Week 12 · Chapter

Chapter 12 — Personality

Introduction to Psychology Free sample edition

The module's primary reading · ~40–50 minutes · Objective 7 (describe cognitive, social, and emotional development across the lifespan and compare the major families of personality theory and their assessment), Objective 1 (explain what makes psychology a science and compare its major theoretical perspectives (biological, psychodynamic, behavioral, cognitive, humanistic, sociocultural)) · Read it first this week; the lecture, the slides, the tutorial, the quiz, and the Analysis Workshop all build on it.

In plain language

Everyone you know has a style: the friend who plans every trip, the cousin who talks to strangers in line, the coworker who stays calm in a crisis. Personality is the word psychologists use for that style, a person's typical way of thinking, feeling, and acting that shows up again and again. This week you will meet the four big families of personality theory, and each one asks a different question about where that style comes from. You will learn to describe a person on five dials, which are sliding scales with a low end and a high end, instead of sorting them into a box. Finally, you will compare the tests psychologists trust with the ones they do not, including the quick quizzes you find online.

Why you already care about this

Jonah and Noor share a 2-bedroom apartment near campus. Jonah's whiteboard lists 6 tasks for the week. In 12 months he has never paid the rent late. He tries every new recipe he finds, lends his car without a fuss, and leaves parties after about an hour because crowds wear him out. Noor starts her papers the night before they are due and has lost her keys 3 times since moving in. She invites the whole hall over on weekends, settles arguments between neighbors, and stayed calm the night the kitchen sink flooded.

You already have words for both of them. You might call Jonah "the organized introvert" and Noor "the fun, messy one." Those labels are fast, and they are a kind of theory. They predict that Jonah will be early to the movie and that Noor will bring three friends. But are the labels accurate? Would they hold up next month, or in a different setting? And what do they leave out?

Those are the questions personality psychologists ask. This week you will see four ways they have answered them, and you will learn a way to describe Jonah and Noor that is fairer and far more precise than a two-word label.

By the end of this chapter you will be able to:

define personality and name what makes a description of it scientific;
explain the id, ego, and superego, and identify five defense mechanisms in a new case;
explain self-concept and unconditional positive regard, and connect them to self-actualization;
name the Big Five dimensions in order and read a person on them as five dials;
explain reciprocal determinism and self-efficacy, and trace them through a new case;
compare a self-report inventory with a projective test on reliability and validity, and test an online type quiz with the same two questions.

Carry this sentence with you: a person is a set of dial positions, not a box.

Where we are

Already covered: Week 1 introduced Freud's psychoanalysis, the humanistic movement, and the six perspectives. Week 2 built reliability and validity. Week 6 introduced Bandura's observational learning, Week 10 placed self-actualization at the top of Maslow's hierarchy, and Week 11 asked whether people stay the same across the lifespan.
This week: what personality is, the four major families of personality theory, the Big Five, and how personality is measured.
How they connect: each personality family grows out of a Week 1 perspective, and Week 2's reliability and validity become the test every personality measure must pass.
Where we're going next: Week 13, Social Psychology, moves from the person to the situation and shows how strongly other people shape what anyone does.

Several earlier ideas carry this week. In Week 1, you met psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud's approach, which holds that wishes and conflicts outside a person's awareness shape behavior. You also met the humanistic movement led by Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers, which centered psychology on personal growth, free choice, and each person's own point of view. In Week 2, reliability meant consistency: a reliable measure gives the same or a very similar result when it is repeated under the same conditions. Validity meant accuracy: a valid measure captures the construct it claims to measure, and a measure can be reliable without being valid. In Week 6, Albert Bandura's Bobo doll study (1961) showed that children learn by watching a model. Week 11's question of stability versus change returns here, because a personality is the part of you that tends to stay stable.

1. Define the target: what makes a personality description scientific

Think about how you would describe your closest friend to someone who has never met them. You would probably not list what they did on one random afternoon. You would describe what they usually do: "She is always the first to volunteer," or "He worries about everything." You are pointing at a pattern that repeats.

Personality is a person's characteristic pattern of thinking, feeling, and behaving, one that stays fairly consistent across situations and over time.

