GORDON ALLPORT

TRAIT THEORY
OVERVIEW
 The formal and systematic study of personality was not recognized by the psychology
establishment until Allport published Personality: A Psychological Interpretation in
1937.
 Allport served two purposes: He helped bring personality into the mainstream and
he formulated a theory of personality development in which traits play a prominent
role.
 Allport makes each person unique.

THE LIFE OF ALLPORT

 Born in Montezuma, Indiana
 Youngest of four sons. His life is full of restrictions, test of morality, and no bright
colors.
 He experienced isolation and rejection from his siblings, and it leads to the
development of inferiority feelings for which he attempted to compensate by striving
to excel.
 Allport’s interest in social ethics and social service was acquired from his parents,
was reinforced at Harvard.
 He visited Freud in his office.
 A successful man in the field of Psychology

THE NATURE OF PERSONALITY

 “Personality is the dynamic organization within the individual of those
psychophysical systems that determine the characteristic behavior and thought.”
 Two distinct personalities: one for childhood and one for adulthood

PERSONALITY TRAITS
 Allport considered personality traits to be predispositions to respond, in the same or
a similar manner, to different kinds of stimuli.
 Characteristics of Traits:
 Personality of traits are real and exist within each of us.
❖ Traits determine or cause behavior.
❖ Traits can be demonstrated empirically.
❖ Traits are interrelated; they may overlap, even though they represent different
characteristics.
❖ Traits vary with the situation.
 PERSONAL DISPOSITIONS
These are traits that are peculiar to an individual, as opposed to traits shared by several
people.
1. Cardinal Traits: The most pervasive and powerful human rights
2. Central Traits: The handful of outstanding traits that describe a person’s behavior.
3. Secondary Traits: The least important traits, which a person may display
inconspicuously and inconsistently.

PERSONALITY DEVELOPMENT IN CHILDHOOD:

THE UNIQUE SELF
 Proprium: It includes those aspects of personality that are distinctive and thus
appropriate to our individual emotional life.
 The development of the proprium:
Stage Development

1 Bodily Self In this stage infants become aware of their own existence and
distinguish their own bodies from objects in the environment.

2 Self-Identity Children realize that their identity remains intact despite the
many changes that are taking place.

3 Self-esteem Children learn to take pride in their accomplishments

4 Extension of Self In this stage, children come to recognize the objects and people
that are part of their own world.

5 Self-Image Children develop actual and idealized images of themselves

and their behavior and become aware of satisfying parental
expectations.

6 Self as a rational Ages 6-12. Children begin to apply reason and logic to the
coper solution of everyday problems.

7 Propriate Stage 7 develops during adolescence. Young people begin to

Striving formulate long-range goals and plans.

8 Adulthood Normal, mature adults are functionally autonomous,

independent of childhood motives.
 THE HEALTHY ADULT PERSONALITY
6 Criteria for normal, mature, emotionally healthy adult personalities:
 A mature person has an extended sense of self.
 The mature individual can relate warmly to others and establishing hearty social
relations.
 A mature person demonstrates emotional security and self-acceptance.
 The mature person has realistic perception of life, experience, claims and ambitions.
 The mature person has self-insight and a sense of humor.
 Mature individuals have a unifying philosophy of life since they can see the whole
picture owing to their ability to regularly and consistently single out the important
things in their own life.

THE STUDY OF VALUES

❖ According to Allport, our values are personality traits and represent strongly held
interests and motivations.
❖ Allport + 2 colleagues developed an objective self-report assessment test called Study
of Values
 Theoretical Values
 Economic Values
 Aesthetic Values
 Social Values
 Political Values
 Religious Values

ASSESSMENT IN ALLPORT’S THEORY

 Constitutional and Physiological diagnosis
 Cultural Setting, membership, role
 Personal documents and case studies
 Self-Appraisal
 Conduct Analysis
 Ratings
 Tests and Scales
 Projective Techniques
 Depth Analysis
 Expressive behavior
 Synoptic procedures
 MCCRAE AND COSTA
Five Factor Theory

Paul T. Costa, Jr., and Robert R. McCrae

- Extraordinarily productive research team that has worked together since they first
met in Boston in 1975.
- Costa was born in 1942 in Franklin, New Hampshire. After completing undergraduate
work at Clark University (1964), he went to graduate school at the University of
Chicago (1966-1970), where he studied human development.
- McCrae was born in 1949 in Maryville, Missouri. He studied philosophy at Michigan
State University (1967-1971) but switched to psychology for his graduate work at
Boston University (1971-1976).
- Costa and McCrae’s research reflects their enduring interest in the scientific study of
personality and
- In the field of personality psychology, one of the most enduring theories defines
personality according to how much (or how little) we demonstrate each of five traits
– known as the Big Five personality traits of the ways in which people differ from one
another.

