Personality Psychology 3906

Introduction Personality is about our consistency across situations The situation of course DOES play a big role So does the individual, to argue with this is to be a moron

Our focus We’ll focus mostly on what makes us the same What is the same about each individual, not what divides us That said, the differences beg interesting evolutionary questions as well

Variability Why the heck is there variability in personality? Could be normal variation around an optimum Could be that the optimum value changes over time Frequency dependent selection will play a role Many psychological traits are facultative

Intelligence Some say this is not a personality trait, but to me it fits the bill nicely Is it one ability or many? g? Probably something hierarchical But there is a g at the top

intelligence So basically combining Thurstone and Spearman’s ideas Perhaps there are other intelligences

Are there other intelligences? Creativity? Domain specific abilities Non school stuff? Emotional intelligence? Perhaps Basically remember that hunter gatherer IQ would be different that the SAT test….

Variation in intelligence Why does it happen? Brain size (somewhat sure, but the effect is teensy) Polygenetic trait Many challenges during development Brains are expensive

Implications of the evolutionary approach to intelligence We have to learn things in school that are evolutionarily novel Variation in novel stuff like reading and math Not language learning and counting though

Other personality traits How many are there? Big five does a nice job Openness Conscientiousness Extroversion Agreeableness neurotocism

These seem to vary a lot more Intelligence is, it seems, much less variable than the ‘Big 5’ Why? Well other personality traits are probably much more facultative What is optimal changes a great deal depending on the situation

Conclusions Many factors influence personality and intelligence It makes some sense to discuss intelligence separately Evolutionary approaches to intelligence are becoming much more generally accepted