Transcript Personality Psychology Chapter 12 Cognitive Approaches to Personality

Personality Psychology
Chapter 12
Cognitive Approaches to Personality
Introduction
• Cognitive approaches to personality focus on
differences in how people process information
• The different “styles” of perceiving and thinking
• The different strategies people use to solve
problems
Three levels of cognition of interest
to personality psychologists
•
•
•
Perception: Process of imposing order on
information received by our sense organs
Interpretation: Process of making sense
of, or explaining, events in the world
Beliefs and desires: Standards and goals
people develop for evaluating themselves
and others
Fourth cognitive domain of interest: Intelligence
Cognition
Awareness and thinking, as well as specific
mental acts such as perceiving, interpreting,
remembering, believing, and anticipating.
– Personalizing cognition – relating a new event
to past experience
– Objectifying cognition – recalling factual
information in response to a new event
Cognitive Topics in Personality
Cognition
Personalizing
“Big, friendly, loves
to go on walks”
Objectifying
“3 year old Golden
Retriever, 60 pounds
and rusty-yellow”
Cognitive Topics in Personality
Information Processing
The transformation of sensory input into
mental representations and the manipulation
of such representations
Information Processing and Personality

Grew rapidly during the 1970s and 1980s.
 Unlike
computers, however, humans are not
always accurate or unbiased in how they process
information.
 Humans
differ greatly from each other in terms of
how they perceive, think about, and construe
themselves, the world, and other people.
Three Levels of Cognition
• Perception
The process of imposing order on information
• Interpretation
Making sense, or explaining, various events in the
world
• Beliefs and Desires
Standards and goals that people develop for
evaluating themselves and others
Personality Revealed Through
Perception
Field Dependence
Relying on the visual
field to make a
judgment
Field Independence
Relying on your own
sensations to make a
judgment
Measured using the Rod and Frame Test or the
Embedded Figures Test.
Field Dependence-Independence
and Life Choices
Education
Witkin et. al. (1954) found that choice of major in
college was related to field independence/dependence.
Field Independence
Field Dependence
• Natural sciences
• Math
• Engineering
• Social Sciences
• Education
Field Dependence-Independence
and Life Choices
Interpersonal Relations
• Witkin found that field dependent people tend to rely on
social cues and are oriented toward other people.
• Field independent people function with more autonomy
and are more impersonal or detached towards others.
Perceptual Style Leads To Different
Styles Of Learning
Police Officers
Field independent officers perform better in high-stimulation
settings

Field independent officers could notice details more accurately and were
less distracted by noise and activity.
Multimedia-based Computer Instruction
Field independent eighth-graders learned more effectively than
field dependent

Field independent students got points imbedded within the different
sources of media faster, and were able to switch between educational
media or sensory fields faster than field dependent students.
Field Independent Characteristics
• Field independent people tend to:
– Be skilled at analyzing complex situations and exacting
information from the clutter of background distraction
– Better able to screen out distracting information and focus on a
task
– Learn more effectively in hypermedia-based instructional
environment
– Be somewhat low on social skills
– Prefer to keep their distance from others
Field Dependent Characteristics
• Field dependent people tend to:
– Have strong social skills
– Gravitate toward others
– Be more attentive to context than field independent
people
Pain Tolerance and Sensation
Reducing-Augmenting
The Reducer-Augmenter Theory was proposed by
Aneseth Petrie, a psychologist studying individual
differences in tolerance for sensory stimulation
Reducer-Augmenter Theory:
People with low pain tolerance had a nervous system that
amplified or augmented the subjective impact sensory
input
Those who could tolerate pain well had a nervous system
that reduced the effects
Pain Tolerance and Sensation
Reducing-Augmenting
 Reducers show relatively small brain
responses to flashes of light and bursts of noise
compared to augmenters
 Reducers seek strong stimulation, drink more
coffee, smoke more, and have a lower threshold
to become bored
 Reducers tend to start smoking at an earlier
age, and to engage in minor delinquencies as
adolescents
Personality Revealed
Through Interpretation
Personality psychologists study two main kinds of
interpretation: responsibility and expectations for
the future.
 Kelly’s
 Locus
Personal Construct Theory
of Control
 Learned
Helplessness
 Explanatory
Style
Kelly’s Personal Construct
Theory
• Human nature: Humans-as-scientists;
people attempt to understand, predict, and
control events
• Personal constructs: Constructs person uses
to interpret and predict events
Kelly’s Personal Construct Theory
• Kelly and post-modernism: Post-modernism
is an intellectual position grounded in
notion that reality is constructed, that every
person and every culture has unique version
of reality, with none having privilege
Kelly’s Personal Construct
Theory
• Fundamental Postulate: “a person’s
processes are psychologically channelized
by the ways in which he anticipates events”
• Commonality corollary: If two people have
similar construct systems, they will be
psychologically similar
Kelly’s Personal Construct
Theory
• Sociality corollary: To understand a person,
must understand how she construes the
social world
• Anxiety: Not being able to understand and
predict life events
• Assessing personal constructs
Locus of Control
• Locus of control research started in the mid-1950’s
when psychologist Julian Rotter was developing his
social learning theory.
• He believed that some people expect that certain
behaviors will result in obtaining a reinforcer, or they
believed that they were in control of the outcomes of
life.
• Generalized Expectancies:
– a person’s expectations for reinforcement hold across a
variety of situations. When people encounter a new
situation they base their expectancies about what will
happen on their generalized expectancies about whether
they have the abilities to influence events.
Locus of Control
 Generalized Expectancies
 Internal Locus of Control
 The expectancy that events are under one’s control and
that one is responsible for major life outcomes
 External Locus of Control
 The expectancy that events are outside of one’s control
 Specific Expectancies
 the locus of control is in discrete areas of life. A person may be
internal in one area (health) and external in another (politics)
Learned Helplessness
Accepting a painful fate without attempting to remove
yourself from the unpleasant situation.
Work on learned helplessness began when psychologists were
studying avoidance learning in dogs. The dogs learned to
accept shocks to their paws, even though they could jump
away.
Explanatory Style

