10/15/2011 10:49:00 PM
THEORIES OF PERSONALITY
- behavior is a function of person and environment [ B=F(P,E) ]
- TRAIT APPROACH:
 traits= stable predisposition to behave in a given
manner…psychologically real but unobservable features of the
person
o formed in childhood but adjusts in early adulthood
o at adulthood the trait is permanent and is a stable, enduring
feature of themselves that shapes everything they do
 each trait has a unique feature that can be studied in isolation from
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other traits
personality is no more than the collection of traits
BIG 5: Openness (curious v cautious/consistent), Conscientiousness
(responsible v easy going/carefree), Extraversion (outgoing v
reserved/quiet), Agreeableness (cooperative v competitive),
Neuroticism (nervous/insecure v confident)
o Argues that people have stable traits that effect their
behavior (regardless of their environment)
o Agreeableness does NOT effect how you select experiences
BUT will effect how you experience the experience
Halo effect= if you like someone you score them highly on
admirable traits, while you score people you dislike highly on
unflattering traits
Biological responses: startle response, disgust sensitivity, tendency
to stop a ritual behavior HOW DOES THIS FIT IN? LIBERAL v.
CONSERVATIVE?
Personality effects selection into situations and how you experience
situations you enter/quality of the experience
Three new traits: egostrength, need to evaluate and need for
cognition
- PSYCHODYNAMIC APPROACH: (a theory for why some people are
“unnatural”)…FREUD
- must understand someone’s personality type to understand their
personality
* personality influences behavior
- traits thought to be surface manifestation or symptoms of personality…to
understand behavior, must study personality dynamics
* Ego= executive, reasoning conscious self
* Id= innate impulses (present at birth), desires that control sexual
drive and aggression. Operates below level of conscious
thought…seeks gratification
*Superego= conscious conscience. Acquired from parents. Aware of its
presence.
- conflict between the id and the superego  defense mechanisms
*Repression= keeping id impulses completely out of conscious thought
* Reaction Formation= turning unacceptable feelings/urges into its
opposite in conscious experience
* Projection= own unacceptable drives, urges, feelings, traits, made to
be someone else’s fault. No longer your own.
* Transference= Feelings towards other person or group slip over and
attach to another person or group.
* Sublimation= unacceptable id urges and desires find an acceptable
outlet … i.e) aggression play sports
- Authoritarian Personality: develop hostility towards parents, especially
the father (REPRESSED)…id impulses need to find an outlet (REACTION
FORMATION)… excessive glorification and love for parents…TRANSFERENCE
of feelings to all authority figures…PROJECTION of id instincts onto out
groups…psychodynamic approach treats authoritarian personality as
abnormal and needs to be explained
* concern with anti-Semitism and fascism and if there was a certain
personality type more susceptible to authoritarian personality
* developed surveys to identify authoritarian personalities
* acquiescence bias= tendency of people to agree with almost
anything…tested by giving a survey with contradictory
statements…high acquiescence bias and authoritarian
personality tend to be less educated
*certain predispositions towards traits because origins of where you
grew up and how those experiences have influenced you
Authoritarian Predisposition
*comes from Freud’s research on psychoanalysis
- Psychodynamic approach is the clinical tradition
- LEARNING THEORY
* classical:
- Pavlov- unconditioned stimulus, unconditioned response,
conditioned stimulus, conditioned response
- subject is not passive…actions must be repeated
- stimulus generalization= learned reaction to a stimulus applied to similar
stimuli (ex. positive reaction to mom’s smile positive reaction to
everyone’s smile)
- once you have a conditioned response to a stimuli, which has been
produced through 1st order classical conditioning or operant conditioning,
that stimuli can be used in further conditioning
*high ordering conditioning: if baby associates mom’s smile with
pleasure, baby will associate pleasure with Obama if mom smiles when
he comes on TV
- Operant Learning Theory: behavior is rewarded or punished. If punished,
behavior will be extinguished ex) GSI getting slapped when researcher says
“democrat”
*full, sometimes partial reinforcement
-FASIO OLSEN ARTICLE: Pokemon experiment with neutral, positive and
negative words…criticism: subjects trying to please…F&O embed their
research in a false story to undermine these criticisms
* Explicit attitudes= how much you liked/disliked objects (easy to
measure)
*Implicit attitudes= attitudes that you hold that can’t be articulated
-SOCIAL LEARNING THEORY: (Skinner/Bandura) believes it’s crazy to
build a learning theory about humans based off studies by rats BECAUSE
people have agency and can move themselves into environments that will
effect the conditioning process
*we learn through modeling and through information transmitted via
communication environment observational learning…must have
attention, retention, motor reproduction, motivation (if any one breaks
down, modeling won’t occur)
- implicit learning= (associational learning) forming subconscious beliefs
about what goes with what (ie associations) through repeated pairings
*correlated nostril size with criminal history
- consistency theory= when people are processing, or taking in information,
people will resist it if it goes against prior information…individuals acquire
beliefs that an depart from reality (irrational/distorted)…individuals will
engage in all sorts of mechanisms which have implications for their beliefs
and attitudes (dissonance)
*information that is inconsistent with prior is noxious (ie good
person doing a bad thing or vice versa)
Dissonance Reduction DRAW CIRCLE GRAPHS*
*denial= either reject the association, change the affect towards the
actor or the act
-principle of least effort: resolve the dissonance by doing the
easiest thing. Cognitive miser
* bolstering= drowning out inconsistent behavior with other positive
things…positive outweighs the cons.
