Great Myths of Personality

M. Brent Donnellan, Richard E. Lucas

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781118521410
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psicologia
• Subtopic: Personalità in psicologia

Great Myths of Personality teaches critical thinking skills and key concepts of personality psychology through the discussion of popular myths and misconceptions.

• Provides a thorough look at contemporary myths and misconceptions, such as: Does birth order affect personality? Are personality tests an accurate way to measure personality? Do romantic partners need similar personalities for relationship success?
• Introduces concepts of personality psychology in an accessible and engaging manner
• Focuses on current debates and controversies in the field with references to the latest research and scientific literature

1
SITUATIONAL FACTORS OVERWHELM PERSONALITY WHEN PREDICTING BEHAVIOR

We start this book off with the biggest myth in all of personality psychology—the idea that situational forces overwhelm the effects of personality traits when it comes to explaining people's behavior. People who believe this idea argue that features of the situation and environment play a stronger role in determining behavior than the characteristics of the person. Taken to the extreme, proponents of this idea might even argue that personality does not exist at all, and that our perception that people have stable personalities is an illusion. This myth was so powerful and was so widely accepted that it almost destroyed the field of personality psychology as an academic discipline starting in the 1970s. Thus, this is a critical myth to address. If personality itself is a myth, then there isn't much point to the rest of the book. In addition, in addressing this myth, we set the stage for many other myths that we cover in this book. Questions about the stability of personality over the life span, for instance, necessarily build on issues regarding stability from one moment to the next, one day to the next, and one month to the next. Therefore, we will try to introduce some basic ideas about what personality is and what we should expect from people's personalities.

Defining personality

So what is personality? As we noted in the introduction, personality focuses on the ways that people differ from one another. One widely cited definition was proposed by Gordon Allport (see 1937, 1961). Allport was a famous personality psychologist who wrote one of the first major texts on the topic, and he is often regarded as founding father of the field. According to Allport (1961, p. 28), “Personality is the dynamic organization within the individual of those psychophysical systems that determine [the person's] characteristic behavior and thought.” If we break this definition down into its component parts, we can identify a few key features that will be important for our discussion about personality in this book.

Most importantly, personality is “within the individual.” It is something that the person carries around from situation to situation. Thus, this implies that there will be at least some form of stability over time and across situations. Note that we do not yet explain precisely what form of stability we expect to see—this will become important as we discuss the responses to the myth addressed in this chapter. Furthermore, these features that are within the individual determine that person's “characteristic behavior and thought.” In an earlier version, Allport (1937, p. 48) wrote that personality determines a person's “unique adjustments to [his or her] environment.” In other words, depending on their personalities, people will react differently to the same situation. This part of the definition also implies that all behaviors reflect the interaction between the person and his or her environment. Personality does not exert its effects in a vacuum. Finally, Allport notes that personality reflects a “dynamic organization” of features within the individual. This means that the different characteristics that people have may work together in a unique manner to create their reactions to the world. In other words, one personality characteristic may have a different influence on behavior depending on the other personality characteristics that the person has. Consider a person who is both anxious and highly self‐controlled. How might that person react to news that he or she is at higher risk for heart disease compared to someone who is anxious but quite low in self‐control?

Allport's definition suggests that knowing something about a person's personality will allow us to predict (with some degree of uncertainty) how that person will respond to a specific situation in the future. As you can imagine, this is extremely useful information. At the most basic level, if personality exists and has a reasonably important influence on behavior, then we can expect at least some consistency when we encounter the same person in the same situation on two occasions. When you choose a person who has been kind and considerate to you in the past to be your roommate or even your spouse, you are doing so precisely because you believe this person has some stable personality characteristics that will cause them to act similarly in the future. In short, anytime you choose to interact with someone based on your expectations of how they will behave in the future, you are implicitly endorsing the idea that personalities exist and affect behavior.

