An Introduction to Personality, Individual Differences and Intelligence

Nick Haslam, Luke Smillie, John Song

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781473933729
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Persönlichkeit in der Psychologie

The second edition of this popular textbook builds on the strengths of the first, continuing its reputation for clarity, accessibility, conceptual sophistication and panoramic coverage of personality and intelligence. The authorship team is enriched by the addition of two high-profile international scholars, Luke Smillie and John Song, whose expertise broadens and deepens the text.

New tothis edition:

• Chapters exploring the neurobiological, genetic and evolutionary foundations of personality; and emotion, motivation and personality processes
• An enhanced coverage of personality disorders
• A thoroughly revised and extended section on intelligence which now addresses cognitive abilities and their biological bases; the role of intelligence in everyday life; and emotional intelligence
• A brand new companion website that includes a substantial test bank andlecture slides.

An Introduction to Personality, Individual Differences and Intelligence, Second Edition isa key textbook for all psychology students on a personality or individual differences course.

Section 1 Describing Personality

• 1 What is Personality? 3
• 2 Trait Psychology 17
• 3 Personality Processes 49

1 What is Personality?

Learning objectives

• To develop an understanding of how the concept of ‘personality’ has developed over the course of history.
• To understand how personality is conceptualized within psychology and how personality differs from other forms of psychological variation.
• To distinguish between personality and related concepts, such as character and temperament.
• To recognize how personality psychology fits within psychology as a whole and how it differs from related subdisciplines.
• To develop an overview of the book’s organization.

This chapter introduces and clarifies the concept of ‘personality’, which defines the subject matter of personality psychology. The historical background and alternative meanings of the concept are discussed, followed by an analysis of how personality relates to and is distinct from other kinds of differences between people, such as those that are physical rather than psychological, or transient rather than lasting. Personality is distinguished from the related concepts of character and temperament, and the place that the study of personality occupies in psychology as a whole is examined. Personality psychology is argued to be distinguished by its emphasis on individual differences, and by its focus on whole persons as behaving, thinking, and feeling beings. Finally, an overview of the book’s organization is presented.

A friend of one of the authors once told him a sad story about a boy he knew as a child. Apparently, this boy’s mother took him aside at an early age, looked him in the eye, and addressed to him the following words: ‘Son, you’re not very good-looking, you’re not very smart, you have no personality, and you’ll probably never have many friends, and I thought I should tell you this while you are young so you don’t develop any unrealistic hopes for the future.’

This rather harsh assessment immediately raises a few questions. What kind of harm did the boy suffer from this statement? Did he grow up to be an alcoholic, an axe murderer, a dentist? What kind of mother would say this to her child? Is this story made up? However, one question that may not have struck you is this: What would it mean to have no personality? Or, turning the question around, what does it mean to have a personality?

The concept of personality

To answer this question we have to explore the meanings of the word ‘personality’, because it turns out that there are several. One particularly instructive way to sort out these meanings and to think through their implications is to examine the word’s history. People have always had personalities and all ancient thought traditions made judgements about human personality (Mayer, Lin, & Korogodsky, 2011), but the concept of personality itself is relatively recent and has undergone some significant changes. Once upon a time, personality was something everyone had. When the word first appeared in English in the 14th century, it meant the quality of being a person, as distinct from an inanimate thing. ‘Personality’ referred to the capacities – such as consciousness and rational thought – that were believed to give humans a special place in creation (Williams, 1976). In this theological sense, then, personality refers to our shared humanity.

In time, however, this sense of personality as personhood gave way to one that has a more modern feel to it. Over a period of centuries, personality came to refer less to the human capacities that we share and that distinguish us from animals, and more to the characteristics that give each one of us our individuality. In this sense, personality implies a focus on the individual human being: the ‘person’. Interestingly, however, the word ‘person’ did not originally refer to the individual in the way we tend to use it today. Instead, ‘person’ came, via French, from the Latin word ‘persona’, which referred to the mask worn by an actor to portray a particular character. In this theatrical sense, personality has to do with the role or character that the person plays in life’s drama. The person’s individuality, in this sense, is a matter of the roles or characters that he or she assumes.

While ‘personality’ gradually acquired the sense of individuality, it sometimes took on a more specific connotation. Rather than referring equally to all kinds of individuality, it increasingly referred to vivacity or charisma. As a popular song of the 1960s by Lloyd Price put it: ‘I’ll be a fool for you, ’Cause you’ve got – [ecstatic chorus] Personality! – Walk – Personality! – Talk – Personality! – Smile – Personality! – Charm – Personality!’, and so on. People who had these qualities in abundance were said to have more personality, and self-improvement books gave directions for acquiring this precious quantity. Presumably it is in this sense that our unfortunate boy was said to have ‘no personality’, and why celebrities are commonly referred to as ‘personalities’.

Clearly ‘personality’ has had several distinct meanings: personhood, individuality, and personal charm. These are all meanings that laypeople understand and use in their everyday speech. But what does personality mean in the specialized language of psychology, the science that should, presumably, have something to say about human individuality, and what it is to be a person? What is it, precisely, that personality psychologists study?

‘Personality’ in psychology

If you ask an ornithologist or an architect what their fields are basically all about they will probably give you a simple, unhesitating answer: birds and buildings. Ask a personality psychologist and you are likely to hear a pause, an embarrassed clearing of the throat, and then a rather lengthy and abstract formulation. Ask ten personality psychologists, and you may well hear ten different formulations. Personality is a slippery concept, which is difficult to capture within a simple definition. In spite of this, a common thread runs through all psychologists’ definitions. Psychologists agree that personality is fundamentally a matter of human individuality, or ‘individual differences’, to use the phrase that most prefer.