Two words in that definition do the heavy lifting. Characteristic means it belongs to this person and sets them apart from others. Consistent means it shows up again: at home and at work, this month and next year. A single bad mood is not personality. A tendency to be in a bad mood most days might be.

Everyone describes personality, so what makes a psychologist's description different? It comes down to the same toolkit you built in Weeks 1 and 2. A description becomes scientific when it has three things:

An operational definition. "Organized" has to become something you can observe and count, such as how many assignments a student turns in on time out of the term's total.
A reliable and valid measure. The measure has to give a similar result when repeated (reliability) and has to capture organization rather than something else, such as how much free time a person has (validity).
Predictions that data could prove wrong. A good description says what the person will probably do next, in a way that could turn out to be false. A claim that fits every possible outcome is not falsifiable, and it cannot be tested.

Worked example — testing a label. Put "Jonah is organized" through the three checks.

Operational definition. Count something observable: the share of rent payments Jonah made on time. In 12 months, he made all 12 on time, so 12 of 12 were on time.
Reliability. Check again later. If next year's count is also high, the measure is consistent.
Prediction. "Organized" predicts that Jonah will turn in his next lab report on time. If he misses three in a row, the label was wrong, and you can see that it was wrong. That is what makes it testable.

In words: a label becomes science when you can measure it the same way twice and when it makes a prediction that could fail. Keep this checklist close, because the rest of the chapter grades each family of theory against it.

Misconception check. Students often think personality is whatever a person is like right now, so an angry outburst "shows" an angry personality. It is tempting because a strong moment is easy to remember. The cure is the word consistent. Personality is the pattern across many situations and over time, not one scene. One outburst tells you about a moment; a pattern of outbursts across months tells you about a person.

2. Look beneath the surface: the psychodynamic family

Dimitri, a project coordinator at a shipping company, misses the deadline for a quarterly report. When his manager asks what happened, he has an explanation ready, and it is not the real reason. Most of us have done something like this. The psychodynamic family of theories asks what is going on underneath.

This family grew from Freud's psychoanalysis, the root of the psychodynamic perspective you met in Week 1. Freud described the mind as having three parts that often pull in different directions. The notation is always written in this order: id · ego · superego.

The id is the part of the mind that holds a person's immediate wants and urges and pushes for their satisfaction right away, run on the pleasure principle.
The ego is the realistic manager of the mind that bargains between the id's wants, the superego's rules, and what the world allows.
The superego is the part of the mind that holds the rules and ideals a person has taken in from parents and society, acting as a conscience.

Picture a slice of cake at midnight. The id says "eat it now." The superego says "you promised yourself you would not." The ego looks for a deal the real world allows: "eat half, and go to bed."

When these parts clash, Freud believed, a person feels anxiety. Defense mechanisms are the unconscious strategies the ego uses to protect a person from anxiety by distorting or hiding a threatening reality. Unconscious is the key word: the person is not choosing to fool anyone. Five of the defenses are worth knowing by name.

Repression is a defense mechanism that pushes anxiety-provoking thoughts, feelings, or memories out of conscious awareness without the person realizing it.
Denial is a defense mechanism in which a person refuses to accept that a painful or threatening fact is true.
Rationalization is a defense mechanism in which a person replaces the real, uncomfortable reason for an action with an acceptable-sounding excuse.
Projection is a defense mechanism in which a person sees their own unacceptable feelings or faults in someone else instead of in themselves.
Displacement is a defense mechanism in which a person redirects a feeling, such as anger, away from its real source and onto a safer target.

Worked example — one missed deadline, five ways. Explain Dimitri's missed report with each defense.

Repression. Dimitri honestly has no memory of the reminder email he dreaded opening. The anxious thought was pushed out of awareness.
Denial. "The deadline isn't really today. They always give us extra time." He refuses to accept the fact.
Rationalization. "Nobody reads these reports anyway." An acceptable excuse replaces the real reason, which is that he put it off.
Projection. "My manager is the one who is disorganized." He sees his own fault in someone else.
Displacement. He says nothing at work, then snaps at his sister over dinner. The anger moves from its real source to a safer target.

