Psychology of

individual
differences

Ms. Pallavi Madan

Are we really different?
Personality
Originated from the Latin word Persona meaning a theatrical mask worn by Roman actors in
Greek dramas.
Personality can be defined as a pattern of of relatively permanent traits and unique
characteristics that give both consistency and individuality to a person’s behavior (Roberts
& Mroczek, 2008).
“Personality refers to, individual differences in characteristic patterns of thinking, feeling
and behaving.” (APA)
Interactionist perspective: Behavior is a function of personality and situational factors.
Nature of personality
1. Dynamic Organization-Psychological elements of the system are
independent but function in a linking manner. It can change.
2. Psycho-physical Systems – Psychological elements of the system are
traits, emotions, intellect, temperament, character are based in the neurology and
endocrinology of the body.
3. Unique- Everyone will have a different personality.
4. Consistent Pattern- An individual behaves in the same way in different
situations.
5. Thinking (cognition), Feeling (affect), Behaving (behavior)
Dimensions for understanding personality

1. Determinism v/s Free will

2. Pessimism v/s Optimism
3. Causality v/s Teleology
4. Conscious v/s Unconscious determinants of behavior
5. Biological v/s Sociological influences in Personality
6. Uniqueness v/s Similarities
Type
approach
Hippocrates attempted to explain personality in terms of body fluid or humors.

es
He postulated that our body has four types of fluid;

yellow bile
black bile
blood
phlegm

Every person is characterised by the prominence of one type of fluid which

determines the temperament of the person concerned.
Thus he classified people into four types which are given below:

a) Choleric – people with predominance of yellow bile are irritable, restless and
hot blooded.

b) Melancholic – people with high black bile are sad, depressed and devoid of
hope in life.

c) Sanguin – when blood content is high the person remains cheerful, active and
he is optimistic in life.

d) Phlegmatic – predominance of phlegm makes a person calm and quite and

usually there behaviour is marked by inactiveness.
Sheldon
Somatology, championed by the psychologist William Herbert Sheldon (1940),
was based on the idea that we could determine personality from people’s body
types.

Sheldon argued that people with more body fat and a rounder physique
(“endomorphs”) were more likely to be assertive and bold, whereas thinner people
(“ectomorphs”) were more likely to be introverted, creative and intellectual.
“Mesomorphs” possessed strong musculature and were

energetic and courageous as individuals.

FRIEDMAN AND ROSENMAn
Type A Personalities: People in this category possess high motivation, lack
patience, feel short of time and are always in a hurry. Susceptible to problems like
coronary heart disease and hypertension.

Type B Personalities: Individuals with a Type B personality work steadily, enjoying

achievements, but do not tend to become stress when goals are not achieved.
Type C Personalities (Suggested by Morris):
These personalities are detail oriented,
people pleasers, passive and patient. They
suppress wants, needs and feelings.

Type D Personalities: These people dwell on

negative aspects of life and stress
themselves unnecessarily. As a result, their
physical, as well as mental health, is always
suffering.
Trait approach
The trait approach to personality was pioneered by early psychologists, including
Gordon Allport (1897–1967), Raymond Cattell (1905–1998), and Hans Eysenck
(1916–1997).

Each of these psychologists believed in the idea of the trait as the stable unit of
personality, and each attempted to provide a list or taxonomy of the most
important trait dimensions. Their approach was to provide people with a self-report
measure and then to use statistical analyses to look for the underlying “factors” or
“clusters” of traits, according to the frequency and the co-occurrence of traits in the
respondents.
Gordon Allport
1. Cardinal traits are the most pervasive ones, including many other traits. Many
aspects of one’s behaviour and personality can be explained through cardinal
traits.
2. Central traits are less pervasive than the cardinal ones, but still refer to generalized
dispositions of the individual. These traits can be directly observed in the individual.
3. Secondary traits are less generalised and cannot be directly or publicly observed.
These are also less relevant for the personality of the individual.
Raymond cattell
Cattell (1990) used a statistical procedure known as factor analysis to analyze the
correlations among traits and to identify the most important ones. On the basis of
his research he identified what he referred to as “source” and “surface”
traits, and he developed a measure that assessed 16 dimensions of traits based
on personality adjectives taken from everyday language.

