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How would you describe your personality?
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Maybe friendly, creative, quirky?
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What about nervous, or timid, or outgoing?
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But has anyone ever called you a sanguine?
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What about a Kapha, or full of metal?
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Ancient Greek physician Hippocrates believed personality manifested itself in four different
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humors, and, basically, you are who you are because of your balance of phlegm, blood,
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and yellow and black bile.
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According to traditional Chinese medicine, our personalities depend on the balance of
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five elements: Earth, Wind, Water, Metal and Fire.
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Those who practice traditional Hindu Ayurvedic Medicine view each other as unique combinations
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of three different mind-body principles called Doshas.
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But Sigmund Freud thought our personalities depended in part on who was winning the battle
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of urges between the Id, Ego, and Superego.
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Meanwhile, humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow suggested that the key to self-actualization
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was first successfully climbing a hierarchy of more basic needs.
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And then, youve got your BuzzFeed quizzes to determine what kind of pirate, or font,
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or sandwich, or Harry Potter character you are, but, that, I would never take one of
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those seriously.
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All this is to say that people have been characterizing one another for a long, long time, and whether
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youre into blood, or bile, or ego, or id, or BLT, or PB&J;, there are a lot of ways to
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describe and measure a personality.
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And all these theories, all the years of research, and cigar smoking, and inkblot gazing, and
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the fans debating whether theyre more of a Luke or a Leia, theyre all funneling down
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to one big central question.
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Who, or what, is the self?
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[Intro]
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Last week we talked about how psychologists often study personality by examining the differences
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between characteristics, and by looking at how these various characteristics combine
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to create a whole thinking, feeling person.
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The early psychoanalytic and humanistic theorists had a lot of ideas about personality, but
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some psychologists question their lack of clearly measurable standards.
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Like, there was no way to really quantify someones inkblot response, or how orally
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fixated they might be.
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So this drive to find a more empirical approach spawned two more popular theories in the twentieth
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century, known as the trait and social cognitive perspectives.
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Instead of focusing on things like lingering unconscious influences or missed growth opportunities,
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trait theory researchers look to define personality through stable and lasting behavior patterns
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and conscious motivations.
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Legend has it that it all began in 1919, when young American psychologist Gordon Allport
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paid a visit to none other than Freud himself.
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Allport was telling Freud about his journey there on the train, and how there was this
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little boy who was obsessed with staying clean and didnt want to sit next to anyone or touch
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anything.
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Allport wondered if the boys mother had a kind of dirt phobia that had rubbed off on
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him.
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So yadda yadda yadda, hes telling his tale, and at the end of it Freud looks at him and
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says, Mhmm..
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Was that little boy you?
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Allport was basically like, No, man, that was just some kid on the train.
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Dont try to make this into some big unconscious episode from my repressed childhood.
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Allport thought Freud was digging a little too deep, and that sometimes you just need
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to look at motives in the present, not the past, to describe behavior.
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So Allport started his own club, describing personality in terms of fundamental traits,
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or characteristic behaviors and conscious motives.
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He wasnt so much interested in explaining traits as he was in describing them.
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Modern trait researchers like Robert McCrae and Paul Costa have since organized our fundamental
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characteristics into whats casually known as The Big Five: openness, conscientiousness,
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extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism, which you can remember using the mnemonic
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OCEAN, or CANOE, whichever one you prefer.
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Each of these traits exist on a spectrum, so, for example, your level of openness can
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range, on one end, from being totally open to new things and variety, or wanting strict,
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regular routine on the other end.
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Your degree of conscientiousness can translate into being impulsive and careless, or careful
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and disciplined.
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Someone high on the extroversion end will be sociable, while those on the low end will
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be shy and reserved.
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A very agreeable person, meanwhile, is helpful and trusting, while someone at the opposite
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end may be suspicious or uncooperative.
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And finally, on the neuroticism spectrum, an emotionally stable person will be calm
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and secure, while a less stable person is often anxious, insecure, and self-pitying.
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The important idea here is that these traits are hypothesized to predict behavior and attitude.
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Like an introvert might prefer communicating through e-mail more than an extrovert, and
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an agreeable person is much more likely to help their neighbor move that couch than a
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suspicious one whos just glaring through the window.
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By adulthood, trait theorists will tell you these characteristics are pretty stable, but
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it isnt to say that they cant flex a little in different situations.
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Like that same shy person might end up singing Elvis karaoke in a room full of people under
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the right conditions.
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So our personality traits are better at predicting our average behavior that what wed do in
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any specific situation, and research indicates that some traits, like neuroticism, seem to
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be better predictors of behavior than others.
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This flexibility that we all seem to have leads to the fourth major theory on personality,
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the social cognitive perspective.
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Originally proposed by our Bobo-beating friend Alfred Bandura, the social cognitive school
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emphasizes the interaction between our traits and their social context.
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Bandura noted that we learn a lot of our behavior by watching and imitating others.
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Thats the social part of the equation.
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But we also think a lot about how these social interactions affect our behavior, which is
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the cognitive part.
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So, in this way, people and their situations basically work together to create behavior.
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Bandura referred to this sort of interplay as reciprocal determinism.
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Meaning, that for example, the kind of books you read or music you listen to or friends
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you hang out with say something about your personality, because different people choose
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to be in different environments, and then those environments in turn continue to reinforce
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our personalities.
