What Is a Personality Clash - Essay Example

Running Head: Psychology Psychology s Psychology Personality is that which makes individuals distinctively themselves. It is the stuff of biographers, playwrights and historians, but also of scientists and lay speculators. In a sense, we are all personality theorists. It is a difficult, multidisciplinary area of research. Personality is determined in part by genes, as well as by cultural factors, it operates at the conscious and unconscious level, and it both changes over time and remains stable. Both lay people and academic researchers ask many personality-related questions. The types of questions asked by lay people include the following. What is a personality clash Do people with opposite personalities find each other attractive Can someone have little or no personality Academic questions are also of interest to the lay person, and might include the following. Does personality change much over time What causes (shapes, determines) an individual's personality What are the fundamental dimensions of personality To what extent do personality differences (alone) determine such things as health What causes a person to be an introvert or extravert (more likely an ambivert) Can neurotics be cured effectively Personality psychology is often a child of its investigative method. The couch and the laboratory use different methods, and hence develop different concepts and theories of personality. Personality psychologists, unlike many of their biological and cognitive colleagues, are often 'whole-person' psychologists, not focusing exclusively on beliefs, emotions or cognitions. Many have tended to ask 'big' questions, such as the following. What is the relative importance of the past, the present and the future to the development of personality What motivates human behaviour How important is the concept of self How consistent is human behaviour (Hergenhalin, 1994). As Cook (1984) notes, there are many different and important reasons for studying personality - obviously to gain a scientific understanding, but also to assess people accurately and to try to change people. He also argues that some theories look at the development of personality and others examine the structure of personality, which attempts to get below the surface of observable trait-type behaviours by examining biological, phenomenal or motivational factors. Carver and Scheier (1992) argue that, whereas some personality theorists (especially trait theorists) are interested in the structure of personality, others are more interested in its functioning. Both are important, but the result is often the development of separate theories and approaches. Personality theorists and researchers have influenced and have also been influenced by many other disciplines. Indeed, there is evidence that personality differences are related to different interests in psychology. Thus Zachar and Leong showed that pure (scientific) vs. applied (practitional) graduate students had quite different personalities. Pushing graduate students into strong practitioner-personality orientations to become scientists makes as much sense as trying to convert an introvert into an extravert. However, introverts may benefit from some training and social skills, just as practitioner-orientated graduate students can learn to think and evaluate their interventions scientifically without having to become a practising scientist. (Zachar and Leong, 1992, p.676) Sociologists and anthropologists have influenced some personality theories by discussing what goes on 'outside, around and among' individuals, rather than what goes on inside them. Lately, however, it has been biologists and geneticists whose ideas and discoveries have most influenced personality research. Certainly this trend looks likely to continue. Behaviour genetics, cognitive neuropsychology and multivariate statistics probably represent the most influential contributions to the discipline at the moment (see Section 1.11). Personality psychology aims to provide viable descriptions of and explanations for individual differences. It aims, by observation, hypothesis/theory development and experimental testing, to understand systematic human variability. Researchers hope to understand the basic structure of personality (the periodic table of individual differences), the processes whereby individual differences in observable behaviour occur, and the development of both over time. Those with a preference for a systems framework identify four overarching types, namely the identification/definition of personality, the components of personality, the organisation of those components, and the development of those components (Mayer, 1995). Personality research is either exploratory or confirmatory. The former usually starts with systematic observation that generates hypotheses, which are tested by the latter (empirical experiment). However, all personality theories contain hunches, rather than hypotheses based on intuitive knowledge, everyday observations, or simple rational deductions from thinking about human behaviour. It is through observation, experiment and logic that theories are built, tested and refuted. Inevitably, some theorists rely more heavily on one of these models of theory-building than others. Ideally, personality theorists should