In words: the same behavior can be dressed in five different disguises, and in each one the person does not see the disguise. That is the family's great strength as a story about people. It is also its great weakness as science.

Here is the limitation. A psychodynamic explanation can be fitted to almost any outcome after it happens. If Dimitri had finished early, the theory could call that a defense too, against the anxiety of failing. A theory that explains every result in hindsight predicts none of them in advance. That is the hindsight bias you met in Week 1, and it is why most of Freud's specific claims are hard to test. His lasting contribution is broader: the idea that people are not always aware of why they act.

Pause and think. Choose one. Answer it in two or three sentences.

(a) Describe a time you, or a character in a show you like, explained a mistake with a ready excuse, and name which defense mechanism fits it best.

(b) Explain in your own words why a theory that can explain any outcome after the fact is hard to test, using an example that is not about a deadline.

Misconception check. Students often think defense mechanisms are deliberate lies or excuses. It is tempting because rationalization sounds like making excuses on purpose. The cure is the word unconscious. In Freud's theory, a person using a defense does not know they are doing it. If Dimitri knowingly invents a story to avoid trouble, that is ordinary lying, not a defense mechanism.

3. Grow toward your potential: the humanistic family

Think about a coach, teacher, or relative who believed in you no matter how a game or a test went. You may have tried harder, not because you feared losing their approval, but because you did not have to. The humanistic family of theories puts that kind of experience at the center of personality.

This family grew from the humanistic movement led by Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers, and it starts from a hopeful premise: people are naturally driven to grow. Where the psychodynamic family looks for hidden conflict, the humanistic family looks at how a person sees themselves and what helps them flourish.

Self-concept is a person's overall picture of who they are, including their beliefs about their abilities, qualities, and worth.
Unconditional positive regard is Carl Rogers's term for acceptance and caring that do not depend on what a person does or achieves, which he held helps a person grow.

Rogers argued that when people receive acceptance only on conditions ("I love you when you get an A"), they learn to hide or deny parts of themselves. When they receive unconditional positive regard, their self-concept can match their real experience, and they are freer to grow. That growth points toward self-actualization, the top level of Maslow's hierarchy: the drive to develop your talents and become the most complete version of yourself. You met it in Week 10 as a motive; here it is the direction a healthy personality grows.

Worked example — two coaches. A middle-school soccer player misses a penalty kick in the final minute. Compare two responses.

Conditional regard. Coach A says, "You let the team down. Starters don't miss." The player learns that acceptance depends on results. Her self-concept may shrink to "I'm only worth something when I score."
Unconditional positive regard. Coach B says, "That was a hard moment. You're still my player. Let's work on it at practice." The player's worth is not on the line, so she can admit the mistake and practice.
Humanistic prediction. Rogers would predict that the second player is more likely to keep growing toward her potential.

In words: the humanistic family says acceptance is the soil personality grows in. A caveat belongs right beside that idea. The family's ideas are hard to measure: "growth" and "acceptance" resist precise operational definitions. That makes the family more useful as a guide to how to treat people than as a source of testable predictions.

Misconception check. Students often think unconditional positive regard means approving of everything a person does. It is tempting because "unconditional" sounds like "no limits." The cure is to separate the person from the behavior. Coach B still wants the kick practiced. What is unconditional is the acceptance of the player, not approval of every action.

4. Turn the dials: the trait family and the Big Five

Go back to Jonah and Noor. Instead of asking what hidden conflict drives them, or how accepted they feel, you could ask a simpler question: where does each of them sit on a few basic dimensions that describe everybody? That question defines the trait family.

A trait is a stable tendency to think, feel, or act in a certain way across many situations, such as a tendency to be talkative or to be organized.

Trait researchers asked how many basic traits it takes to describe a person well. Many studies, using different questionnaires and ratings from both the person and people who know them, kept arriving at five broad dimensions. The Big Five is the five-factor model of personality, which describes every person on five broad, continuous dimensions: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism, remembered as OCEAN.