For example, shyness, being quiet, and disliking crowds might all be surface traits
related to the more basic source trait of introversion, a tendency to withdraw from
excessive stimulation.
Hans eysenck
Hans Eysenck was particularly interested in the innate, genetically based
personality differences. He believed personality is largely governed by biology, and
he viewed people as having two specific personality dimensions:

1. Extroversion vs. Introversion

2. Neuroticism vs. Stability
3. Psychoticism vs. Socialization (After collaborating with his wife and fellow
personality theorist, he added a third dimension to this model).
Big 5 model
The Five-Factor (Big Five) Model of Personality: According to this model, there are
five fundamental underlying trait dimensions that are stable across time, cross-
culturally shared, and explain a substantial proportion of behavior(Costa &
McCrae, 1992; Goldberg, 1982).

The five dimensions (sometimes known as the “Big Five”) are agreeableness,
conscientiousness, extraversion, neuroticism, and openness to experience.
Psychoanalytic theory
Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), who founded what today is
known as the psychodynamic approach to understanding
personality.

Many people know about Freud because his work has had a
huge impact on our everyday thinking about psychology, and
the psychodynamic approach is one of the most important
approaches to psychological therapy.
Structure of the mind/ levels of consciousness

1. Conscious:Thoughts, feelings and

sensations that we are aware of.
2. Pre-conscious:Mental activity which we
can be aware of if attended closely.
3. Unconscious:Thoughts, urges, wishes,
desires that we are unaware of.
Structure of personality
According to Freudian theory, the Id is the component of personality that forms
the basis of our most primitive impulses. The id is entirely unconscious, and it
drives our most important motivations, including the sexual drive (libido) and
the aggressive or destructive drive (Thanatos).
The id is driven by the pleasure principle—the desire for immediate
gratification of our sexual and aggressive urges. The id is why we smoke
cigarettes, drink alcohol, view pornography, tell mean jokes about people, and
engage in other fun or harmful behaviors, often at the cost of doing more
productive activities.
The Ego is guided by the Reality Principle, the mechanism by which the Id
is kept under control. The primary job of the Ego is to provide balance between
the demands of the world and the urges of the Id. It does this by giving the Id
opportunities to express its desires, but only in circumstances where it is safe
to do so.
The third and final component of Freud’s personality model is the Superego.
This structure first appears in early childhood and represents societal morality.
The Superego is the antithesis of the Id but is equally unreasonable. That is,
the Superego wishes to inhibit the impulses of the Id entirely. It does this by
placing strict demands upon the Ego to not allow any expression of the Id’s
urges.
Structure of personality
In order for the three parts of the personality
to function, the constant conflict among
them needs to be managed through
Psychological Defense
Mechanisms.
Jung’s theory
Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961) was another student of Freud who developed his
own theories about personality. Jung agreed with Freud about the power of the
unconscious but felt that Freud overemphasized the importance of sexuality.

Jung argued that in addition to the personal unconscious, there was also a
collective unconscious, or a collection of shared ancestral memories. Jung
believed that the collective unconscious contains a variety of archetypes, or cross-
culturally universal symbols, which explain the similarities among people in their
emotional reactions to many stimuli.
https://www.truity.com/test/type-finder-
personality-test-new
Adler’s theory
Alfred Adler developed his theory to advocate the driving force behind human behavior was
seeking superiority instead of pleasure. People used the defense mechanism of compensation
(trying to overcome feelings of inferiority in one area of life by striving to be superior in another
area).

Birth order and Personality:

Firstborns with younger siblings feel inferior. They overcompensate by overachieving.

Middle children have slightly easier, feeling superior over the inferior elder sibling and
dominating the younger one. They are usually competitive.
Younger children are supposedly pampered, and might feel inferior due to lack of freedom and
responsibility.
The only child shares characteristics with the older child and relates better with adults than
peers.
Horney’s basic anxiety
The concept of basic anxiety experienced by a child who is born in a world much
bigger and powerful than them. Children with less supportive upbringings would grow
up to have neurotic personalities. There are three ways of dealing with this anxiety:

Moving towards people, becoming dependent and clingy.

Moving against people, becoming aggressive, cruel and demanding.
Moving away from people, becoming withdrawn.

She countered penis envy with womb envy which was supposedly experienced by
males to compensate for the lack of child bearing ability by striving for success in other
areas of life.
Behavioural and Cognitive Theories
Freud’s emphasis on internal processes have been criticized by the behaviourists
such as Skinner who focused on behaviour as being a learned response through
reinforcement.

According to Skinner’s operant conditioning theory, personality is influenced by the

reinforcing consequences of the individual’s behaviour.
Reinforcement and punishment
A reinforcer is a stimulus that increases the strength of a particular response/behaviour
when given after the occurrence of that response. Punishment means you are
decreasing the likelihood of a behavior. They can be positive or negative.

