Personality Theories

Critical Perspectives

Albert Ellis, Mike Abrams, Lidia Dengelegi Abrams

• Publisher: SAGE Publications, Inc
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781452278902
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychotherapy
• Index: Psychology

Personality Theories: Critical Perspectives is the groundbreaking, final text written by Albert Ellis, long considered thefounder of cognitive behavioral therapies. The book provides students with supporting and contradictory evidence for the development of personality theories through time. Without condemning the founding theorists who came before him, Ellis builds on more than a century of psychological research to re-examine the theories of Freud, Jung, and Adler while taking an equally critical look at modern, research-based theories, including his own.

Chapter 1

The Study of Personality
Introduction

Chapter Goals

• Provide an overview of the controversies in the field of personality
• Explain the purpose and utility of studying personality to mental health professionals
• Review the various definitions of human personality
• Offer insights into the history of personality theories
• Introduce some of the methods used to measure or evaluate personality
• Present some of the major personality theorists who have developed the concepts we will be studying

Subdisciplines of psychology such as social psychology, cognitive psychology, and industrial psychology endeavor to find common principles that will explain everyone’s behavior. These subfields have achieved considerable success in doing so, since we are all similar in many ways. Despite our similarities, however, there is little doubt that each human being is unique—different from every other individual on the planet. Seeking to understand human commonalities and seeking to account for individual differences are complementary, insofar as we cannot fully apprehend differences if we cannot identify our common characteristics.

Personality psychology looks for answers to numerous questions. In what ways do human beings differ? In what situations and along what dimensions do they differ? Why do they differ? How much do they differ? How consistent are human differences? Can they be measured? These are the issues that this text will explore. An important aspect of this exploration will be a critical examination of the numerous theories that have been proposed to explain personality. Some of these are competing and contradictory while others are supportive and complementary.

Personality psychology was a latecomer among the various disciplines within psychology. Before it was adopted as a subject for study, however, it was already well established as a topic of discussion in the public domain. People have always been practicing personality psychology whether they have recognized it or not. When we seek the right person for a mate, our judgment of his or her personality is indispensable in evaluating our hoped-for compatibility. And are personnel directors really doing anything other than analyzing the applicant’s personality during a job interview? Similarly, when we describe a physician as a “good doctor,” have we really assessed the caliber of his or her medical knowledge? Or are we saying that we are satisfied with the doctor’s professional persona? When we listen to political speeches, how do we rate the orators? Are we looking at their command of the issues or their political acumen? Or is it essentially their personality that we appraise? In most cases, it would seem the latter. These examples illustrate the omnipresence of informal personality assessment. It is a subject of universal interest and continual relevance in all human interactions. On the other hand, although the study of personality is compelling and important, personality as such is also very hard to pin down.

Personality falls under the heading of things that most people believe they understand. In fact, there is probably no domain within any field of knowledge in which more people think they have achieved some expertise. Simply put, most people believe they can know or understand other people. We all try to predict behavior, interpret conversations, and make inferences about others’ actions. If someone offends us, acts strangely, or seems excessively kind, we will quickly try to understand their motives. In addition, we often draw inferences about what kind of people they are; that is, what personality traits they may possess. Most of us regard ourselves as competent judges of personality. We make use of our skills in personality assessment on a daily basis; however, most of us would have a difficult time explaining exactly how we draw our conclusions about others.

Besides evaluating and rating each other’s personalities, we also tend to be confident that we are very good in so doing. It is rare to find someone who admits that he or she is not a good judge of people and does not understand the behavior of others. As this text will show, most of us are not only often incorrect in our assessments of others but also overconfident of our abilities. Most people have an innate trust in their ability to impute underlying motives to the actions of others. We are personality experts, or at least think we are. Moreover, once we evaluate someone else’s personal qualities, we tend to interpret their subsequent actions through the lens of our initial assessment, making it difficult to see that we might have been inaccurate in the first place.

We tend to go through our lives categorizing the people we encounter under various labels. Our language is replete with words that describe types or groups of people, many of them quite pejorative. Words like macho, wimp, nerd, milquetoast, playboy, redneck, square, and hippie are used to categorize a type of person, most often one we find undesirable. This tendency to categorize people makes a great deal of sense in some contexts because it is a universal human characteristic to impose order on complex situations. As complex as human behavior can be, repeating patterns can be discerned.

Almost all human encounters involve classifying and categorizing personalities. For example, business people typically judge their associates on their general demeanor, physical bearing, verbal style, and presumed ability to fit into the milieu of a specific organization. University professors presenting technical papers to their colleagues will be judged to some extent on their personality. Indeed, it is hard to conceive of any interpersonal interaction in which the appraisal of personality does not play an important role.

Can anybody really understand human personality? Furthermore, does it even exist? Or is it a convenient construct that is so intangible as to have no meaning? In fact, some experts do not accept the notion that people have consistent personalities. These experts espouse situationalism; the most extreme members of this group reject the concept of personality completely. Situationalists propose that differences in human behavior are artifacts of the various situations in which human beings find themselves, as well as their cultural environments or social surrounds. The authors of this text, however, are confident that the construct of personality is real and legitimate and will demonstrate its legitimacy in the chapter on individual differences.