However, this definition of personality as human individuality immediately runs into problems unless we flesh it out a little. For a start, it is obvious that not all differences between people are differences of personality. We differ in our physical attributes, our ages, our nationalities, and our genders, and none of these differences really seems to be about personality. Of course, it is possible that these differences are in some way related to personality, but they are not themselves differences of personality. We are sometimes told that men are from Mars and women from Venus – the former aggressive and dominating, the latter loving and nurturing – but even if these crude stereotypes were true, biological sex would not be a personality characteristic. So we must immediately qualify our definition so that personality refers only to psychological differences between people, differences having to do with thought, emotion, motivation, and behaviour.

Even here our definition is not quite sufficient as far as most psychologists are concerned. Traditionally, psychologists have considered certain psychological differences between people to be outside the realm of personality, specifically those involving intelligence and cognitive abilities. For many years psychological researchers and theorists have tried to understand and measure people’s intellectual capabilities, individual differences that predict successful performance on a variety of tasks, and particularly those that involve formal schooling. Individual differences of this sort will be examined in a later section of this book (Chapters 12–14), and are certainly of interest to many personality psychologists, but they are generally treated separately from individual differences in personality. Excluding these ability-related differences, then, we are left with a definition of personality as non-intellectual psychological differences between people.

If this distinction between intellectual and non-intellectual differences makes you uneasy, you are not alone. Many psychologists consider it to be somewhat arbitrary. Which side of the conceptual divide does creativity fall on, for example? It seems to be partly a matter of mental abilities, and partly a matter of non-intellectual qualities such as openness to new experiences, mental flexibility, and drive. In addition, some psychologists argue that certain personality differences – differences that do not involve competencies in particular cognitive tasks – can be fruitfully understood as abilities or intelligences. For instance, some psychologists have recently proposed interpersonal and emotional intelligences. Nevertheless, although the boundary between the intellectual and non-intellectual domains is a vague and permeable one, it is a boundary that most psychologists continue to take seriously.

Have we finished our conceptual labour now that we have a working definition of personality as non-intellectual psychological differences between people? Sadly, not quite. Consider the case of emotions and moods. Emotions and moods are non-intellectual states of mind, and at any particular time individuals differ on them (you may be angry, another person anxious, yet another person content). Shouldn’t emotions and moods therefore be aspects of personality? Psychologists argue that they are not, precisely because they refer to fleeting states rather than to enduring characteristics of the person. Only characteristics that have some degree of stability and consistency – characteristics that can be thought of as lasting dispositions of the person – are considered to be aspects of personality. Once again, people’s emotional states may reflect enduring emotional dispositions (e.g., you might be an anger-prone person) or they may be related to their personalities in a specific way (e.g., you might be angry now because you are the sort of person who is quick to take offence). However, emotional states are too short-lived to be considered as aspects of personality themselves.

A related issue arises with psychological characteristics such as attitudes (e.g., being for or against immigration restrictions), beliefs (e.g., whether or not God exists), tastes (e.g., preferring hip hop or Haydn), and habits (e.g., going to bed early or late). All of these characteristics, unlike emotions and moods, are at least somewhat stable over time, and they clearly reflect non-intellectual differences between people. However, psychologists still do not usually consider them true components of personality. The reason this time is that attitudes, beliefs, tastes, and habits are normally quite narrow and restricted in their psychological relevance. Attitudes and beliefs concern specific propositions, tastes concern specific experiences, and habits concern specific actions. Personality characteristics, in contrast, have relatively broad relevance; they refer to generalized patterns of psychological functioning. For instance, people might be said to have ‘authoritarian’ personalities if, in addition to their specifically anti-immigration sentiments, they hold a variety of prejudiced, repressive, and highly conventional attitudes. Similarly, people who go to bed late might be said to be ambitious if this habit is part of a larger pattern of hard work and competitive striving, or extraverted and sensation-seeking if it is part of a pattern of relentless partying.

As you can see, the understanding of personality that psychologists employ is quite complex. The appealing simplicity that ‘individual differences’ implies is a little deceptive. From the perspective of personality psychology, that is, personality refers to those individual differences that (1) are psychological in nature, (2) fall outside the intellectual domain, (3) are enduring dispositions rather than transient states, and (4) form relatively broad or generalized patterns. This set of distinctions is presented schematically in Figure 1.1.

Figure 1.1 A classification of individual differences

Does this complex set of distinctions add up to a satisfactory definition of personality? It certainly comes close. However, we need to make one more important addition to it. Some psychologists argue that the definition of personality should not only refer to individual differences in dispositions, but should also refer to the underlying psychological mechanisms and processes that give rise to them. That is, someone’s personality is not simply a set of characteristics that they possess, but also a set of dynamics that account for these characteristics. If we allow for this sensible addition, then it is hard to do much better than Funder (1997), who defines personality as ‘an individual’s characteristic pattern of thought, emotion, and behavior, together with the psychological mechanisms – hidden or not – behind those patterns’ (pp. 1–2).

After reading all of the conceptual distinctions we have made so far while defining personality, the definition that we have come up with may seem to narrow personality down to a small and insignificant subset of the differences between people. However, if you think about it for a minute, you might change your mind. In fact, those aspects of your psychological individuality that are enduring, broad, and non-intellectual are particularly important ones.

If you were asked to describe yourself, you would probably mention many attributes that are not aspects of your personality – such as groups you belong to (e.g., national, ethnic, gender, age) and physical descriptions – but you would almost certainly mention quite a few personality characteristics. Indeed, psychologist Deborah Prentice (1990) asked a sample of university students to describe themselves and found that personality c...