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So if Bernice has a kind of anxious-suspicious personality, and she has a serious, titanic
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crush on Sherlock Holmes, she might be extra attuned to potentially dangerous or fishy
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situations.
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But the more she sees the world in that way, the more anxious and suspicious she gets.
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In this way, were both the creators and the products of the situations we surround ourselves
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with.
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Thats why one of the key indicators of personality in this school of thought has to do with our
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sense of personal control that is, the extent to which you perceive that you have
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control over your environment.
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Someone who believes that they control their own fate, or make their own luck, is said
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to have an internal locus of control, while those who feel like theyre just guided by
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forces beyond their control are said to have an external locus.
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Now whether were talking about control versus helplessness, introversion versus extroversion,
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calm versus anxious, or whatever, each of these different personality perspectives have
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their own methods of testing and measuring personality.
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Weve talked before about how the psychoanalyst super-hunk Hermann Rorschach used his inkblot
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test to infer information about a persons personality; we know that Freud used dream
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analysis, and both he and Young were both fans of free association, but the broader
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school of theorists, now known as the psycho-dynamic camp that descended from Freud and pals, also
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use other projective psychological tests, including the famous thematic apperception
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test.
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In this kind of test, youd be presented with evocative but ambiguous pictures, and then
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asked to provide information about them.
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You might be asked to tell a story about the scenes, considering things like how are the
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characters feeling, or whats going on, or what happened before this event and what will
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happen after.
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Like check it out, is the woman crying because her brother just died, or from a bee sting?
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Or is she a maid laughing because some royal just passed out drunk on his bed, or perhaps
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the object of her long-burning affection has just confessed his love in a fever haze all
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Jane Austen-style and shes having a mini-breakdown in the hall?!
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The idea is that your responses will reveal something about your concerns and motivations
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in real life, or how you see the world, or about your unconscious processes that drive
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you.
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By contrast with that approach, though, modern trait personality researchers believe that
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you can assess personality traits by having people answer a series of test questions.
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There are lots of so-called personality trait inventories out there.
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Some provide a quick reading on a particular enduring trait, like anxiety or self-esteem,
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while other gauge a wide range of traits, like our friends The Big Five.
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These tests, like the Myers-Briggs, which you might have heard of, involve long questionnaires
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of true-false or agree-disagree questions like, Do you enjoy being the center of attention?,
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Do you find it easy to empathize with others?, or Do you value justice over mercy?
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But the classic Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory is probably the most widely used
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personality test.
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The most recent version asks a series of five hundred and sixty-seven true-false questions,
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varying from No one seems to understand me to I like mechanics magazines to I loved
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my father, and is often used to identify emotional disorders.
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Then theres how Banduras social cognitive camp sizes you up.
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Because this school of thought emphasizes the interaction of environment and behavior
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rather than just traits alone, they arent solely into questions and answers.
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Instead, they might measure personality in different contexts, understanding behavior
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in one situation is best predicted by how you acted in a similar situation.
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Like, if Bernice freaked out and tried to hide under the bed during the last five thunderstorms,
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we can predict that she will do that again next time.
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And if we conducted a controlled lab experiment where we, say, we looked at the effects of
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thunderstorm noises on peoples behavior, we might get an even better sense of what
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baseline psychological factors could best predict storm-induced freak-outs.
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And finally, there are the Humanistic theorists like Maslow.
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They often reject standardized assessments altogether.
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Instead, they tend to measure your self-concept through therapy, interviews, and questionnaires
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that ask subjects to describe both how they would ideally like to be and how they actually
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are.
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The idea is that the closer the actual and ideal are, the more positive the subjects
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sense of self.
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Which brings us back to that biggest motherlode question of them all: Who, or what, is the
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self?
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All the books out there about self-esteem, self-help, self-awareness, self-control, and
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so on are built upon one assumption: that the self is the organizer of our thoughts
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and feelings and actions: essentially the center of a personality.
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But of course, its a sticky issue.
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One way to think about self is through the concept of possible selves, like your ideal
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self, perhaps devastatingly attractive and intelligent, successful, and well-loved, as
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well as your most feared self, the one who could end up unemployed and lonely and rundown.
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This balance of potential best and worst selves motivates us through life.
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In the end, once you factor in environment and childhood experiences, culture and all
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that mess, not to mention biology which we havent even touched on today, can we really
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firmly define self?
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Or answer certainly that we even have one?
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That, my friend, is one of lifes biggest questions, and so far it has yet to be universally
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answered.
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But you learned a lot anyway today, right?
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As we talked about the trait and social cognitive perspectives, and also about different ways
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these schools and others measure and test personality.
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We also talked about what self is, and how our self-esteem works.
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Thanks for watching, especially to our Subbable subscribers who make Crash Course possible.
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To find out how you can become a supporter, just go to subbable.com/crashcourse.
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This episode was written by Kathleen Yale, edited by Blake de Pastino, and our consultant
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is Dr. Ranji Bhagwat.
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Our director and editor is Nicholas Jenkins, and the script supervisor is Michael Aranda,
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who is also our sound designer, and the graphics team is Thought Cafe.
This post was previously published on YouTube.
Photo credit: Screenshot from video.
The post Measuring Personality: Crash Course Psychology #22 appeared first on The Good Men Project.