As a science of human behavior, personality psychology goes even further than the ideas reflected in this belief. Personality psychologists believe that if they can begin to understand the “dynamic organization” of personality characteristics within people, they can not only expect stability across similar situations, they can also predict new behaviors in new situations based on the understanding of that person's personality characteristics (along with an understanding of the features of the new situation). This expectation explains why personality psychologists often examine the connections between specific personality traits (like conscientiousness) and theoretically relevant and practically important real‐world outcomes like success in school or work (Ozer & Benet‐Martinez, 2006; Roberts, Kuncel, Shiner, Caspi, & Goldberg, 2007; Wilmot & Ones, 2019). If personality exists and has a reasonably powerful effect on behavior, then you can see why researchers might want to document the strength of any connections in a systematic fashion.

Personality and assessment

However, in the late 1960s, something happened that led people to call into question the most basic tenets of personality psychology. Specifically, Walter Mischel published an influential book called Personality and Assessment (Mischel, 1968). In this book, Mischel laid out a set of critiques about the state of personality research and theory at the time. It is important to understand the nature of these critiques, along with the ways that these critiques were interpreted, to understand the myth about the power and primacy of situational factors we cover here. This is also a place where some of our discussion of myths touches upon how personality research is presented in other parts of psychology.

Mischel (1968) was highly critical of “broad” personality traits, especially those that were “decontextualized” or not linked to a specific situation. When researchers talk about broad traits, they usually refer to abstract ideas that capture individual differences in a range of specific attributes that are thought to reflect a general underlying tendency. For instance, extraversion is a broad trait that reflects not just whether you enjoy parties (a narrow tendency) but also whether you are highly active, whether you tend to experience positive emotions, whether you enjoy exciting activities, and whether you are assertive with others. Although not every person who is assertive also enjoys parties, these characteristics tend to go together to form the broad trait of extraversion. Furthermore, decontextualized traits are those that are thought to lead to the same or very similar behaviors across a wide range of contexts. The fact that people who are extraverted might be sociable at parties, at work, in the classroom, and even with a bunch of strangers means that their extraverted behavior does not depend all that much on the specific context—it is decontextualized. It is these broad, decontextualized traits that Mischel targeted with his critique (though some people took his ideas even further and argued that we should be skeptical of the idea of stable personality characteristics as a whole). Other broad traits include the Big Five attributes described in the introduction and other attributes such as aggressiveness, self‐control, and shyness.

Mischel acknowledged that when people were asked to describe their personality across different situations or on different occasions, their responses were quite stable. In other words, people believed that decontextualized and cross‐situationally stable personality traits existed. However, according to the research that Mischel reviewed, when psychologists actually looked at the specific behaviors that people exhibited, this behavior was not especially stable either across different situations or even in the same situation at different times. This discrepancy between what people believe about the consistency of their behavior and what they actually do across situations was an important part of this critique because it suggested that people fool themselves about how consistent they are. People might not actually know themselves at all.

What was the evidence that Mischel identified to buttress his claims about personality traits? One of the most famous studies that Mischel reviewed was conducted by Hartshorne and May (1928). In this study, researchers tested the honesty of a group of children¹ using a variety of different behavioral tests. If honesty is conceptualized as a broad trait, then it should be reflected in a range of specific behaviors. After all, these specific behaviors are thought to reflect a general tendency to be truthful, forthcoming, and morally upstanding. For example, the children in these studies were presented with opportunities to cheat on tests, but the precise behavior that was required to cheat (like copying answers from an answer sheet vs. copying from a friend) differed. Hartshorne and May found that these dishonest behaviors were not especially stable from one situation to the next; those children who cheated in one situation were not necessarily those who cheated in a different situation. In fact, the correlations between any two behaviors were often extremely low, sometimes close to zero (meaning that you could not predict how one child would behave from his or her behavior in a different type of cheating opportunity). This and other evidence led Mischel to conclude that despite people's perception that broad traits like “honesty” exist, specific honest acts are not especially stable from one situation to the next. Instead, because behavior varied—even across subtly different situations—situations must have m...