Personality traits

Five-factor model

- (also called the Big Five) The Five-Factor Model is a widely accepted model of personality traits. Advocates of the model believe that much of the variability in people's thoughts, feelings, and behaviors can be summarized with five broad traits. These five traits are Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism.

Agreeableness

- A personality trait that reflects a person's tendency to be compassionate, cooperative, warm, and caring to others. People low in agreeableness tend to be rude, hostile, and to pursue their own interests over those of others.

Extraversion

- A personality trait that reflects a person's tendency to be sociable, outgoing, active, and assertive.

Neuroticism

- A personality trait that reflects the tendency to be interpersonally sensitive and the tendency to experience negative emotions like anxiety, fear, sadness, and anger.

Factor analysis -

- A statistical technique for grouping similar things together according to how highly they are associated.

Continuous distributions

- Characteristics can go from low to high, with all different intermediate values possible. One does not simply have the trait or not have it, but can possess varying amounts of it.

Personality traits -

- Enduring dispositions in behavior that show differences across individuals, and which tend to characterize the person across varying types of situations.

Personality -

- Enduring predispositions that characterize a person, such as styles of thought, feelings and behavior.

Stability

- Individuals with a trait are also somewhat stable over time in behaviors related to the trait. If they are talkative, for example, at age 30, they will also tend to be talkative at age 40.

Individual differences

- People differ from one another on behaviors related to the trait. Using speech is not a personality trait and neither is walking on two feet—virtually all individuals do these activities, and there are almost no individual differences. But people differ on how frequently they talk and how active they are, and thus personality traits such as Talkativeness and Activity Level do exist.

Lexical hypothesis -

- The lexical hypothesis is the idea that the most important differences between people will be encoded in the language that we use to describe people. Therefore, if we want to know which personality traits are most important, we can look to the language that people use to describe themselves and others.

Person-situation Debate

- The person-situation debate is a historical debate about the relative power of personality traits as compared to situational influences on behavior. The situationist critique, which started the person-situation debate, suggested that people overestimate the extent to which personality traits are consistent across situations.

Openness

- The tendency to appreciate new art, ideas, values, feelings, and behaviors.

Conscientiousness

- The tendency to be careful, on-time for appointments, to follow rules, and to be hardworking.

Extraversion

- The tendency to be talkative, sociable, and to enjoy others; the tendency to have a dominant style.

Consistency-

- To have a personality trait, individuals must be somewhat consistent across situations in their behaviors related to the trait. For example, if they are talkative at home, they tend also to be talkative at work.

Independent

- Two characteristics or traits are separate from one another-- a person can be high on one and low on the other, or vice-versa. Some correlated traits are relatively independent in that although there is a tendency for a person high on one to also be high on the other, this is not always the case.

-Scores on the Big Five traits are mostly _____________________________ That means that a person's standing on one trait tells very little about their standing on the other traits of the Big Five.

- independent

Someone who scores high on a specific trait _________________________________________ is expected to be sociable in different situations and over time.

- like extraversion

Five-factor model -OCEAN-

- openness - conscientiousness - extraversion - agreeableness - neuroticism

nstead of studying broad, context-free descriptions, like the trait terms we've described so far, Mischel thought that psychologists should focus on ____________________________________________________ .

- people's distinctive reactions to specific situations.

__________________________________ are not just a useful way to describe people you know; they actually help psychologists predict how good a worker someone will be, how long he or she will live, and the types of jobs and activities the person will enjoy.

- personality traits

There are three criteria that are characterize personality traits

-1.consistency -2.stability - 3.individual differences

Conscientiousness

-A personality trait that reflects a person's tendency to be careful, organized, hardworking, and to follow rules.

Openness to Experience

-A personality trait that reflects a person's tendency to seek out and to appreciate new things, including thoughts, feelings, values, and experiences.

In addition, ________________________________________ people are often healthier than people low in conscientiousness because they are more likely to maintain healthy diets, to exercise, and to follow basic safety procedures like wearing seat belts or bicycle helmets.

-highly conscientious

Big 5 trats

1. openness 2. Conscientiousness 3. extraversion 4. agreeableness 5. neuroticism

Facets

Broad personality traits can be broken down into narrower facets or aspects of the trait. For example, extraversion has several facets, such as sociability, dominance, risk-taking and so forth.

Specifically, personality researchers have also found the personality traits like _________________________________ play an important role in college and beyond, probably because highly conscientious individuals study hard, get their work done on time, and are less distracted by nonessential activities that take time away from school work.

Conscientiousness

Thus, in the Five-Factor Model, you need ___________ scores to describe most of an individual's personality.

Five

in one of the first comprehensive models to be proposed, _______________________ suggested that Extraversion and Neuroticism are most important. Eysenck believed that by combining people's standing on these two major traits, we could account for many of the differences in personality that we see in people (Eysenck, 1981).

Hans Eysenck

Hexaco model -

The HEXACO model is an alternative to the Five-Factor Model. The HEXACO model includes six traits, five of which are variants of the traits included in the Big Five (Emotionality [E], Extraversion [X], Agreeableness [A], Conscientiousness [C], and Openness [O]). The sixth factor, Honesty-Humility [H], is unique to this model.

Agreeableness

The tendency to agree and go along with others rather than to assert one's own opinions and choices.

Neuroticism

The tendency to frequently experience negative emotions such as anger, worry, and sadness, as well as being interpersonally sensitive.

Continuous distributions -

characteristics can go from low to high, with all different intermediate values possible. One does not simply have the trait or not have it, but can possess varying amounts of it.

Mischel and others argued that it was these ___________________________________ that underlie people's reactions to specific situations that provide some consistency when situational features are the same. If so, then studying these broad traits might be more fruitful than cataloging and measuring narrow, context-free traits like Extraversion or Neuroticism.

social-cognitive processes