Personality Psychology and Individual Differences: An Introductory Series, #4

By Connor Whiteley

If you want to learn about personality psychology, this is the book for you!

Our personalities affect us in lots of interesting ways and they cause a lot of great behaviours. Making them extremely important to study.

This great, easy-to-understand book is the perfect guide to personality psychology and most of all its fun, packed full of great examples that relate the facts to everyday life!

By the end of this psychology book, you'll know:

• What Personality is and how it's studied?
• What Influences our Personality to form?
• How Personality Influences Religious and political beliefs and our Mental Abilities?
• And many more great topics!

This is NOT a boring university textbook.

BUY IT NOW!

• Language: English
• Publisher: CGD Publishing
• Release date: Oct 4, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201972547

Connor Whiteley

Hello, I'm Connor Whiteley, I am an 18-year-old who loves to write creatively, and I wrote my Brownsea trilogy when I was 14 years old after I went to Brownsea Island on a scout camp. At the camp, I started to think about how all the broken tiles and pottery got there and somehow a trilogy got created.Moreover, I love writing fantasy and sci-fi novels because you’re only limited by your imagination.In addition, I'm was an Explorer Scout and I love camping, sailing and other outdoor activities as well as cooking.Furthermore, I do quite a bit of charity work as well. For example: in early 2018 I was a part of a youth panel which was involved in creating a report with research to try and get government funding for organised youth groups and through this panel. I was invited to Prince Charles’ 70th birthday party and how some of us got in the royal photograph.Finally, I am going to university and I hope to get my doctorate in clinical psychology in a few years.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION TO PERSONALITY

Whenever people think about personality, they always tend to think they have a particular type of personality. For example, they have a hard working personality or a creative personality. This thinking is right and wrong but mostly wrong. Since we don’t have a particular type of personality as we’re a combination of different personality traits. 

We’ll return to the above thinking later on but people differ in their ways of thinking, behaving and feeling and their culturally different too. For example, you and me, we would have different opinions and beliefs around certain topics.

Definitions of Personality:

Since personality is such an abstract concept, defining personality is very complex and difficult. But we’ll try it anyway.

One rather contemporary definition is from Ashton (2013, p 27) who defined personality as the following:

"A set of psychological traits and mechanisms within the individual that refer to differences among individuals in a typical tendency to behave, think, or feel in some conceptually related ways, across a variety of relevant situations, and across some fairly long period of time."

This idea I quite like because it explains personality in an easy-to-understand way, and it refers to personality as the individual differences. In turn, this makes personality a lot easier to understand.

Although, a definition of what personality is, is only meaningful to the extent that it gives us, directly or indirectly, a comparison with other people. Since this is what modern personality research looks at. How does person A’s and person B’s personalities cause them to be so different?

And this in itself can make personality rather difficult to study and define because the psychological features that differentiate people from one another aren’t always visible when you look at them.

However, people do have a predisposition to show their behaviours, thoughts, feelings and these all refer to all the different aspects of a person. You could regard these different aspects of a person as personality traits.

In addition, in some conceptual way, these aspects are related across a wide range of situations and over a fairly long period of time. Like, we’ll see in the chapter later on stability of personality over time.

Nonetheless, all this talk of aspects, individual differences and definitions, does raise a lot of questions. For example,

Personality raises a lot of questions like, what are the major personality factors? 

What’s the role of Individual factors in personality?

What are the real-world consequences of these differences?

What determines personality?

And all of these questions, we will look at by the end of the book.

What Does Personality Psychology Look At?

Interestingly enough, personality psychology doesn’t only look at personality traits. That is a large part of what personality psychology does, but it isn’t everything.

Due to this area of psychology looks at people’s styles of thinking, feeling and behaving as well.

With the overall aim of personality psychology being to understand how and why people differ as well as how to predict similarities and differences between people in different settings.

Using personality psychology, you can investigate a lot of things. For instance, you can do what’s called ideographic research. This is where you research one person in extreme detail. You typically use this research type when you want to study someone’s very unique personality characteristics.

Another approach to research you could do is the nomothetic approach. This is the more typical type of research where you study large groups to find individual differences amongst other variables.

On the whole, all personality psychology research is largely correlational with a few exceptions since you can only say there is a relationship between personality trait A and behaviour B. As well as you can’t get personality from one situation, so you need to test many different situations.

Evaluation of Personality Measures:

Whilst we’ll look at how personality is measured in more depth later on. We need to look at how these personality measures are evaluated. Because psychology is a science.

Reliability

The first way in which we evaluate these personality measures is by looking at their reliability. This is the degree to which a measure produces consistent results. And this overall concept of reliability can be broken down into a few subcategories.

For instance, Internal-consistency reliability is the extent to which the items of a measure are correlated with each other. This is important because we don’t want your items that you think are measuring Openness to Experience, for example, to be measuring other things in addition to Openness to Experience like someone’s levels of perfectionism.

We test this type of reliability using Cronbach’s alpha and if the results are greater or equal to 0.70 then this is considered acceptable. Meaning your items on your measuring scale do relate to one another.

