Unit 3- Chapter 1: Personality Traits

Conscientiousness

- A personality trait that reflects a person's tendency to be careful, organized, hardworking, and to foterm-12llow rules.

Agreeableness

- A personality trait that reflects a person's tendency to be compassionate, cooperative, war, 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.

Extraversion

- A personality trait that reflects a person's tendency to be sociable, outgoing, active, and assertive. - When personality psychologists measure traits like extraversion, they typically find that most people score somewhere in the middle, with smaller numbers showing more extreme levels.

Openness

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

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.

Facets of Traits

- Broad personality traits can be broken down into narrower facets or aspects of the trait. (e.g., extraversion has several facets such as sociability, dominance, risk-tasking and so forth.) - The more specific lower-level units of personality are often called facets.

Continuous Distributions

- Characteristics can go from low to high, with all different intermediate values possible. One does not simple have the trait or not have it, but can possess varying amounts of it. - Personality traits reflect on continuous distributions rather than distinct personalty types.

Personality Traits

- Enduring dispositions in behavior that show differences across individuals, and which tend to characterize the person across varying types of situations. - It reflects basic dimensions on which people differ. There are limited number of these dimensions, and each individual falls somewhere on each dimension (they could be low, medium, or high on any specific trait).

Personality

- Enduring predispositions that characterize a person, such as styles of thought, feelings and behavior. - It's the characteristic ways that people differ from one another.

Five-Factor Model of Personality (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 fiver broad traits. - These five traits are Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. (OCEAN)

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 (emotionally (E), Extraversion (X), Agreeableness (A), Conscientiousness (C), and Openness (O)). - The sixth factor, Honesty-Humility (H), is unique to this model. People high in this trait are sincere, fair, and modest, whereas those low in this trait are manipulative, narcissistic, and self-centered. - It posits slightly different versions of some of the traits, and its proponents argue that one important class of individual differences was omitted from the Five-Factor Model.

Lexical Hypothesis (Gordon Allport & Henry Odbert)

- The lexical hypothesis is the idea that themes 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. - They took all the personalty descriptors that they could find in the dictionary, and then used statistical techniques to determine which words "went together". Statistical techniques were used to determine whether a small number of dimensions might underlie all of the thousands of words we use to describe people.

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.

The Mini-IPIP Scale (Donnellan, Oswald, Baird & Lucas, 2006)

- These are phrases describing people's behaviors, using the rating scale from 1-5 to describe how accurately each statement describes you. - 1: Very inaccurate, 2: Moderately inaccurate, 3: Neither inaccurate nor accurate, 4: Moderately accurate, 5: Very accurate 1. Am the life of the party (E). 2. Sympathize with others' feelings (A). 3. Get chores done right away (C). 4. Have frequent mood swings (N). 5. Have a vivid imagination (O). 6. Don't talk a lot (E). 7. Am not interested in other people's problems (A). 8. Often forget to put things back in their proper place (C). 9. Am relaxed most of the time (N). 10. Am not interested in abstract ideas (O). 11. Talk to a lot of different people at parties (E). 12. Feel others' emotions (A). 13. Like order (C). 14. Get upset easily (N). 15. Have difficulty understanding abstract ideas (O). 16. Keep in the background (E). 17. Am not interested in others (A). 18. Make a mess of things (C). 19. Seldom feel blue (N). 20. Do not have a good imagination (O). - For scoring; you must reverse the items that are worded in the opposite direction. Subtract the number you put for that item from 6. Cross out the score you put when you took the scale, and put the new number in representing your score subtracted from the number 6. Add up the scores for each other the five OCEAN scales (including reversed numbers where relevant). Each OCEAN score will be the sum of four items. Place the sum next to each scale below. Then compare your scores to the norms. (If you are low on a trait, it means you are the opposite of the trait label & Vice Versa.) - Openness: Add items 5, 10, 15, 20 - Conscientiousness: Add items 3, 8, 13, 18 - Extraversion: Add items 1, 6, 11, 16 - Agreeableness: Add items 2, 7, 12, 17 - Neuroticism: Add items 4, 9, 14, 19 - Extremely high: 19-20, Very high: 17-18, High: 14-16, Neither high nor low: 11-13, Low: 8-10, Very low: 6-7, Extremely low: 4-5