Why are these five traits considering the Big Five?

 Research concluded that these traits are consistent.

 It has genetic basis for these traits.
 When psychologists measure these traits, there is very consistent agreement.
Research into how to best classify our characteristics suggests that it is best to
organize our traits into these five dimensions.

Are the Big Five Personality Traits Inherited?

 To an extent, we do inherit our levels of the Big Five personality traits. Research
suggests between 40 and 60 percent of our Big Five is heritable (Jang et al., 1996).
 HANS EYSENCK
Dimensions of Personality

OVERVIEW
 Eysenck's theory of personality focused on temperaments, which he believed
were largely controlled by genetic influences.
 He utilized a statistical technique known as factor analysis to identify what he
believed were the two primary dimensions of personality: extraversion and
neuroticism.

LIFE OF HANS EYSENCK

 Born in Berlin and immigrated to England in 1934
 A highly successful and productive man but he regretted taking Psychology.
 Together with his second wife named Sybil, they developed several personality
assessment devices including the Eysenck Personality Inventory, Eysenck Personality
Profiler, Maudsley Medical Questionnaire & Maudsley Personality Inventory.

THE DIMENSIONS OF PERSONALITY

 He agreed with Cattell that personality is composed of traits, or factors, derived by
the factor-analytic method. However, Eysenck was also a critic of factor analysis and
of Cattell’s research because of the potential subjectivity in the technique and the
difficulty in replicating Cattell’s findings.

THREE DIMENSIONS OF PERSONALITY

 Extraversion versus Introversion
❖ Introversion involves directing attention to inner experiences, while
❖ extraversion relates to focusing attention outward, onto other people and the
environment. A person high in introversion might be quiet and reserved, while
an individual high in extraversion might be sociable and outgoing.

 Neuroticism versus Emotional Stability

❖ This dimension of Eysenck’s trait theory is related to moodiness versus even-
temperedness. Neuroticism refers to an individual’s tendency to become upset
or emotional, while stability refers to the tendency to remain emotionally
constant.
 Psychoticism versus Impulse Control
❖ Later, after studying individuals suffering from mental illness, Eysenck added
a personality dimension he called psychoticism to his trait theory. Individuals
 who are high on this trait tend to have difficulty dealing with reality and may
be antisocial, hostile, non-empathetic, and manipulative.

THE PRIMARY ROLE OF HEREDITY

 Traits and dimensions are determined primarily by heredity, although the research
evidence shows a stronger genetic component for extraversion and neuroticism than
for psychoticism. He did not rule out environmental and situational influences on
personality, such as family interactions in childhood, but he believed their effects on
personality were limited.
 ALBERT BANDURA
Social Learning Theory

Overview of Social Cognitive Theory

 SCT is a response to the reductionist nature of behaviorism.
 Humans are flexible; we can learn from various situations.
❖ More than learning from our experiences, we can learn from other people’s
experiences. Known as vicarious learning.
 Triadic reciprocal causation model – The person, environment and behavior have
reciprocal interactions.
❖ Agentic Perspective: we can control the environment and our lives.
❖ Self- Efficacy: the belief that we can perform the behaviors that will produce a
desired outcome.
 People will regulate their behavior through external and internal factors.
 When people find themselves in morally ambiguous situations, they typically attempt
to regulate their behavior through moral agency.

THE LIFE OF BANDURA

 Born in the Province of Alberta, Canada
 His parents were immigrants from Poland who emphasized the value of Education.
 Was encouraged to live independently by his sisters.
 He also learned self-directiveness in the town’s tiny school that had few teachers
and little resources.
 Accidentally, majored in Psychology – happened to go to school early and enrolled in
psych classes just to pass the time.
 He went to the University of British Columbia
 He was a faculty member of Stanford University

Learning
 While he agreed with Skinner that we learn via our own experience, he said that this
is an inefficient way to learn and would not explain the fast cognitive and social
development that happened to humanity.
 Bandura stated that if knowledge could be acquired only through the effects of one’s
own actions, the process of cognitive and social development would be greatly
retarded, not to mention exceedingly tedious.”
 We also learn from others.
Observational Learning
 Although reinforcement facilitates learning, Bandura says that it is not a necessary
condition for it. People can learn, for example, by observing models being reinforced.
 A good man learns from his mistakes, A wise man learn from others’ mistakes.
 By observing other people, humans are spared countless responses that might be
followed by punishment or by no reinforcement.
 Bobo Doll Experiment.