The order is always the same, OCEAN, the first letters of the five names:

Openness is the Big Five dimension that runs from preferring the familiar and routine to seeking new ideas, experiences, and variety.
Conscientiousness is the Big Five dimension that runs from spontaneous and disorganized to careful, organized, and dependable.
Extraversion is the Big Five dimension that runs from reserved and energized by time alone to outgoing and energized by other people.
Agreeableness is the Big Five dimension that runs from competitive and skeptical of others to cooperative, trusting, and kind.
Neuroticism is the Big Five dimension that runs from calm and emotionally steady to easily worried, tense, and moody.

The single most important word in the Big Five is continuous. Each dimension is a dial, not a switch. A person is not "an extravert" or "not an extravert." A person sits somewhere along the extraversion dial, and most people sit somewhere in the middle. This week you will read a dial's position with three words, low, middle, or high, but remember that a real dial has every position in between.

That is the difference between a trait and a type. A personality type is a category that sorts people into a few separate boxes, such as introvert or extravert; it hides the continuous range that a dimension, or dial, captures.

The trait family has the strongest measurement record of the four, because traits can be given operational definitions and measured reliably. Its limitation is the other side of that strength: a list of dial positions describes a person without explaining why they sit there.

Misconception check. Students often list a trait that is not one of the Big Five, such as intelligence, honesty, or self-efficacy. It is tempting because those are important qualities, and some sound like personality. The cure is the acronym. The Big Five are exactly openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism, OCEAN, and nothing else is on the list. Intelligence is the subject of Week 9's tests, and self-efficacy belongs to the social-cognitive family later in this chapter.

5. Read two roommates on five dials

Now put the dials to work on the roommates from the opening. Each reading below is backed by behavior you already saw, so every dial position comes from something observable.

Worked example — Jonah and Noor on the five dials. Read each roommate on all five dials, then count what the readings show.

Jonah, five readings. Openness high: he tries every new recipe. Conscientiousness high: the whiteboard plan, and rent never late. Extraversion low: he recharges alone and leaves parties early. Agreeableness high: he lends his car and rarely argues. Neuroticism middle: he worries before exams but settles quickly.
Noor, five readings. Openness middle: she likes new music but orders the same meal. Conscientiousness low: papers started the night before, keys often lost. Extraversion high: she invites the hall over and gains energy from a crowd. Agreeableness high: she settles hall disputes and shares freely. Neuroticism low: she stays calm when the sink floods.
Total readings. 2 roommates × 5 dials = 10 dial readings.
Compare. They differ on openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, and neuroticism, and match on agreeableness. So 4 dials differ + 1 dial matches = 5 dials.
Type quiz. An "introvert or extravert" quiz reports 1 of the 5 dials and gives 2 boxes. It calls Jonah an introvert and Noor an extravert and says nothing about the other 4 dials, including the 3 other dials on which they differ.
Dials versus boxes. Even read only as low, middle, or high, five dials give 3 × 3 × 3 × 3 × 3 = 243 possible profiles, against 2 boxes for the type quiz. A real dial has positions between the bands too.

The readings are summarized below so you can compare the roommates dial by dial.

Jonah and Noor read on the five Big Five dials, in OCEAN order, with whether their readings match
Dial	Jonah	Noor	Same or different?
Openness	High	Middle	Different
Conscientiousness	High	Low	Different
Extraversion	Low	High	Different
Agreeableness	High	High	Same
Neuroticism	Middle	Low	Different

In words: every reading is a position on a continuum for that one roommate, not a label of who the roommate is. Look at the agreeableness row. Both roommates are high on agreeableness even though a type quiz would put them in opposite boxes. The two-box label hides the very thing that makes them good roommates.

Now compare the two descriptions by size. Five dials read in three bands give 243 possible profiles versus 2 boxes for the quiz, a ratio of 243 to 2, so the dial description can tell apart more than 120 times as many people. If you were choosing a roommate, which description would you rather use?

Pause and think. Choose one. Answer it in two or three sentences.

(a) Read someone you know well, a friend or a family member, on one dial of your choice, and name the behavior that tells you where they sit.

(b) Describe a time a one-word label, such as "shy" or "loud," gave someone the wrong idea about you or a person you know, and name the dial the label squeezed into a box.