Positive reinforcement is when you add something pleasant or desirable

Negative reinforcement is when you take away or remove something unpleasant or
undesirable
In positive punishment, you add an undesirable stimulus to decrease a behavior.
In negative punishment, you remove a pleasant stimulus to decrease a behavior.
reinforcement schedule
Continuous reinforcement refers to getting the reinforcement every time
the response is displayed.

Intermittent reinforcement schedule is further divided into four types: fixed

ratio, fixed interval, variable ratio and variable interval schedule.

*Ratio refers to number of responses and interval refers to time period.

Social-cognitive theory
Social learning theories of Bandura advocated that observation and imitation in the
social situation also affects our behaviour and has an impact in shaping our
personality.

Behaviour of other people, the social context, the environmental factors, and one’s
own thought processes all interact together. Thus, there is reciprocal
determinism among the factors which may vary in strength and in the degree
of causation.
Bandura’s Social Cognitive Theory Diagram as indicated by P-B-E (Person –
Behaviour – Environment)

There is a reciprocal or two-way interaction among the factors related to the

person, the environment and the behaviour itself that affects the behaviour and
shapes the personality. Sometimes the environmental factors are more important
in determining personality whereas at other times, it may be the person’s cognitive
factors related to the person are more influencing factors.
COGNITIVE THEORY OF PERSONALITY

The CAPS (Cognitive-Affective Personality System) model of Walter Mischel and

Shoda (1995) also highlights the cognitive- affective influences on the behaviour of
the individual. They state that our behaviour and consequently our personality is
affected by four things:

1. Perception of the situation

2. Affective or emotional responses to the situation
3. Skills of the person to deal with the situation
4. Anticipation of the outcome of their behaviour
ROTTER’s LOCUS OF CONTROL
Rotter (1954) has proposed the concept of locus of control which refers to the
assumption held by people whether they have control or not over situations/events
in their lives. When they assume that their responses and actions can directly
influence the consequences, they have control over it – this is called internal
locus of control. External locus of control assumes that the control is
outside the individual and lies in other individuals/situation/luck/fate etc.
Rotter further said that internal or external locus of control depend on the person’s
‘expectancies’ for reinforcement and the ‘values’ the person ascribes to particular
reinforcers.
Humanist theories
Psychoanalytic models of personality were complemented during the 1950s and
1960s by the theories of humanistic psychologists. In contrast to the proponents of
psychoanalysis, humanists embraced the notion of free will. Arguing that people
are free to choose their own lives and make their own decisions, humanistic
psychologists focused on the underlying motivations that they believed drove
personality, focusing on the nature of the self-concept,the set of beliefs about who
we are, and self-esteem, our positive feelings about the self
Carl Rogers
Rogers emphasizes the need for providing unconditional love to the children by the
parents for positive personality development. The child when accepted without any
conditions will develop into a fully functioning person and develop a healthy personality.
The Self theory focuses on the person and their subjective understanding of their self
(person – their experiences, feelings, values and beliefs, thus following a
phenomenological approach).
He defines self as the organized, consistent, conceptual gestalt composed of
perceptions of the characteristics of the “I” or “me”, and the perception of the relationship
“I” or “me” in interaction with various aspects of life, together with the values attached to
those perceptions.
Rogers talks about personality in terms of the real self and the ideal self
and the extent to which there is congruence between the two. Real self refers
to the actual you at present and what you can become by self actualization. The
ideal self refers to who you would like to be ideally; it reflects the society’s
expectations and demands of what you should be. Congruence between the two
would make for a healthy personality
Genes and the brain
The role of nature and nurture in personality is studied by means of behavioral genetics
studies including family studies, twin studies, and adoption studies.
These studies partition variability in personality into the influence of genetics (known as
heritability), shared environment, and nonshared environment.
In addition to the use of behavioural genetics, our understanding of the role of biology in personality
recently has been dramatically increased through the use of molecular genetics, which is the
study of which genes are associated with which personality traits (Goldsmith et al., 2003;
Strachan & Read, 1999.
Although these studies find that many personality traits are highly heritable, genetics does not
determine everything.
The major influence on personality is nonshared environmental influences.
Heritability (i.e., genetic influence) is indicated when the correlation coefficient for identical twins exceeds
that for fraternal twins, indicating that shared DNA is an important determinant of personality.
Shared environment determinants are indicated when the correlation coefficients for identical and
fraternal twins are greater than zero and also very similar. These correlations indicate that both twins are
having experiences in the family that make them alike.
Nonshared environment is indicated when identical twins do not have similar traits. These influences
refer to experiences that are not accounted for either by heritability or by shared environmental factors.
Nonshared environmental factors are the experiences that make individuals within the same family less alike.
If a parent treats one child more affectionately than another, and as a consequence this child ends up with
higher self-esteem, the parenting in this case is a nonshared environmental factor.
 Other studies show just how important our brain chemistry is to our reactions
and how we assess our environment. Different parts of the brain “go off” as we
make decisions. The stronger these responses are, the more likely a person is
to hold certain personality traits.