The process of Observational Learning

 Bandura analyzed the nature of observational learning and found it to be governed
by four related mechanisms:
❖ Attentional processes
❖ Retention Processes
❖ Production Processes
❖ Incentive and Motivational Processes

Attentional Processes
 Observational learning or modeling will not occur unless the subject pays attention
to the model.
 Developing our cognitive processes and perceptual skills so that we can pay sufficient
attention to a model, and perceiving the model accurately enough, to imitate
displayed behavior.

Retention Processes
 Retaining or remembering the model’s behavior so that we can imitate or repeat it at
a later time; for this, we use our cognitive processes to form mental images and verbal
descriptions of the model’s behavior.
 We can retain information about a model’s behavior in two ways:
❖ Through an imaginal internal representational system or through verbal
system
❖ Imaginal representation, we form vivid, easily retrievable images while we are
observing the model.
❖ Verbal representation operates similarly and involves a verbal coding of some
behavior we have observed.

Production Processes
 Translating the mental images or verbal symbolic representations of the model’s
behavior into our own overt behavior by physically producing the responses and
receiving feedback on the accuracy of our continued practice.
 Incentive and Motivational Processes
 Perceiving that the model’s behavior leads to a reward and thus expecting that our –
learning and successful performance of the same behavior will lead to similar
consequences.
 Anticipation of Reinforcement: Our incentive to learn is influenced by our
anticipation of the reinforcement or punishment by doing so.
 Reinforcement is not always necessary: Bandura also pointed out that although
reinforcement can facilitate learning, reinforcement is not always necessary and not
always required for learning to occur.

Modeling: The Basis of Observational Learning

 Modeling: a behavior modification technique that involves observing the behavior of
others and participating with them in performing the desired behavior.
 Learning through modeling involves adding and subtracting from the observed
behavior and generalizing from one observation to another.
 Bandura’s basic idea is that learning can occur through observation or example rather
than solely by direct reinforcement.

Enactive Learning
 Bandura believes that complex human behavior can be learned when people think
about and evaluate the consequences of their behaviors.
❖ The person did this and received reinforcement, so if I also do this, I will also
receive reinforcement.
❖ Response consequences inform us of the effects of our actions.
❖ Consequences of our responses motivate our anticipatory behavior; that is, we
can represent future outcomes and acting accordingly.

How do we learn?
 The learning process allows people to have some degree of control over the events
that shape the course of their lives.
 Control, however, rests with a three-way reciprocal interaction of personal variables,
behavior, and environment.

Triadic Reciprocal Causation

 Trait Theories: Personal Traits → Behaviors
 Behaviorism: Environment → Behaviors
 Chance encounters of fortuitous events
 Chance encounters: an unintended meeting of persons unfamiliar to each other
 Fortuitous events: is an environmental experience that is unexpected and
unintended.
 Both are environmental events and our responses to these kinds of situation can
make or break our lives.
❖ As you have noticed, almost all our theorist just stumbled upon psychology,
and they ended up becoming known in the field.
- Some random sh*t happens but we always have a choice what to do about this. We
can just say ew and whine about it or we can turn it into fertilizer. -

Human Agency
 Bandura believes that people are self-regulating, proactive, self-reflective, and self-
organizing and that they have the power to influence their own actions to produce
desired consequences.
❖ We always have a choice.
❖ Saying that you do not have a choice is in itself a choice you made.

Self-Efficacy
 How people act in a particular situation depend on the reciprocity of behavioral,
environmental, and cognitive conditions, especially those cognitive factors that relate
to their beliefs that they can or cannot execute the behaviors necessary to produce
desired outcomes in any particular situations.
❖ Context based: we can have high self-efficacy in certain areas of our life and
low on others.
❖ Different from outcome expectations: Efficacy refers to people’s confidence
that they have the ability to perform certain behaviors.
 B.F. SKINNER
Radical Behaviorism

Burrhus Frederic Skinner

 He planned to become a professional literary writer.
 After 1 year of nothing, he ended up studying psychology.
 He had some stint with government research (pigeons) and tried to enter the market
with his baby-tender, which both failed in the end.
 He finally wrote his first novel, Walden Two which served as his catharsis and became
more productive ever since.
 Radical Behaviorism became his stance.

Why is there a need to turn to behaviorism?

 Psychology as a science is still controversial statement back then due to having so
many concepts that are pure speculative and does not lend itself to scientific scrutiny.
 However, Behavior is observable and following the SR Theory, we can describe,
predict, and control behavior by manipulating the stimulus.
 Concepts such as will, intention, care, love, hunger, are not really needed to explain
behavior.

