Download - Lecture 4
Lecture 4
PERSONALITY I:
• Video - ABC News “Back with a vengeance” (10 mins)
• Lecture - – What is personality?– Why should we care?– How do we measure personality?
Class Outline
Personality
• The relatively enduring individual traits and dispositions that form a pattern distinguishing one person from all others– Traits -– Dispositions -
• Reflected by stylistic differences in behavior of people
What Determines Personality?
• Heredity (“nature”)– Personality is determined at conception by
an individual’s genes
• Environment (“nurture”)– Situations that a person is exposed to shape
and alter personality traits – e.g. Birth order
What Determines Personality? (cont.)
• Integrated View– Heredity may predispose a person to certain
patterns of behavior– Environmental factors such as birth order
and traumatic experiences, influence the development of specific personality traits (e.g. extraversion; emotional stability)
The Integrated View
Heredity:Inheritedgeneticcharacteristics
Environment:Lifeexperiences
Personalitycharacteristics:
e.g.AggressionExtraversionLocus of controlEmotional stability
Assessing Personality Traits
• Personality Ratings
• Situational Tests
• Personality Inventories
• Projective Techniques
Personality Ratings
• Typically involve the use of five or seven-point scales containing a list of adjectives acting as anchors for the scales– Approach is open to various interpretations of
users– Improvement is seen when scales are tied to
specific behavioral dimensions e.g. competitiveness
– Observations of rater can distort results
Situational Tests
• Involve the direct observation of an individual’s behavior in a setting designed to provide information about personality
• Very expensive
• Less subjective than rating scales
• Assessment in natural settings
• Certain traits don’t lend to this
Personality Inventories
• The most widely used method of assessing personality characteristics
• Ease of administration
• Social Desirability is a potential problem, where people answer as they perceive they should and not according to their actual feelings
Projective Techniques
• Designed to probe subtle aspects of personality
• Based on belief of individualistic interpretation
• Types of Projective Techniques– Story Telling– Sentence Completion
Story Telling
• Good in standardized interpretation, reliability, and usefulness
• Most widely used is TAT, Thematic Apperception Test
• 20 Pictures, each portraying a social setting of ambiguous meaning
Sentence Completion
• Asks respondents to supply endings for a series of partial sentences
• Best used when respondents have little to gain by faking answers
• Team building exercises may appropriately use this technique
Review
• Individual personality has serious behavioral implications for organizations
• Adult personality is the result of both heredity and environment
• There are many ways to measure personality with varying accuracy and cost