Personality Traits

This post is an exerpt of this book: Matthews, G. Personality traits. Cambridge University Press, 2003.

History

• Allport and Odbert (1936) identified almost 18,000 English personality-relevant terms.

The trait concept and personality theory

Introduction: conceptions of traits

Everyday conceptions of traits

Everyday conceptions of personality traits make two key assumptions.

• Traits are stable over time.
  • Most people would accept that there is a core of consistency which defines the individual’s “true” nature.
  • In other words, there are differences between individuals that are apparent across a variety of situations.
  • Stability distinguishes traits from more transient properties of the person, such as temporary mood states.
• Trait directly influence behavior.
  • If a person spontaneously breaks into chearful song, we might “explain” the behaviour by saying that he or she has a happy disposition.

One of the major tasks for a scientific psychology of traits is to distinguish mental properties of the person from overt behaviours, and to investigate the causal relationship between them.

Scientific conceptions of traits

If there is to be a speciality called personality, its unique and therefore defining characteristic is traits.

Steps of developing a science of traits:

1. The measurement and classification of traits.
   1. Verbal report
      1. self-report
      2. ask the repondent
   2. Behaviour tasks in the laboratory
      1. In practice, howerver, personality measures based on objective behaviour tests have had only limited success, and few have been validated.
      2. (Verbal report has been the preferred method of trait assesment used by personality researchers.)
   3. (What is the number of broad dimensions needed to describe the main elements of any individual personality?)
      1. Many of these (personality traits) words have rather similar meanings.
      2. Such overlapping traits can be grouped together as a broad aspect or dimension of personality.
2. To test whether and how traits relate to behaviours.
   1. There is no guarantee that people’s self-descriptions are accurate.
   2. Traits may also be useful in applied settings, in predicting a person’s job performance, or the response of a patient to therapy, for example.
3. Development of a satisfactory theory of personality traits.
   1. (We may be able to access people’s levels of extraversion and other traits, and show that our assessment predicts some aspects of their behaviour)
   2. But in themselves these observations tell us nothing about why the personality dimension predicts behaviour.
   3. One difficulty is that personality may be represented at a variety of levels of psychological description.
   4. For example, extraversion might be associated
      1. with simple properties of the central nervous system, such as the excitability of individual neurones
      2. or with style of information processing
      3. or with acquired social knowledge and beliefs.
      4. We can only distinguish these broad possibilities by the normal, somewhat laborious scientific methods of formulating specific hypotheses and testing them rigorously against experimental and observational evidence.

Whether we can ever develop a general scientific theory of traits at all?

• The idographic approach to personality (e,g,m Lamiell, 1981) considers that all aspects of personality are fundamentally unique and idosyncratic to each individual, so that no generalised theoretical statements are possible.
• In this book, we adopt the alternative nomothetic apporach, wich assumes that we can arrive at general hypotheses concerning stable individual differences through the normal scientific method.
  • We cannot, ofcourse, expect such hypotheses to predict all or even most of the person’s behaviour; the uniqueness of individuals seems secure.

Causal primacy. There is uncertainty too over the causal status of traits.

看完第一章了，但是还没时间整理，这里只是第一节的内容