Personality through learning, growth, biology and traits

Transcript

SoheeIn her twenties, Rosa was the daredevil of her friend group. Fast cars, rock climbing, a skydiving trip for her birthday. Now she's forty, has two kids, and describes herself, with a laugh, as the most careful person she knows.

RyanSo did Rosa's personality change? Or did her life change? Your answer depends on which personality theory you hold.

SoheeWelcome to EPPP Prep, the podcast. I'm Sohee.

RyanI'm Ryan. Last time was Freud and the neo-Freudians. Today we cover the other big families of personality theory: learning approaches, humanistic approaches, biological approaches, and trait theories.

SoheeStart with learning. The OpenStax psychology textbook says the learning approaches focus only on observable behavior. And that's their big advantage over psychodynamic theory: observable, measurable phenomena can be scientifically tested.

RyanB. F. Skinner, a strict behaviorist, believed the environment was solely responsible for all behavior, including the consistent patterns personality theorists study. We behave consistently because we've learned certain response tendencies.

SoheeAnd Skinner disagreed with Freud that personality is fixed in childhood. He argued it develops over our entire life. The textbook's example is almost exactly Rosa: a risk taker whose reinforcements change after marriage and children, until she describes herself as cautious.

RyanThen Albert Bandura. He agreed personality develops through learning, but felt thinking and reasoning matter too. His social-cognitive theory has three key ideas: reciprocal determinism, observational learning and self-efficacy.

SoheeReciprocal determinism means cognitive processes, behavior and context all interact, each influencing and being influenced by the others at the same time. That's different from Skinner's environment-only view.

RyanObservational learning: we learn by watching someone else's behavior and its consequences. Whether we imitate a model depends on whether we see the model reinforced or punished.

SoheeAnd self-efficacy: our level of confidence in our own abilities, developed through our social experiences. People with high self-efficacy see goals as within reach, view challenges as tasks to master, and recover quickly from setbacks.

RyanPeople with low self-efficacy avoid challenging tasks, focus on failure, and lose confidence after setbacks. And self-efficacy can be situation specific. A student can feel confident in English and much less so in math.

SoheeNow a close cousin that the exam loves to contrast. Julian Rotter's locus of control, from 1966. It's about our beliefs about the power we have over our lives.

RyanInternals believe most outcomes result directly from their own efforts. Externals believe outcomes are outside their control, governed by other people, luck or chance.

SoheeAnd the textbook reports that people with an internal locus of control perform better academically, achieve more in their careers, are healthier, cope better, and are less depressed.

RyanHere's the distinction. Self-efficacy is belief in your own abilities. Locus of control is belief about who or what controls your outcomes.

SoheePause and think. A nursing student believes her grades depend entirely on her own effort. But she doubts she's capable of mastering pharmacology. How would you describe her?

RyanInternal locus of control, because she credits outcomes to her effort. But low self-efficacy for pharmacology, because she doubts her ability in that specific area. The two can come apart.

SoheeThen Walter Mischel, a student of Rotter. He surveyed decades of research and found the data didn't support the central principle of personality psychology, that traits are consistent across situations. That set off the person-situation debate.

RyanBut Mischel found behavior was much more consistent within similar situations. And he's famous for the marshmallow test of self-regulation. Preschoolers could eat one marshmallow now, or wait and get two.

SoheeChildren who waited were later more successful in high school, with higher SAT scores, for example. But here's the update. A more recent study with a larger, more representative sample, by Watts, Duncan and Quan in 2018, found the associations weren't as strong, and were sensitive to factors like family background and home environment.

RyanAnd today the debate is mostly resolved. Most psychologists consider both the situation and personal factors. For Mischel, people are situation processors who interpret a situation and act on that interpretation.

SoheeNow the humanists, the third force in psychology, reacting against both psychoanalysis and behaviorism. They focus on how healthy people develop.

RyanAbraham Maslow studied people he considered healthy, creative and productive, and found they shared traits like being open, creative, loving and accepting of themselves. In his hierarchy of needs, the highest need is self-actualization, the achievement of our fullest potential.