aim for elegant, parsimonious, veridical theories of individual functioning. However, description is not explanation - naming (labelling) is not explaining. Personality psychology is replete with overlapping and often rather vague concepts which, in providing complex or novel labels, look like explanations. Much effort has gone into description and taxonomisation, but far less into understanding dynamics and process (Meehl, 1992). It is only when one achieves an effective analysis of behaviour that one can provide an explanation in terms of a mechanism or process. Personality psychology is at once both fascinating and infuriating. It is crammed with novel theories, unusual concepts and perspicacious insights, so that scanning the traditional textbook is like opening Pandora's box. However, few reviewers of the field have attempted a careful 'compare and contrast' approach to the theories, pointing out where they are internally inconsistent and contradictory, where there is no evidence of proof for specific hypotheses, or where all of the experimental evidence suggests that the hypothesis (or the entire theory) is wrong. Personality psychology reviewers seem to be either too humble or too incompetent to do the task. Worse, they do not keep up to date, and personality psychology becomes intellectually and socially isolated from other areas of psychology (Ehrenreich, 1997). Hence they are happy to lay out a 'flea market' of theories for the interested student, without any clear guide as to whether they should be taken seriously or not (see Section 1.6). Most personality theorists have also eschewed grand theories that look too all-inclusive and non-scientific. An exception to this trend is sociobiology. The best books in the field offer a critical, comprehensive, comparative analysis that is unafraid to dismiss or ignore theories, however appealing, that have yielded precious little empirical support over the years. What is required is a method, and a series of criteria, that can be used to make a comparative analysis of all personality theories. Maddi has argued that personality psychology has had an 'unnecessarily prolonged infancy' because researchers have 'made little progress towards weeding out some theories as empirically unworkable' (Maddi, 1989, p.3). Different personality theorists have stressed rather different factors as the determinants of personality. Recent research on identical twins, as well as adoption studies, have stressed the powerful role of genetics in determining personality. Others have preferred to stress socio-cultural determinants, such as child-rearing practices, political and religious institutions, formal and informal education, and economic opportunities. Some place greater emphasis on personal learning through patterns of reward and punishment in the family. There are those who follow the existential and humanistic social philosophers who stress free will and the belief that personality style is a matter of personal choice. There are still other theorists who believe that unconscious mechanisms set in place in early childhood are powerful factors in determining personality structure and process. For the past 20 years, the cognitive revolution in psychology has led a minority of personality theorists to stress the cognitive processes of perception and memory as being the fundamental factors that explain individual differences (Matthews and Deary, 1998). As a result of these differences, personality theorists have answered the fundamental questions in their areas quite differently. Hence there appear to be rather different approaches in personality theory - the psychoanalytic, socio-cultural, trait, learning, sociobiological and existential-humanist approaches. Inevitably, therefore, it is a difficult area to cover or review. Hence textbooks arrange the subject according to different approaches or theories, assuming each is equally valid and important. It is also possible to describe individual differences at quite different levels - ranging from fairly abstract to totally concrete. These may be labelled core vs. peripheral, abstract vs. concrete, inherent vs. learned, and pervasive vs. specific. Most theories include statements and descriptions at all levels. At the abstract/core/trait level, description is about structure and unique characteristics. In the words of trait theory, the levels are usually described as follows. Superfactors These are the most abstract, unique, independent, higher-order factors. They are the periodic table of personality theory - the fundamental elements that make up personality. The past 20 years have seen a growing consensus about what these may be. We will discuss The Big Five in due course. Primary factors This is one level down, where one takes a superfactor and divides it into related constituent parts. Thus the superficial extraversion may have two factors - sociability and impulsivity - which are primary factors, or six factors, such as warmth, gregariousness, assertiveness, activity, excitement seeking and positive emotion. Specific behaviour events These are behavioural manifestations of a primary trait. Thus the person who daily seeks out the company of friends and acquaintances for chats may be labelled sociable and extraverted. Therefore personality theorists may work at different levels