Chapter 14 Personality

Personality is the people's typical ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving. Psychologist Gordon Allport defines personality as consisting of relatively enduring predispositions that influence our behaviors across many situations. Predispositions are also called traits and can be introversion, aggressiveness, and conscientiousness. The nonmothetic approach to studying personality is when one strives to understand personality by identifying general laws that govern the behavior of all individuals. The idiographic approach is when one strives to understand personality by identifying the unique configuration of characteristics and life history experiences within a person.
Three influences on personality are genetic factors, shared environmental factors like experiences that make individuals within the same family more alike, and nonshared environmental factors like experiences that make individuals within the same family less alike. A molecular genetic study investigation allows researchers to pinpoint genes associated with specific personality traits. Freud's Psychoanalytic Theory of Personality has three core assumptions: Psychic Determinism- the assumption that all psychological events have a cause, Symbolic Meaning- no action is meaningless, and Unconscious Motivation- why we do what we do. Freud said that the human psyche consists of three components: Id- reservoir of our most primitive impulses (basic instincts), Ego- psyche's executive and principal decision maker (the boss), and Superego- our sense of morality (moral standards). Social learning theorists are theorists who emphasize thinking as a cause of personality. This can include social learning views of determinism, observational learning and personality, and sense of perceived control.