Personality Precis of Funder (2001)

Mission Empirical Goal How are persons situations and behaviors related? Institutional Goal Integrating developmental, social, cognitive and biological psychology to allow understanding of the whole person

Paradigms Psychoanalytic Freud’s personal life under criticism Crews (1998) Renewed interest in a scientific unconscious

Trait Psychology Person-Situation Debate resolved Mischel’s (1968) contention that behavior is so unstable and narrow as to render the concept of personality unimportant has been repudiated Relative order of individuals preserved over situational changes. Deployed in Violence, personality disorder, drug use, sex and mating, driving, employment, …

The big five and Five factor models Five factor model recognized as the latitude and longitude of any exploration of personality (Ozer and Reise, 1994) Claims the 5FM does not subsume all other constructs, even if these can all be mapped onto the 5FM (p ) What lies beyond? What lies within?

Other Behaviorist Watson (1925); Skinner (1938) Social learning (Rotter, 1954; Eysenck, 1968; Bandura, 1977; 1999) Humanistic Rogers, Kelly, Maslow

New Paradigms Social-Cognitive Perception, memory, “schemas” as explanations of behavior Higgins (1999) Anxiety and Depression as the result of comparisons of what we are compared to what we should be and what we hope to be (respectively) Baldwin (1999) Schemas get activated for situations and then control our response Criticism by Bandura regarding fragmentation

Attempts to Integrate Social Cognitive Models Bandura (2001) social cognitive theory of personality Self-control via self reward and self punishment Mischel (1999) CAPS Series of if … then rules for behaving in situations Is this anything other than a redescription? If it is, then is it anything other than traits?

Social Cognition & Traits Much social cognitive research defines its “schema” types on the basis of 3-4 item measures of dubious validity and/or reliability and with unknown relationships to personality traits Social cognition workers seem ill disposed to see the generalizability and stability of the traits they study. If schemas are stable then they become traits. If biological then soc-cog becomes a working model of trait psychology Someone should compare Bandura, Dweck, Higgins etc to 5FM

Biological Models Frontal lobes and personality (Damasio, 1994) Amygdala and emotion (Buck, 1999) Testosterone, Cortisol, 5HT, DA 2 How do we bridge the “explanatory gap” between neurons and psyche?

Behavior and Molecular Genetics All of personality and related constructs are around half due to differences in genes (Plomin and others) Shared environment typically unimportant (Rowe, 1997; Scarr, 2000) Some hint that behaviors are more influences by families than are self reports (really?) What are the genes? Need very large studies for complex genetic traits (n = )

Evolutionary Darwin: Natural Selection & Sexual Selection determine change Buss, Gangestad, Kenrick, Miller Sex differences, mating behaviors, selection for detecting relevant traits, sexual selection for desired traits of a partner (kindness intelligence)

Summary Traits Unconscious & conscious motives Social Cognition & Schemas motivations, attributions … If … then rules

Basic Issues Out of Person, situation & Behavior Need more measures of behavior If personality correlates.4 with a behavior, the assumptions is that 84% is situation What about: Unmeasured traits (or schemas etc) Unmeasured cognitive ability (or sensory performance) Error (of measurement of the behavior or the trait) Noise (unrepeatable accidents)

What about behavior How do we code it? What do we measure? How many behaviors did you do today?

Descriptions What do extraverts do? (Greenwald, 1999) Broader ranges Outcomes (job, life, health) Peer reports (reputation) Interviews (diaries) Research observation Expensive

Institutions Getting over Mischel’s wrecking ball Accepting biology, stability Transmitting our history Note Funder misses all of English difference research and IQ

Integrating with clinical Continuity, causality Prozac in normals (great study Knutson (1998) How does treatment interact with (change?) personality?

Developmental Integration We call the personality of preverbal children “temperament” These are close to identical (Caspi & Siva, 1995) How does personality develop and set? Social psychology Close to two sides of the same coin Some social psychologists have a mission to teach that personality has no place in explaining behavior (Conner, 2000) But emotion, self-evaluation, goal orientation are clear personality constructs