SoheeAnd Carl Rogers focused on self-concept, our thoughts and feelings about ourselves. He divided the self into the ideal self, who you'd like to be, and the real self, who you actually are.

RyanWhen the two are very similar, that's congruence, which leads to a greater sense of self-worth. When there's a large gap, that's incongruence, which can lead to maladjustment. And parents can foster congruence through unconditional positive regard, unconditional love.

SoheeNow biology. Psychologists who favor the biological approach believe inherited predispositions and physiological processes help explain personality differences.

RyanThe Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart studied 350 pairs of twins between 1979 and 1999. Identical twins, whether raised together or apart, had very similar personalities.

SoheeHeritability is the proportion of difference among people attributed to genetics. Traits reported with a heritability above 0.50 included leadership, obedience to authority, sense of well-being, alienation, resistance to stress and fearfulness.

RyanWith an important caveat. Traits aren't determined by a single gene, but by many genes plus epigenetic factors that control whether genes are expressed.

SoheeAnd temperament. Most psychologists believe it has a biological basis because it appears so early. Thomas and Chess found babies could be categorized as easy, difficult, or slow to warm up. Environment and maturation still shape how it's expressed.

RyanFinally, traits. Gordon Allport found 4,500 words in English that describe people, and sorted traits into three categories.

SoheeA cardinal trait dominates your whole personality and life, like Ebenezer Scrooge's greed. They're rare. Central traits make up our personalities, like loyal, kind or grouchy. And secondary traits appear only in specific circumstances, like preferences and attitudes.

RyanPause and think. Someone who always orders salad dressing on the side. Cardinal, central or secondary?

SoheeSecondary. It's a specific preference in a specific situation. The textbook uses that exact example.

RyanRaymond Cattell narrowed the list and identified 16 factors, measured by the 16PF. Each factor is scored on a continuum, from high to low, rather than present or absent.

SoheeHans and Sybil Eysenck went the other way, focusing on temperament and biology. Two dimensions: extroversion versus introversion, and neuroticism versus stability. Later they added a third: psychoticism versus superego control.

RyanIn their theory, people high on neuroticism tend to be anxious, with an overactive sympathetic nervous system, so their bodies can go into a fight-or-flight reaction even under low stress. People high on stability need more stimulation to set that reaction off.

SoheeSo their dimensions are rooted in biology.

RyanCattell's 16 may be too broad and the Eysencks' two too narrow. The Five Factor Model hits a middle ground, and the textbook calls it the most popular theory in personality psychology today.

SoheeOpenness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. The mnemonic is OCEAN. Each is a spectrum, and most of us fall somewhere in the middle.

RyanSome details. Conscientiousness correlates positively with academic success. The Big Five are relatively stable over the lifespan, with some shifts. Conscientiousness increases through young adulthood into middle age, agreeableness increases and peaks between 50 and 70, and neuroticism and extroversion decline slightly.

SoheeAnd the Big Five have been shown across ethnicities, cultures and ages. There's also the HEXACO model, named for six broad traits: honesty-humility, emotionality, extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness and openness to experience.

RyanSo back to Rosa. A Skinnerian says her reinforcements changed. Bandura says her thinking, behavior and context shaped each other. Mischel says she processes new situations differently. And a trait theorist might note that Big Five traits shift a little with age.

SoheeRecap. Skinner: environment shapes behavior, personality develops across life. Bandura: reciprocal determinism, observational learning, self-efficacy. Rotter: locus of control, internal or external.

RyanMischel: behavior is consistent within situations, and the marshmallow findings are weaker than first reported. Maslow: self-actualization. Rogers: congruence between real and ideal self, fostered by unconditional positive regard.

SoheeBiology: identical twins reared apart are similar, heritability above 0.50 for some traits, temperament as easy, difficult or slow to warm up. Traits: Allport's cardinal, central, secondary; Cattell's 16; the Eysencks' dimensions; and the Big Five, OCEAN.

RyanAnd here's something hopeful from Bandura. Self-efficacy grows from experience. Each practice question you get right is a small piece of evidence that you can do this.

SoheeThanks for listening to EPPP Prep. Next time: culture.

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