* differentiation= subtyping…compartmentalize, separate from political
judgment. Place blame on an outside actor.
* transcendence= redescribe the act in more abstract, transcendent
terms, so that your evaluation of the act flips or changes…reframing
the act into something less negative/ making act into something more
abstract. Opposite of differentiation…similar to reaction formation?
Kind of sort of maybe?
*rationalization = keeps initial beliefs in tact by believing that the
actor had good motives/intentions, it was an accident, the actor was
not the “prime mover”…loose connection
- Positivity Principle= tendancy towards the positive…once you resolve
the inconsistency, you get a positive feeling and reinforced in a positive
fashion to reengage.
- Self, trying to justify their own actions (EX. HAZING IN THE GREEK
SYSTEM)
ATTRIBUTION THEORY: how we take information and apply it to how
people behave, as well as the use of that information to explain the actions
rationally…when you observe an event, you want to assign a cause to it.
-attribute causes innate traits (personality of circumstance)
*Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE)- people overuse dispositional
examples to explain behavior when it is actually a non dispositional
example…when you look at others you are more likely to attribute
things that happen to them as their fault.
- Quiz Show example: host asks questions from their own
memory…game is automatically rigged…IN ALL CASES the
contestant and the host rated the host 15 points higher
then the contestants (people are explaining poor
performance of contestants in dispositional terms)
- explanations: need or want to feel in control
*Ultimate Attribution Error (UAE)- judges in group versus out group
behavior…good behavior of in group explained as dispositional, while
bad behavior is explained in non dispositional terms (and vice versa
for the out group)
- explanations: ego defense believes that the individual is
“better” then the out group because we feel better about
ourselves if our group is better then another group
draw the graph
* Actor/Observer Differences- actor’s explanations of actor’s behavior
is explained in more non dispositional terms WHILE the observer’s
explanation of actor’s behavior is explained in more dispositional ways
- when people think about themselves and own properties not a
lot of traits come to mind, we do not think of ourselves w/static
enduring traits UNLIKE how we think about others.
*Success/Failrue Differences- actor’s own success versus actor’s own
failure explained in dispositional and non dispositional terms
(respectively)
- explanations: need to feel worthy explain away failures
as things outside of our control…SELF HANDICAPPING:
before a big challenge where success isn’t guaranteed,
create a huge situational impediment
- individual is a cognitive miser who uses shortcuts when making judgments
(HEURISTICS)
-Availability Heuristic: people will tend to cite and explanation that
is readily available/ most accessible in memory and or perceptions
*memories of people/groups are heavily trait laden, so we
readily call them to mind…people are our visual focus, so we cite
traits of people
- more salient
- Representativeness Heuristic: if an outcome or behavior is
typical/ representative of what a given cause produces, the cause will
tend to be cited
* ex) if behavior is cheating and is typical of dishonesty, when
cheating is encountered, dishonesty will be cited before any
other possible causes (FAE- many behaviors are typical of traits
so we call them readily to mind and employ them in
explanations)
SCHEMAS: (structured knowledge about something can be activated
consciously or subliminally) …efficiently organize information in order to
make sense of all of the information you receive on a daily basis
- subliminal= below conscious awareness
-self fulfilling prophecies: our schema based expectations change our
behavior in a fashion that changes the information we receive, and tends to
generate schema consistent information
- schema theory= what/which schema is activated based on how you
process information
* schema based information processing: when a schema is activated,
assuming the schema exists
-produces efficiencies- remember more, faster, do less
guesswork, less random error
* piecemeal information processing: when no schema exists or when
no schema is activated
Aschematic--------- Schematic (typical)---------- Expert
- uneducated (aschematic) pay less attention to politics
- schemas are activated through the act of categorization
- systematic errors/biases:
*schemas might fill in information that was not there (EX. PICTURE OF
HOT AIR BALLOON RIDE)
*gap filling= rend to remember having seen/perceived schema
expected things that were not present in the information (ex.