Philosophy of Science
 Scientific behaviorism allows for an interpretation of behavior but not an explanation
of its causes.
 Interpretation permits a scientist to generalize from a simple learning condition to
more complex one.
 Any science, including that of human behavior, begins with the simple and eventually
evolves generalized principles that permit an interpretation of the more complex one.

Characteristics of Science
 Science is cumulative.
 Science values empirical observations
 Science is a search for order and lawful relationships.

Precursors to Skinner’s Scientific Behaviorism

Edward Thorndike: Law of effect
 He first stated that responses to stimuli that are followed immediately by a satisfier
tend to be “stamped in”, the second held that responses to stimuli that are followed
immediately by an annoyer tent to be “stamped out” Thorndike later amended the
law of effect by minimizing the importance of annoyers.
 Stimulus > Response

▪ Ivan Pavlov: Classical Conditioning

 Stimulus > Response
 Stimulus > Paired with neutral stimulus > Response (Repeat)
 Neutral Stimulus > Response

John B. Watson: Experiment with Little Albert

BF Skinner and Operant Conditioning

 The organism first does something and then reinforced by the environment.
Reinforcement, in turn increases the probability that the same behavior will occur
again.
 Stimulus > Response > Reinforced = higher chance of doing the response again.
 Antecedent > Behavior > Response
 Big Lion > Run > Was able to eat and live > Higher chance of doing again
 Dog sees treats > Sits > eat the treat > Higher chance of doing it again.

Shaping
 Shaping is a procedure in which the experimenter or the environment first rewards
gross approximations of the behavior, then closer approximations, and finally the
desired behavior itself.
 A child trying to read simple words can learn better by reinforcing even one correct
sound until the child completes pronouncing the whole word.
 Reinforcement does not need to come from a person, most of the time it is in the
environment itself.

Reinforcement
 According to Skinner, reinforcement has two effects: It strengthens the behavior, and
it rewards the person.
 This is different from reward because some reinforcements are not necessarily
rewarding.
 Food is not reinforcing because it tastes good; rather, it tastes good because it is
reinforcing.

Positive Reinforcement
 Any stimulus when added to a situation, increases the probability that a given
behavior will occur is termed a positive reinforcer.
 ❖ Food, water, sex, money, social approval, and physical comfort usually are
examples of positive reinforcers.
❖ Much human and animal behavior are acquired through positive
reinforcement.
 Another problem with conditioning humans is determining what consequences are
reinforcing and which ones are not.
❖ Depending on personal history, spankings and scolding might be reinforcing,
and kisses and compliments might be punishing.

Negative Reinforcement
 The removal of an aversive stimulus from a situation also increases the probability
that the preceding behavior will occur.
❖ Postponing quizzes is a negative reinforcement.
❖ There is an almost unlimited number of aversive stimuli, the removal of which
may be negatively reinforcing.
❖ Anxiety, for example, is usually an aversive stimulus, and any behavior that
reduces it, is reinforcing.
▪ Exercising, repressing unpleasant memories, making excuses for
inappropriate behavior, smoking cigarettes, drinking alcohol, and a
multitude of other behaviors designed intentionally or unintentionally
to reduce the unpleasantness of anxiety.

Punishment
 Negative reinforcers remove, reduce, or avoid aversive stimuli whereas punishment
is the presentation of an aversive stimulus, such as an electric shock, or the removal
of a positive one, such as disconnecting an adolescent’s telephone.
 This is ineffective! Do not freaking use this!
 Effects include:
❖ It only suppresses the behavior, but the urge is still there.
❖ Conditioning of negative feeling.
❖ It spreads its effect.

Types of Reinforcements
1. Conditioned reinforcer: sometimes called secondary reinforcers. Those
environmental stimuli that are not by nature satisfying but become so because they
are associated with such unlearned or primary reinforcers as food, water, sex, or
physical comfort.
2. Generalized reinforcer: It is associated with more than one primary reinforcer.
 Skinner recognized five important generalized reinforcers that sustain much of
human behavior: attention, approval, affection, submission of others and token
(money)

Schedules of Reinforcement
1. Continuous Schedule: every time the behavior is done, the organism is
rewarded/reinforced.
2. Intermittent Schedule: there is a pattern on when the reinforcement is given.
a. Fixed Ratio: the organism is reinforced intermittently according to the number
of responses it makes.
b. Variable Ratio: it is reinforced after the nth response on the average. For
humans, playing slot machines is an example of variable-ratio schedule.
c. Fixed Interval: the organism is reinforced for the first response following a
designated period of time. (Ex: Salary of workers)
d. Variable Interval: it is one in which the organism is reinforced after the lapse
of random or varied periods of time. For humans, reinforcement results more
often from one’s effort rather than the passage of time. For this reason, ration
schedules are more common than interval schedules, and the variable-interval
schedule is probably the least common of all.