within different approaches or traditions, with different methods! Within the fields of personality research, different researchers seem happy working at rather different levels, which are partly dictated by their preferred methodological choices. Above, we specified the different levels within the trait approach. There are equally different levels of analysis when taking the psychoanalytic or neurological approach. One of the aims of science is parsimonious explanation - hence the attraction of working at the superfactor level. Over the years, an impressive amount of consistent and wide-ranging evidence has accumulated which has shown how superfactors relate to widely different but important behaviours. Thus the well-known dimension of introversion-extraversion (described by Hippocrates, Galen, Wundt, Jung, Eysenck and Costa, among others) has been shown to be directly related to mental health, learning and education, risk-taking and accident proneness, criminality and social behaviour, social and political attitudes, sexual attitudes and behaviour, social influence and affiliation, social attraction and personal perception and psychotherapy (Wilson, 1977). Traditional textbooks are often arranged according to traits, like extraversion and neuroticism, which look at correlates of each. In the words of Costa and McCrae (1992), we do believe that trait psychology has come of age - it is a mature science with established and replicable methods and findings. History of personality Personality psychologists have been particularly sensitive to fashions in philosophical thinking. They are commonly involved in frequent and profound discussions about methodology and theory. As Caprara and van Heck (1992) have noted, three movements provided the premises of modern personality psychology, namely psychiatric concern about taxonomising mental illness, the development of mental testing, and an interest in instincts and the development of personality. The earliest books on personality theory as such were written in the 1930s (Lewin, 1935; Allport, 1937; Murray, 1938). There are now probably at least 100 personality textbooks in print (in English alone). Personality psychology was a European concern until the 1940s, since which time it has been dominated by American researchers. It has seen periods of excitement and growth (the 1950s and 1980s) and of decline (the 1960s and 1970s). It goes through periods of crisis and rejuvenation, and it has survived a 'near-death' experience and seen a modest academic renaissance. It has been characterised by a myriad of micro-theories, specialist methodologies and measures which go in and out of fashion, although the psychometric tradition appears to have endured. Ignoring the philosophical considerations of the ancient Greeks and medieval scholars, it is possible to detect various themes in the way in which the scientific study of personality has developed since the middle of the last century. The first discernible of these were phrenology and anatomical psychology, which attempted to look for clear anatomical markers of personality. This type of approach is far from dead, both in the bogus scientific world (e.g. palm-reading) and also in the sociobiological literature, linking such factors as head size (volume or circumference) with intelligence. However, it is neuroanatomy, rather than physiology, that has seen a powerful resurgence of research interest. Indeed, it is on the anatomical structure and functioning of the brain (along with genetic work) that many current theorists have pinned their hopes for a modern scientific breakthrough in the understanding of normal, and especially abnormal, personality functioning. The beginning of the twentieth century saw a great deal of interest in intelligence and possible genetic determinants of the latter. These structural and biodeterminist views spread to the world of personality testing. Over the past few years, powerful new technologies looking at genetic fingerprinting and DNA mapping have made this area one of the most exciting and important for understanding individual differences. It is now widely agreed that personality traits are largely inherited, with perhaps 50 to 60 per cent of variance being accounted for by genetic factors (Plomin and Nesselrode, 1990). However, from the end of World War One until well into the 1960s, ideas from classical and operant conditioning seemed to imply that personality and individual differences were 'learned'. The behaviourists suggested that by observation, imitation, identification and the rules of reward and punishment, people learned, unlearned and changed their personalities. Despite a relatively long and sustained research interest in this tradition, it seems to have fallen out of favour lately. This is not to deny the importance of early learning or experience, but to deny that it is primarily conditioning that determines personality. Radical behaviourists or situationalists even denied the reality of personality, preferring to believe that social situations (their rules and equivalents), not inherent traits, were the primary determinants of nearly all behaviour, particularly 'social behaviour'. References Allport, G. (1937) Personality: a psychological interpretation. New York: Holt. 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