Another type of reliability, and I haven’t heard of this type before I did this book, is Interrater reliability. This refers to the degree of agreement between the scores of different raters and/ or observers.

This type of reliability tends to be exclusively used by personality psychology because it’s important that different observers of a person’s personality get the same results.

The final type of reliability is the Test-retest reliability. Which refers to the degree of consistency between the scores across different measurement occasions or situations.

In other words, this type of reliability means the test or measure scale must produce consistent scores between people when you measure them in different situations and occasions.

It’s important to know I’m saying consistent, not exact because as you’ll see later in the book personality traits can vary and change over the lifespan. But not in the way you might think.

Validity

Whilst reliability focuses on producing consistent and reliable scores. Validity refers to the extent to which a test measures what it claims to measure. And as you can probably guess you can have a reliable test without it being valid, and you can have a valid test that’s unreliable.  This is why it’s so important to test both these concepts and their different types.

The first type of validity this concept can be broken down into is content validity. Which refers to the extent a measure assesses all relevant features of the construct, and does not assess irrelevant features.

Another way of defining this type of validity is your test or measurement scale only measures what it tends to, and it measures all aspects of what you’re looking at. As well as it doesn’t measure anything else except what you’re looking at.

Secondly, you have construct validity which is about the extent to which the measure correctly assesses what it intends to and is it the best measurement tool for the job.  

In addition, construct validity can be further broken down into Convergent and discriminant validity. With convergent validity referring to how well the measurement tool measures similar and opposite characteristics to what you want to measure.

For instance, if I want to measure Agreeableness using a personality questionnaire. Then I want this questionnaire to only measure similar characteristics to Agreeableness. Because as you’ll soon see Agreeableness is an overarching factor in personality. But I don’t want this questionnaire to measure any other personality traits. Such as: Conscientiousness and Neuroticism.

The second subtype of construct validity is discriminant validity, and in psychology, we use these types of tests to see if factors and measures we think are unrelated actually are unrelated.

This is important because if we run a test on a new type of personality questionnaire thinking we’re measuring Trait X but the questionnaire won’t be contaminated by Trait Y, and we’re wrong. Then our questionnaire and our results will be biased due to the influence of Trait Y.

Subsequently, the final type of validity that’s important in personality psychology is criterion validity. This is another term for predictive validity meaning we can use the measure to predict the personality characteristics and behaviours of the person.

Methods of Measurement

Now we know how to evaluate these methods of measuring personality. I would like you to bear that in mind as we go together throughout this book so that will help you think about the pros and cons of each study.

Moving onto how we actually measure personality. I want to discuss the main two ways we measure personality. There are others but this is the major way that 99% of personality psychology studies used. And that is self-reports and structured questionnaires.

Here, you ask every person and participant the exact same set of questions and there is a fixed sets of responses for every question. Because most of these questionnaires use a Likert scale so on the scale you need to indicate how much you agree or disagree with the statement.

Personality questionnaires are the most widely used method of measuring personality and most of the personality inventories assess several personality traits using this method. With each trait being assessed by several items.

This allows the questionnaire to have good reliability and content validity.

Also, in personality questionnaires, some items are reversed coded meaning the answer is the opposite of the trait and the answer before it. This balances the questionnaire out and prevents someone from just giving all the same answers for the questions and still giving the researchers exactly what they want.

On the whole, these two research techniques are effective, accurate and low cost. Which is always good.

Nevertheless, these two research methods say people know their behaviours, thoughts, and feelings but as I discuss in Social Psychology, people have gaps in their self-knowledge, and people might not be willing to report their behaviours, thoughts, and feelings. This links to the social desirability bias.

Also, the idea of People know themselves better than anyone else knows them is just plain false in most cases.

Observer reports:

Others (sometimes) know us better than we know ourselves (Vazire & Carlson, 2011)

These types of reports are very similar to self reports but instead of you reporting on your own personality and behaviour. Someone is providing information on you by observing you.

The person acting as the observer can be a spouse, a parent, a friend, a peer, a classmate, but they must know the ‘target’ of the observations fairly well.

In addition, observer reports could be more objective than self reports. One reason for this could be the impact of the social desirability boas could be weakened. Yet if the observer is a parent then their answers will still reflect some level of the social desirability bias since they would want to show off their amazing parenting. That's just one example.

You can do observer reporting by using direct observations. Which as the name suggests involves you directly watching a person’s behaviour. Allowing you to see the frequency and intensity of a given behaviour that indicates a certain personality trait. As well as you can do this in their natural setting, some people call this s natural habitat but I think that sounds rather dehumanising and makes me want to do a David Attenborough impression, or you can do direct observations in an artificial setting. Like, a university laboratory.

In general, direct observations can be very informative. Yet there are limitations as there could be some aspects of personality that can never really be observed and observations are done in a limited range of contexts.  As well as they're time consuming, they cost a lot of money and they involve a lot of effort.

Biodata

This is another interesting method you can use to measure personality