Extinction
 It is defined as the tendency of a previously acquired response to become
progressively weakened upon nonreinforcement.
 Operant extinction takes place when an experimenter systematically withholds
reinforcement of a previously learned response until the probability of that response
diminishes to zero,
 Extinction is seldom systematically applied to human behavior outside therapy or
behavior modification. Most of us live in relatively unpredictable environments and
almost never experience the methodical withholding of reinforcement.
 Thus, many of our behavior persist over a long period of time because they are being
intermittently reinforced, even though the nature of that reinforcement may be
obscure to us.

The human organism

 According to Skinner, human behavior and human personality is shaped by three
forces: (1) natural selection, (2) cultural practices, and (3) the individual’s history of
reinforcement.
 Natural Selection: behaviors that are reinforcing (in other words keep us live) tend to
linger and be passed down
 Cultural Evolution: Cultural practices that increases our chance to survive are
reinforced therefore lingers and be passed down.

o Human Organism – Inner States

 Although he rejected explanations of behavior founded on non-observable
hypothetical constructs, Skinner did not deny the existence of internal states, such as
feelings of love, anxiety, or fear.
 Self-awareness: this can still be observed, only by the person experiencing it
 Drives: It simply refers to the effects of deprivation and satiation and the
corresponding probability that the organism will respond.
 Emotions: He accounted for emotions by the contingencies of survival and
contingencies of reinforcement.
 Anxiety is a prime example of emotion that is described as an aversive stimulus that
helped us survive the wilderness.

Inner States
 Purpose and Intention: What are called intentions or purposes are physically felt
stimuli within the organism and not mentalistic events responsible for behavior.
❖ For example, if you believe that your purpose for jogging is to feel better
and live longer, then this thought per se acts as reinforcing stimulus,
especially while undergoing the drudgery of jogging or when trying to
explain your motivation to a nonrunner.

Complex Behavior
 Higher Mental Processes (Problem Solving): It also involves covert behavior and often
required the person to covertly manipulate the relevant variables until the correct
solution is found. Ultimately these variables are environmental and do not spring
magically from the person’s mind.
 Creativity: To Skinner, then, creativity is simply the result of random or accidental
behaviors (overt or covert) that happen to be rewarded.
 Unconscious Behavior: Denial of experiences can be rewarding because it does
remove the aversive stimuli/feelings of anxiety over punishment.

Dreams and Social Behavior

 Dreams: He agreed with Freud that dreams may serve a wish-fulfillment purpose.
Dream behavior is reinforcing when repressed sexual or aggressive stimuli are
allowed expression.
  Social Behavior: Membership in a social group is not always reinforcing; yet, for at
least three reasons, some people remain a member of group.
❖ First, people may remain in a group that abuses them because some group
members are reinforcing them.
❖ Second, some people, especially children, may not possess the means to
leave the group.
❖ Third, reinforcement may occur on an intermittent schedule so that the
abuse suffered by an individual is intermingled with occasional reward.

Control of Human Behavior

 Social Control: each of us is controlled by a variety of social forces and techniques, but
all these can be grouped under the following headings: (1) operant conditioning, (2)
describing contingencies, (3) deprivation and satiation, (4) physical restraint.
 Describing contingencies: Threats and promises (implied or explicit)

Self-Control
 We can control ourselves by controlling our environment.
 To avoid being distracted, you remove your phone when reviewing.
 Bring exact money to avoid impulse buying.
 Uninstall ZALORA!

Unhealthy Personality
 Counteracting Strategies: When social control is excessive, people can use three basic
strategies for counteracting it – they can escape, revolt, or use passive resistance.
❖ Escape: People who counteract by escape find it difficult to become
involved in intimate personal relationships, tend to be mistrustful of
people and prefer to live lonely lives of environment (moving away).
❖ Revolt: Moving against
❖ Passive Resistance: Passive Aggressive, the most annoying one
 Inappropriate behaviors follow from self-defeating techniques of counteracting social
control or from unsuccessful attempts at self-control, especially when either of these
failures is accompanied by strong emotion.
❖ Vigorous Behavior.
❖ Blocking out reality to block aversive stimuli.
❖ Defective self-knowledge.
❖ Self-punishment.
Psychotherapy

You basically shape the person to become a healthy person by removing the unhealthy behaviors.