Personality Theory

Chapter 1: The Scientific

Study of Personality
Some of the Theorists We’ll
Study
 Freud  Jung
 Adler  Skinner
 Fromm  Dollard
 Horney  Miller
 Sullivan  Rotter
 Erikson  Rogers
The Psychological Study of
Personality
 The nature of human nature
 An age-old question
 How does the psychological study
of personality differ from
philosophical inquiry?
 Psychology, personality, and science
 Theories . . .
 How they developed
 Evidence
 How well we can predict and
understand behaviour using them
 14 theories in 7 groups
Psychology and Science
 Some scientific assumptions
 Determinism: all events in nature act in
lawful ways
 Human free will?
 Discoverability
 Scientific method: a way of going about it
 Potential human benefit
The Methods of Science: A
Prescription
 Essential ingredients:
 Willingness to test ideas
 Putting ideas into questions
 Operationism: how we define ideas
 Observation
 Careful description
 Logical inference
 Higher-order ingredients:
 The experiment
 The principle of control
 Quantification
Personality in Psychology
 Personality theories have relied on:
 The observational method:
 Difficulties in studying persons
experimentally
 The clinical method:
 Techniques
 ‘A window to mental life’
The Need for Both Methods
 Is the clinical method scientific?
 The essential ingredients are there
but clinicians face a huge amount of
data
 Observational and conceptual
demands
 Control is lacking, and thus so is
replicability
The Nature of Personality
 ‘Personality’ as we the term everyday:
 Impressions of others
 Subjectivity

 The scientific psychology of

personality:
 Inferred attributes and processes that
make us individual
 We want to know about behaviour and
about what impels behaviour
 Note, though, the radical behaviourists
 We also have to study the context of
behaviour (the situations)
 Some personality theorists are better
than others in recognizing the influence
of situations
 We must always remember that
behaviour is a person(s) in a
situation(s)
 Person-situation interaction
 Personality theories began as
clinical theories of disturbed
behaviour
 Can we draw conclusions about
normal personality from studying
disturbed persons?
 The ‘continuity assumption’:
differences in degree, not in kind
What’s Theory and What’s
Personality Theory?
 Personality theories are general
behaviour theories
 Theories construct models of their
phenomena
 A model of humankind
 The concepts of theory are
‘fictions’
 Fiction  Scientific Concepts
1. Evolve from experience
1. Evolves from 2. Order and meaning
experience 3. How things ‘work’
2. Order and 4. Precise language
meaning 5. A ‘check’: prediction of
new events
3. How things
‘work’
 The test of theory is the
falsifiability of its hypotheses
 Giving the theory an honest chance to
be wrong, if it is in fact wrong.
Take-Home Messages
 What’s distinctive about the
psychological study of human
personality?
 The attributes of the scientific prescription
 Apply them to the study of personality
 Is reliance on observational methods (the
clinical method) a problem?
 Personality is a continuum from
disturbed to normal
 Why do I put it that way?

 What is theory?
 A model of humankind
 Scientific concepts are scientific
‘fictions’
 What’s the real test of a theory?
 Remember the idea of falsifiability

 Why have we relied on the clinical

method?
 What is personality anyway?
 ‘People’ personality and ‘science’
personality
 Inferences about what motivates
behaviour
 Persons in situations: the person-
situation interaction