waitress/librarian video)
-gap filling illusory database (database of schema confirming
information)
~ experts are less likely to make schema develop
errors like gap filling
* people clear up ambiguity in a schema consistent fashion
- tend to especially remember schema consistent things that
were in the information, and tend to forget schema inconsistent
things in the information
- Illusory Correlation= correlation is 1, or perfect after adjustments seeing
the relationship one expects in the data when it is not actually there…
- own self schema is trait poor, while schemas for others are trait laden
(trait laden= general tendencies to behave in a certain way)
*we see ourselves as unusual
- script (event sequences schema)= elements: props, roles, scenes,
sequence rules
- ascribed schemas= gender, race/ethnicity, age (created bodies of
knowledge on acquired characteristics) …socially constructed
- out group schema is called a stereotype
- stereotypes are:
*less differentiated
* selective
*inaccurate
* more negative
- knowledge about out groups are laden with negative beliefs
* come from within…not acting on reality
-which schema: availability affected by visual cues, regency of schema
activation and frequency…schema will be activated if only one is present
- whether schema: when piecemeal processing is more likely (because you
have no schema)…individual is atypical of a category…person with a whether
schema has a low need for consistency
- schemas can change when:
*Conversion Model
* Bookkeeping Model: gradual accumulation of information slowly
changes beliefs
* Subtyping Model: how discrepant information is coded, schema
becomes more differentiated.
BUT, if you actively try to make people forget a schema, they will do the
opposite.
- visual tuning hypothesis= when individuals activate a schema to something
or their environment, pay closer attention to that (ex. waitress v. librarian
video)
- bi-directional thesis= standard schema activation, activate category and
category attributes come to mind…bi-directional thesis implies works the
other way too.
* “SEEING BLACK”: presented subliminal prime, saw white face, black
face or squiggly line…exposed to crime related objects…if you were
subliminally primed to recognize crime, subjects were much quicker to
identify black faces…not necessarily about prejudices and biases,
simply deals with processing
- AFFECT:
* Moods: transitory, labeled & diffuse
* Emotions: transitive, labeled, object specific
* Attitudes: stable, labeled, object specific
*Arousal States: transitory, unlabeled, diffuse
-classic cognitive model:
- attributes are beliefs that can be positive, negative or neutral in valence
-attitude is the weighted sum of valenced beliefs about the object
*weight increases with salience of attribute to the individual or the
centrality of the attribute to the individual.
- salience= extent to which the attribute comes easily to mind (availability is
high)…whatever is most dominant in your mind has a bigger weight, while
salience can change and be raised or lowered (transitory in nature)
-centrality= generic, enduring view
- consciousness cannot be involved, some attitudes are inference free
- understanding neutrality: (CLASSIC COGNITIVE MODEL)
*Ignorance: attitude is zero because you know nothing
* Indifference: attitude is zero because you have a low need to
evaluate
*Ambivalence: attitude is zero because beliefs cancel out
-attitude differences because of knowledge levels, what they believe to be
true about the object, agreement of facts but disagreement in
evaluation/valence of attributes, and differences in salience or centrality of
attribute.
*changes in salience priming
* changes in information  informing
*changes in beliefs/evaluation of beliefs persuasion
-floating voters: are generally a-schematic
- usually cannot move partisan base to the other end of the spectrum (must
mobilize the base to get votes and convince/win over floating voters)
- online processing model of attitudes:
*a cognitive model, your attitude towards a subject, like politics, is
based on valenced beliefs (weight salience and centrality but does not
emphasize it)
(draw chart)
experience with attitude affective tag w/ valence gets stored next
time schema is activated the beliefs are largely forgotten, but affective
tag is called up and reported
-Inference Free Sources of Attitudes:
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mere exposure effect- subliminally exposed to an object
mere recognition effect- conscious awareness of exposure
if you recognize a name it is automatically more favorable
FACIAL FEEDBACK EFFECT:
*overt head action effects (EX. head shaking/nodding test)
* facial similarity: you like faces that are similar to yours, but
are not sexually attracted to them TRUSTWORTHY, NOT
LUSTWORTHY
* Facial Characteristics- implicit associational learnings…make
inferences about character based on appearance
* mood effects- can influence 8 or 9 points on a 100 point scale
in favor, or against a candidate.
RRPTS- Repression, Reaction Formation, Projection, Transferal,
Sublimation
DBDTR- Denial, Bolstering, Differentiation, Transcendance,
Rationalization
10/15/2011 10:49:00 PM
10/15/2011 10:49:00 PM