*For example, people who are high on neuroticism have stronger responses
in their amygdala, the part of the brain responsible for reacting to fear.

The physical structure of the brain may also be linked to personality traits.
Studies from Cambridge University revealed a positive correlation between
openness and folding in the prefrontal cortices.
Case study: Phineas Gage
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKPXg-gGDoc
Damasio et al., (1994) used measurements from Gage’s skull
and neuroimaging techniques to determine the exact
placement of the entry and exit point of the iron rod on a
replica model.
They found that the damage caused by the rod involved both
the left and right prefrontal cortices.
The left and right cortices are responsible for emotional
processing and rational decision-making; therefore, it can be
assumed that Gage had deficits in these areas.
Culture and personality
Geert Hofstede’s Cultural Dimensions Theory looks at how different dimensions of culture affect
the people within that culture. The theory posits that culture affects a member’s values, as well as their
behaviors and decision-making process. By understanding a person’s culture, you can better understand
their personality traits. The original four dimensions are as follows:

1. Individualism v/s collectivism: Refers to the degree to which individuals are integrated into
groups. In individualist societies, the ties between individuals are loose: Everyone is expected to look
after himself or herself and his or her immediate family. In collectivist societies, people are integrated
from birth onward into strong, cohesive in-groups, often extended families (with uncles, aunts, and
grandparents), protecting them in exchange for unquestioning loyalty.
2. Power distance:The extent to which the less powerful members of organizations and
institutions (such as the family) accept and expect that power is distributed unequally. This
represents inequality (more versus less) but is defined from below, not from above. A
society’s power distance level is bred in its families through the extent to which its children
are socialized toward obedience or toward initiative.

3. Masculinity v/s femininity: Refers to the distribution of emotional roles between the
sexes, another fundamental problem for any society to which a range of solutions are
found.The assertive pole has been called “masculine” and the modest, caring pole
“feminine.” The women in feminine countries have the same modest, caring values as the
men; in masculine countries, they are somewhat assertive and competitive, but not as much
as the men, so that these countries show a gap between men’s values and women’s values.
4. Uncertainty avoidance v/s tolerant: Deals with a society’s tolerance for
ambiguity. It indicates to what extent a culture programs its members to feel either
uncomfortable or comfortable in unstructured situations. Unstructured situations are novel,
unknown, surprising, and different than usual. Uncertainty-avoiding cultures try to minimize
the possibility of such situations by strict laws and rules, by safety and security measures.
People in uncertainty-avoiding countries are also more emotional and are motivated by inner
nervous energy. The opposite type, uncertainty-accepting cultures, are more tolerant of
opinions different from what they are used to; they try to have as few rules as possible.

Two other dimensions were added in later years by Hofstede and independent researchers:
long-term orientation and indulgence vs. self-restraint.
5. Long-term Orientation: Does a culture think in the short-term or the long-
term? This index attempts to answer that question. Cultures with a high score value
look to the future, while cultures with a low score prioritize instant gratification.

6. Indulgence vs. Self-Restraint: A culture with high indulgence likes to indulge

in the finer (and more fun) things in life. Cultures with low indulgence scores prefer self-
restraint and focus on less fun goals.

*Hofstede’s dimensions are cultural personality traits and the Big Five personality
dimensions of Costa and McCrae (2000) individual personality traits.
Assessment of personality
Personality assessment aims at measuring the personality traits and characteristics of individuals. Methods of
Personality Assessment:

Observation- Observation is a direct method where the person is directly observed in different situations.
Interview- It consists of asking questions to the person/interviewee about their behaviour.
Rating scales- Consist of standardized items that are to be rated on a fixed parameter.
Personality Inventories- Personality inventories are questionnaires or scales that consist of
questions/statements and the individual or test taker needs to answer these in a specific standardized format.
Projective Tests- In projective tests the individual has to respond to unstructured or ambiguous stimuli. The
basic assumption behind using unstructured test stimuli in projective tests are that the individual projects
his/her latent or unconscious feelings, needs, emotions, motives etc. on to the ambiguous stimulus.
Thank
you!