THEORIES OF PERSONALITY

The study of personality has a long history. For example, Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, and Machiavelli, among numerous other philosophers and writers, explored human personality in their works. Many of their books reveal compelling insights into the human psyche. Modern theorists to a large extent echo the theories set forth by these earlier thinkers.

Plato

Plato (427–347 BCE) saw the human soul as the seat of personality. In his well-known dialogue, The Republic (c. 390 BCE), he said that the soul consists of three basic forces guiding human behavior: reason, emotion, and appetite. Reason is given the highest value whereas emotion and especially appetite are regarded as the “lower passions.” Plato believed the most powerful of these forces is reason, which keeps the more primitive forces of appetite and emotion at bay.

Aristotle

Aristotle (384–322 BCE), one of Plato’s students and the teacher of Alexander the Great, referred to the seat of personality as the psyche. His description of the psyche suggests that he was the first biological psychologist. Aristotle proposed that the psyche is the product of biological processes. He also saw the psyche as including a set of faculties that he placed in a hierarchy of importance. The first faculty that Aristotle distinguished is the nutritive—the human organism’s basic drives to meet its bodily needs. This faculty can be found in plants as well as in animals and people. The next and higher faculty is the perceptual, which Aristotle defined as the aspect of mind that interprets sensory data. Animals as well as people have a perceptual faculty. The last and highest faculty is the intellectual, which Aristotle saw as unique to human beings.

Photo 1.1 Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527)

Descartes

René Descartes (1596–1650), a French philosopher, viewed human personality as the product of the interaction of divine and primal forces. He saw the essential force behind human personality as the immortal soul—pure, perfect, and intangible. Descartes set out to explain how this spiritual entity interacted with the physical body. His observation of an anatomical dissection led him to think he had resolved this mind-body problem. He noticed a small body in the apparent center of the brain known as the pineal gland or pineal body, so named by the Greco-Roman physician Claudius Galen (c. 130–c. 200 CE) because its shape reminded him of a pine cone.

Descartes (1649) came to the conclusion that that this cone-shaped endocrine gland must be the point of contact between the soul and the body. Cartesian dualism, which is the philosophical position that two substances—matter and spirit, or brain and mind—exist independently of each other although they interact—became the most common view in the Christian West after the seventeenth century because it “explained” the existence of human free will and consciousness in an otherwise mechanistic universe. Indeed, before the advent of the computer, it seemed impossible to allow for consciousness without appealing to nonphysical concepts. Cartesian dualism is still the dominant view on the mind-body issue among the general public, although it is not held by cognitive psychologists or neurologists.

Machiavelli

In contrast to Descartes, Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527), a Florentine diplomat and political thinker, believed that personality is best understood in a social context. According to Machiavelli’s worldview, people are essentially selfish, greedy, ungrateful, and vengeful. Furthermore, he saw two primary forces as defining human character. The first one is an almost untranslatable Italian term—virtù—which is best described as a combination of assertiveness, fearlessness, and self-confidence. Machiavelli called the second force fortuna, which is the Latin word for luck. A person could become a powerful leader with the help of a good dose of virtù and fortuna. Machiavelli (1546/1935) warned that leaders who act out of kindness and a belief in the essential goodness of humanity will always fail. This belief is sometimes expressed by contemporary people as “nice guys finish last.”

Image 1.1 Descartes believed that the pineal gland is the seat of the soul within the human brain

Almost every major philosopher from ancient Greece and Rome through the Enlightenment proposed some form of personality theory, and many of their ideas served as the groundwork of theories set forth by modern psychologists. This text will concentrate on the theories that arose after the development of psychology as a distinct discipline. Because psychology is one of the social sciences, its practitioners seek not only to construct theories of personality or human behavior but also to find ways to test and validate them. As we will see, most of the more recent theorists in personality psychology claim to have discovered empirically verified principles as opposed to untested philosophical conjectures. Some have succeeded; some have not. The authors of this text, however, have little doubt that theories of personality should be held to the same standards used to judge theories in any other science.

THE MAKING OF A THEORY

In attempting to explain natural phenomena, researchers systematically observe events or conduct experiments on the subject of interest. They then review their findings, looking for any patterns or consistent outcomes that they may have uncovered. Their final step is to assess their findings in light of prior studies in the field and then propose a comprehensive explanation that links these findings with earlier and current ones. This comprehensive explanation is called a theory.

We can consider an example from the history of medicine that illustrates the steps in the scientific method. In 1847, Ignaz Semmelweis (1818–1865), a young Austrian medical graduate who had just been appointed an assistant physician in midwifery at a large hospital in Vienna, noticed a puzzling phenomenon. There were two maternity wards in the hospital; patients in the first ward, attended by fully licensed physicians and medical students, had a rate of post-childbirth infection (called “puerperal fever” or “childbed fever”) three times as high as that of patients in the second ward, who were attended only by nurses and midwives. Puerperal fever was a common cause of death following childbirth at the time that Semmelweis began his investigation.

Quantifications, observations, and measurements (sometimes called characterizations). Semmelweis began by keeping careful records of deaths from puerperal fever in the two wards under his care. In the 1840s, puerperal fever was commonly attributed to weather conditions, overcr...