The reformulation of learned helplessness theory
focuses on the cognitions a person has that may
lead to feelings of helplessness, or the explanations
that people give for events in their lives.

These explanations are referred to as causal
attribution.

The next three slides highlight the 3 categories for
attribution for the causes of events.
Explanatory Style
External
Explanatory Style
Internal
Explanatory Style
Believing that the causes
of events are outside
of one’s control
Blaming yourself for
events
Explanatory Style
Stable
Explanatory Style
Unstable
Explanatory Style
The cause of a
situation is permanent
and stable
Causes of events are
temporary and not
long lasting
“My paper’s poor grade
was due to the fact that I
am not a good writer”
“My paper’s poor grade
was due to the fact that I
was tired when I wrote it”
Explanatory Style
Global
Explanatory Style
Specific
Explanatory Style
Causes affect many
situations in all of
life
Events happen due
to very specific
causes
“I was robbed because
all people are bad”
“That person who
robbed me is bad”
Explanatory Style
Pessimistic
Explanatory Style
Optimistic
Explanatory Style
Emphasizes
internal, stable, and
global causes
Emphasizes
external, temporary,
and specific causes
Explanatory Style
• Our explanatory styles have shown to be a stable
characteristic over time.
• The pessimistic style puts a person at risk for
feelings of helplessness and poor adjustment.
• Studies have shown that a pessimistic style in
college predicted poorer health 20 to 35 years
later.
Personality Revealed
Through Beliefs and Desires
• One important part of a person’s
desires is his or her goals for the
future.
• People differ in their beliefs and
desires, and these differences are part
of and reveal their personalities.
Personality Revealed
Through Beliefs and Desires
• This section looks at two programs of
research:
Personal
 the
Life
Project Analysis
assessment of personal projects and
Tasks, Goals, and Strategies
 the
strategies people enact to achieve
their goals and life tasks.
Personality Revealed
Through Beliefs and Desires
Personal Projects Analysis
• Psychologist Brian Little believes that personal projects
make natural units for understanding the working of
personality because they reflect how people navigate
through daily life.
• He found that bringing your personal projects to
successful completion seems to be a pivotal factor in
whether we thrive emotionally or lead lives of quiet
desperation.
Personal Projects Analysis
 Personal
Projects: a set of relevant actions intended
to achieve a goal that the person has selected
 People
who score high on neuroticism rate their
personal projects as stressful, difficult, likely to end
in failure, and outside of their control.
 Overall
happiness is most related to feeling to
control of one’s personal projects
Life Tasks, Goals, and Strategies
 Life
Tasks: personal versions of culturally
mandated problem-solving goals
 Strategies:
characteristic ways that people
respond to the challenges of making
progress on a particular life task
Life Tasks, Goals, and Strategies
What strategies might help anyone pursue life tasks in the
face of risk, uncertainty, and self-doubt?
 Social

Constraint
Anxiety is overcome by taking the lead from other people
whenever in social situations
 Defensive

Pessimism
Preparing for failure ahead of time; set low expectations for
own performance and focus on worst-case outcomes
 Outcome-Focused

Turning every situation into opportunities to focus on the task;
reassurance-seeking in particular life task domain.
Intelligence
Intelligence continues to be defined in many ways,
and there may be many different kinds of
intelligence.
 General
Intelligence: early belief that intelligence was
a trait
 Achievement
View: how much knowledge a person
has acquired relative to others similar in age
 Aptitude
learn
View: the ability to become educated or to
Summary

Personality and perceptual differences

Personality and interpreting events

Personality and how people select projects and
tasks to pursue in life

Intelligence