What is personality? Type approaches
Personality is a person's steady and special way of thinking, feeling and behaving in different situations. It is fairly stable, yet it can change slowly.
Type approaches
They sort people into broad groups.
- Hippocrates: four types based on body fluids: sanguine, phlegmatic, choleric, melancholic.
- Charaka Samhita (Ayurveda): vata, pitta, kapha. Indian thought also has triguna: sattva, rajas, tamas.
- Sheldon: body build types: endomorph (round, relaxed), mesomorph (muscular, energetic), ectomorph (thin, shy).
- Jung: introverts (prefer being alone, shy) and extraverts (social, outgoing).
- Friedman and Rosenman: Type A (hurried, competitive, impatient; more heart disease risk) and Type B (relaxed). Later: Type C (cooperative, hide feelings) and Type D (prone to sadness).
Limit: people rarely fit neatly into one box.
Trait approaches
A trait is a steady quality on which people differ, like shyness. Trait approaches describe a person on many dimensions.
- Gordon Allport: cardinal traits (one ruling trait, like non-violence in Gandhiji), central traits (5-10 main ones, like honest, friendly), secondary traits (small likes, like a favourite food).
- Raymond Cattell: 16 source traits, measured by the 16 PF questionnaire.
- Hans Eysenck: neuroticism vs emotional stability, extraversion vs introversion, and later psychoticism vs sociability.
- Big Five (Costa and McCrae): Openness to experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism (OCEAN).
Psychodynamic approach (Freud)
Levels of consciousness
Conscious (what we know now), preconscious (can be recalled easily), unconscious (hidden wishes and fears we cannot reach easily). Freud used free association, dream analysis and slips of the tongue to study it.
Structure of personality
- Id: basic urges; works on the pleasure principle.
- Ego: the realistic manager; works on the reality principle.
- Superego: the moral voice; conscience learnt from parents and society.
Defence mechanisms
Ways the ego guards against anxiety without us knowing: repression (pushing painful memories out of awareness), projection (seeing our own traits in others), denial (refusing to accept reality), reaction formation (showing the opposite of what we feel), rationalisation (giving a good-sounding reason for a poor act).
Psychosexual stages
Oral → anal → phallic (Oedipus complex) → latency → genital. Getting stuck at a stage is fixation; going back to an earlier stage is regression.
Post-Freudian approaches
These thinkers kept the unconscious but gave more weight to social forces and goals.
- Carl Jung: the collective unconscious, with shared archetypes (images like the mother or the hero).
- Karen Horney: basic anxiety from poor care in childhood; she also challenged Freud's views about women.
- Alfred Adler: behaviour is goal-directed; people try to overcome feelings of inferiority.
- Erich Fromm: people are social beings; personality reflects society's values.
- Erik Erikson: stages across the whole life; the teenage identity crisis.
Criticism of psychodynamic theories: based on few case studies, hard to test, and too much stress on sex and childhood.
Behavioural and cultural approaches
Behavioural approach: personality is our learned response to stimuli. It is built by classical conditioning, operant conditioning (rewards and punishment) and observational learning. Change the rewards and behaviour changes.
Cultural approach: personality fits the ecology (land, climate, food source) and way of life. For example, in hunting-gathering communities that move often, children are raised to be independent and self-reliant. In settled farming communities, obedience and cooperation are valued more.
Humanistic approach
- Carl Rogers: a fully functioning person is open and growing. We have a real self and an ideal self; when they are close, we are happy. Unconditional positive regard (love without conditions) helps growth.
- Abraham Maslow: self-actualisation is reaching one's full potential. Self-actualised people are creative, loving and at peace with themselves.
A healthy personality accepts itself, faces reality, has warm relations and keeps growing.
Assessment of personality
Self-report measures
The person answers questions about themselves. Examples: MMPI (Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, used to find problems), EPQ (Eysenck Personality Questionnaire), 16 PF. Problems: social desirability (giving nice-sounding answers) and acquiescence (saying yes to everything).
Projective techniques
Based on the idea that people project hidden feelings into unclear pictures.
- Rorschach inkblot test: 10 inkblot cards.
- Thematic Apperception Test (TAT): pictures of people; you tell a story about each.
- Rosenzweig Picture-Frustration Study: cartoons in a frustrating situation.
- Sentence completion and draw-a-person.
They need trained experts to score and interpret.
Behavioural analysis
Watching real behaviour: interview, observation, behavioural ratings (rating scales by people who know you), nomination (peers name who fits a quality) and situational tests (placing a person in a set-up situation).
Try it at home
Rate yourself 1 to 10 on each OCEAN trait. Ask a close friend to rate you too, without seeing your answers. Compare. Where you differ, social desirability or self-image may be at work. This shows why psychologists use more than one method.
Key formulas and definitions
- Personality: steady pattern of thinking, feeling, acting
- Type: Type A/B, introvert/extravert, endomorph/mesomorph/ectomorph
- Trait: Allport (cardinal, central, secondary), Cattell 16 PF, Eysenck, Big Five OCEAN
- Freud: conscious, preconscious, unconscious; id, ego, superego
- Defences: repression, projection, denial, reaction formation, rationalisation
- Post-Freudians: Jung, Horney, Adler, Fromm, Erikson
- Humanistic: Rogers (real vs ideal self), Maslow (self-actualisation)
- Assessment: self-report, projective, behavioural
Worked examples
1. Aman is always in a hurry, hates waiting and must win every game. Which type?
Type A personality: impatient, competitive and time-pressured. It is linked with higher risk of heart disease.
2. Sneha dislikes her classmate but is extra sweet to her. Which defence mechanism?
Reaction formation: showing the opposite of what one truly feels.
3. Ravi fails a test and says, "The questions were out of syllabus." Which defence?
Rationalisation: giving a reasonable-sounding excuse to protect self-esteem.
4. A counsellor shows 10 inkblot cards and asks what each looks like. Which test and approach?
The Rorschach inkblot test, a projective technique from the psychodynamic tradition.
5. Mohan lives by one ruling value, honesty, in every choice. Which Allport trait?
A cardinal trait: a single trait that shapes almost all behaviour.
6. In a hunting community that moves often, children learn to be independent. Which approach explains this?
The cultural approach: ecology and way of life shape personality.
Common mistakes
- Mixing up type and trait. Types are boxes; traits are scales on which everyone has some amount.
- Thinking the ego is 'selfishness'. In Freud's theory, the ego is the realistic manager.
- Calling projective tests 'objective'. They need expert interpretation and are less objective than self-report tests.
- Thinking Big Five neuroticism means mental illness. It only means a tendency to feel worried or upset easily.