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