Personality Theories: An Introduction
Dr. C. George Boeree
Personality psychology, also known
as personology, is the study of
the person, that is, the whole
human individual. Most people, when they think of personality, are
actually thinking of personality differences
- types and traits and the like. This is certainly an important part
of personality psychology, since one of the characteristics of persons is
that they can differ from each other quite a bit. But the main part of
personality psychology addresses the broader issue of "what is it to be a
person."
Personality psychologists view their field of study as being at the top (of
course) of a pyramid of other fields in psychology, each more detailed and
precise than the ones above. Practically speaking, that means that
personality psychologists must take into consideration biology (especially
neurology), evolution and genetics, sensation and perception, motivation and
emotion, learning and memory, developmental psychology, psychopathology,
psychotherapy, and whatever else might fall between the cracks.
Since this is quite an undertaking, personality psychology may also be seen
as the least scientific (and most philosophical) field in psychology.
It is for this reason that most personality courses in colleges still teach
the field in terms of theories.
We have dozens and dozens of theories, each emphasizing different aspects of
personhood, using different methods, sometimes agreeing with other theories,
sometimes disagreeing.
Like all psychologists - and all scientists - personality psychologists
yearn for a unified theory, one we
can all agree on, one that is firmly rooted in solid scientific
evidence. Unfortunately, that is easier said then done. People
are very hard to study. We are looking at an enormously complicated
organism (one with "mind," whatever that is), embedded in not only a
physical environment, but in a social one made up of more of these
enormously complicated organisms. Too much is going on for us to
easily simplify the situation without making it totally meaningless by doing
so!
We need to take a look at the various research
methods available to us as personality psychologists to understand
where we stand...
There are two broad classes of research methods: quantitative
and qualitative. Quantitative
methods involve measurements and qualitative methods don't.
Measurement is very important to science because scientists want to get
beyond the purely subjective and to the more objective. If my dear
wife and I are both looking at a man and I say "he's short," she may say
"no, he's not - he's quite tall!" we are stuck with two subjective
opinions. If we take out a tape measure, we can together measure the
man to discover that he is, in fact, 5 foot 8 inches. Since I am 6
foot 2, I might think of him as short. My wife is 5 foot 2, and she
might see him as tall. But there will be no argument about what the
measuring tape says!
(Actually, there won't be any arguing in any case, since my wife is clearly
always correct.)
A patch of color may seem blue to me and green to you. A piece of
music may seem fast to me and slow to you. A person might seem shy to
me and outgoing to you. But if we measure the wavelength of color, or
the rhythm of the music, or find a way to give a number to
shyness-outgoingness, we can agree. We become "objective."
Creating personality tests to
measure personality traits is a common activity of personality
psychologists.
If you take two different forms of measurement - such as a measuring tape
and a weight scale - and we measure the height and weight of a few hundred
of our nearest and dearest friends, we can examine whether the two measures
relate to each other somehow. This is called correlation.
And, as you might expect, people's heights and weights do tend to
correlate: The taller you are, generally speaking the heavier you
are. Of course, there will be some folks who are tall but quite light
and some who are short but quite heavy, and lots of variation in between,
but there will indeed be a modest, but significant, correlation.
You might be able to do the same thing with something involving
personality. For example, you might want to see if people who are shy
are also more intelligent than people who are outgoing. So develop a
way to measure shyness-outgoingness and a way to measure intelligence (an IQ
test!), and measure a few thousand people. Compare the measures and
see if they correlate. In the case of this example, you would likely
find little correlation, despite our stereotypes. Correlation is a
popular technique in psychology, including personality.
What correlation can't help you with is finding what causes what. Does
height somehow cause weight? Or is it the other way around? Does
being shy cause you to be smarter, or does being smarter cause you to be
shy? You can't say. It could be one way or the other, or in fact
there could be some other variable that is the cause of both.
That's where experimentation comes
in. Experiments are the "gold standard" of science, and all of us
personality psychologists wish we had an easier time doing them. In
the prototypical experiment, we actually manipulate one of the variables
(the independent one) and then measure a second variable (the dependent
one).
So, for example, you can measure the degree of rotation of the volume knob
on your radio, and then measure the actually volume of the music that comes
out of the speakers. What you would find, obviously, is that the
further you turn the knob, the louder the volume. They correlate, but
this time, because the knob was actually manipulated (literally in this
case) and the volume measured after, you know that the rotation of the knob
is in some way a cause of the volume.
Taking this idea into the world of personality, we could show people scary
movies that have been rated as to how scary they are. Then we could
measure their anxiety (with an instrument that measures how sweaty our hands
get, for example, or with a simple test where we ask them to rate how
frightened they are). Then we can see if they correlate. And, of
course, they would to some degree. Plus we now know that the scarier
the movie, the more scared we get. A breakthrough in psychological
science!
There are several things that make measurement, correlation, and experiments
difficult for personality psychologists. First, it isn't always easy
to measure the kinds of things we are interested in in any meaningful
way. Even the examples of shyness-easygoingness and intelligence and
anxiety are iffy at best. How well do people recognize their own
anxiety? How well does a sweat-test relate to anxiety? Can a
paper-and-pencil test really tell you if you are smart or shy?
When we get to some of the most important ideas in personality - ideas like
consciousness, anger, love, motivations, neurosis - the problem looks at
present to be insurmountable.
Another difficulty is the problem of control.
