Studying personality at the group level
• Looking at individual differences in a group
Discussion Question One:
Is the lack of moral diversity among social and personality psychologist a problem? Why or why
not?
o Level of individual differences; the authoritarian personality
▪ In the 1950s, psychologists wanted to understand how the Nazis could
commit genocide
• Is there a pre-fascist personality?
▪ Psychologists began to study the individual difference traits that might
make some people susceptible to prejudice and extreme dehumanization
▪ In 1950, Adorno et al. published “The Authoritarian Personality”
• The authoritarian personality is characterized by a rigid adherence
to middle class values, submissiveness to authority, closed-
mindedness, black and white thinking, preoccupation with power
relationships and condemnation of those who are perceived to be
violating traditional values
▪ Hypothesized that this personality types stems from early experiences with
parents
• Raised in an authoritarian household in which parents are
demanding and non-responsive
▪ It’s important to note that there’s nothing wrong with Germans in
particular; psychologist believe that under the right circumstanced any
society is capable of genocide (an example includes the Stanley Milgram
experiment)
o In essence, the authoritarian personality is still studied by psychologists today-
particularly in the realm of political psychology