In
experiments,
especially, you need to control all the irrelevant variables in order to see
whether the independent variable actually affects the dependent
variable. But there are millions of variables impacting us at every
moment. Even our whole history as a person is right there, influencing
the outcome. No sterile lab will ever control those!
Even if you could control many of the variables - the psychological version
of a sterile lab - could you now generalize
beyond that situation? People act differently in a lab than at
home. They act differently when they are being observed than when they
do in private. Experiments are actually social situations, and they
are different from other social situations. Realism might be the
answer, but how does one accomplish realism at the same time as one keeps
control?
Then there's the problem of samples.
If
a
chemist works with a certain rock, he or she can be pretty confident that
other samples of the same rock will respond similarly to any chemicals
applied. Even a biologist observing a rat can feel pretty comfortable
that this rat is similar to most rats (although that has been
debated!). This is certainly not true for people.
In psychology, we often use college freshmen as subjects for our
research. They are convenient - easily available, easy to coax into
participation (with promises of "points"), passive, docile.... But
whatever results you get with college freshmen, can you generalize them to
people in factories? to people on the other side of the world?
to people 100 years ago or 100 years in the future? Can you even
generalize to college seniors? This problem transcends the issues for
quantitative methods to qualitative methods as well.
What about qualitative methods,
then? Qualitative methods basically involve careful observation of
people, followed by careful description, followed by careful analysis.
The problem with qualitative methods is clear: How can we be certain
that the researcher is indeed being careful? Or, indeed, that the
researcher is even being honest? Only by replicating the studies.
There are as many qualitative methods as there are quantitative
methods. In some, the researcher actually introspects
- looks into his own experiences - for evidence. This sounds weak, but
in fact it is ultimately the only way for a researcher to directly access
the kinds of things that go on in the privacy of his or her own mind!
This method is common among existential psychologists.
Other researchers observe people
"in the wild," sort of like ethologists watch birds or chimps or lions, and
describe their behavior. The good thing here is that it is certainly
easier to replicate observations than introspections. Anthropologists
typically rely on this method, as do many sociologists.
One of the most common qualitative method in personality is the interview.
We ask questions, sometimes prearranged ones, sometimes by the seat of our
pants, of a variety of people who have had a certain experience (such as
being abducted by a UFO) or fall into a certain category (such as being
diagnosed as having schizophrenia). The case
study is a version of this that focusses on gaining a rather
complete understanding of a single individual, and is the basis for a great
deal of personality theory.
Ultimately, science is just careful observation plus careful thinking.
So we personality psychologists do the best we can with our research
methods. That does leave us to consider the business of careful
thinking, though, and there are a couple of particulars there to consider as
well.
First, we must always be on guard against ethnocentrism.
Ethnocentrism is (for our purposes) the tendency we all have to see things
from the perspective of our own culture. We are born into our culture,
and most of us never truly leave it. We learn it so young and so
thoroughly that it becomes "second nature."
Freud, for example, was born in 1856 in Moravia (part of what is now the
Czech Republic). His culture - central European, German speaking,
Victorian era, Jewish... - was quite different from our own (whatever that
might be). One thing his culture taught was that sex was a very bad
thing, an animal thing, a sinful thing. Masturbation was thought to
lead to criminality, retardation, and mental illness. Women who were
capable of orgasms were assumed to be nymphomaniacs, unlikely to make good
wives and mothers, and possibly destined for prostitution.
Freud is to be respected in that he was able to rise above his cultural
attitudes about sex and suggest that sexuality - even female sexuality - was
a natural (if animalistic) aspect of being human, and that repressing one's
sexuality could lead to debilitating psychological disorders. On the
other hand, he didn't quite see the possibility of a new western culture -
our own - wherein sexuality was not only accepted as normal but as something
we should all be actively engaged in at every opportunity.
A second thing to be on guard against is egocentrism.
Again, for our purposes, we are talking about the tendency to see our
experiences, our lives, as being the standard for all people. Freud
was very close to his mother. She was 20 when she had him, while his
father was 40. She stayed home to raise him, while his father was
working the usual 16 hour days of the time. Little Freud was a child
genius who could talk about adult matters by the time he was five. He
was, as his mother once put it, her "golden Siggy."
These circumstances are unusual, even for his time and place. Yet, as
he developed his theory, he took it for granted that the mother-son
connection was at the center of psychology for one and all! That, of
course, was a mistake: egocentrism.
Last, we need to be on guard against dogmatism.
A
dogma
is a set of ideas that the person who holds those ideas will not permit to
be criticized. Do you have evidence against my beliefs? I don't
want to hear them. Do you notice some logical flaws in my
arguments? They are irrelevant. Dogmas are common in the worlds
of religion and politics, but they have absolutely no place in
science! Science should always be open to new evidence and
criticism. Science isn't "Truth;" it is just a movement in that
general direction. When someone claims they have "Truth," science
comes to a grinding halt.
Well, sadly, Freud was guilty of dogmatism. He became so attached to
his ideas that he refused to accept disagreement from his "disciples."
(Notice the religious term here!) Some, like Jung and Adler, would
eventually go on to develop their own theories. If only Freud had not
been dogmatic, if only he had been open to new ideas and new evidence and
allowed his theory to evolve openly, we might all be "Freudians" today - and
"Freudian" would mean something quite different and much grander.
Enough of this beating around the bush. Let's get started. Where
should we start? At the beginning, of course. And that would be
the great master himself, Sigmund Freud.
© Copyright 2007, C. George Boeree