Misconception check. Students often read a trait as a type, as if "high in extraversion" means "an extravert, period." It is tempting because type labels are short and familiar. The cure is the table above. Noor is high in extraversion and middle in openness; she is not a category, she is a set of positions. Most people sit near the middle of most dials, which a two-box quiz cannot show.

6. Change the setting: the social-cognitive family

Ines starts her first week as a line cook at a busy restaurant. On day one she watches the grill station and thinks, "I could never keep up with that." By day five she has asked to try it, burned two orders, gotten a quick tip from the head cook, and handled a whole lunch rush. Her belief changed what she did, what she did changed how the kitchen treated her, and how the kitchen treated her changed her belief.

The social-cognitive family, associated with Albert Bandura, explains personality through that kind of loop. You met Bandura in Week 6, where his Bobo doll study (1961) showed that children learn by watching a model. His later work on personality kept that focus on thinking and on other people.

Social-cognitive theory is the family of personality theory, associated with Albert Bandura, that explains personality through the interaction of a person's thoughts and beliefs, their behavior, and their environment. Its two key ideas are these:

Reciprocal determinism is Albert Bandura's idea that a person's thoughts and beliefs, their behavior, and their environment each influence the other two. In notation: person ↔ behavior ↔ environment, with each arrow running both ways.
Self-efficacy is a person's belief in their ability to succeed at a specific task, such as learning a new station at work.

Worked example — Ines at the grill. Trace reciprocal determinism through her first week.

Person to behavior. By midweek, Ines's self-efficacy for the grill has grown a little. Her belief leads her to ask for a turn at the station.
Behavior to environment. Because she asks, the head cook gives her more turns and a quick tip. Her behavior has changed her environment.
Environment to person. More practice and a helpful tip lead to a smooth lunch rush. Her success raises her self-efficacy.
Around again. Higher self-efficacy leads her to volunteer for the busier dinner shift, and the loop continues.

In words: in this family, personality is not only inside you. It is a running conversation between what you believe, what you do, and where you are. Self-efficacy is also specific: Ines can feel confident at the grill and unsure about the register at the same time.

The family's strength is that its ideas are testable. You can measure self-efficacy for a task and check whether it predicts effort and persistence. Its limitation is that it says less about the broad, stable patterns the trait family captures.

Misconception check. Students often treat self-efficacy as the same thing as self-esteem, or as a sixth Big Five trait. It is tempting because all three are about how you see yourself. The cure is the word specific. Self-efficacy is a belief about one task ("I can learn the grill"), not your overall worth, and it is not one of the Big Five dials. A person can be low in neuroticism and still have low self-efficacy for public speaking.

7. Measure a personality: inventories versus projective tests

A clinic, a research lab, and an online quiz site all claim to measure personality. They do not all deserve the same trust. The difference comes down to the two Week 2 questions: is the measure reliable, and is it valid?

A self-report inventory is a personality test that asks a long, fixed set of questions about a person's feelings and behavior and scores every answer the same way. Because every person gets the same items and the same scoring, two scorers reach the same result. The best-known example is the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), a widely used self-report inventory, objectively scored, whose reliability and validity are well established.

A projective test is a personality test that asks a person to describe or tell a story about ambiguous images, on the assumption that the answers reveal hidden feelings. In plain words, it hands you something unclear and studies what you make of it. The evidence for its reliability and validity is considerably weaker than for a self-report inventory. Two classic examples come straight from the psychodynamic family's belief in hidden motives:

The Rorschach inkblot test is a projective test in which a person says what they see in a series of symmetrical inkblots.
The Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) is a projective test in which a person tells a story about each of a series of ambiguous pictures of people.

Worked example — two tests, two questions. Compare an inventory and an inkblot test on reliability and validity.

Reliability, the inventory. Every answer is scored the same way by a fixed key, so two scorers reach the same result, and retaking the test tends to give similar results. Its reliability is well established.
Reliability, the inkblot. Two scorers can read the same answer ("I see two people dancing") in different ways. That makes consistent scoring harder, and the evidence for reliability is considerably weaker.
Validity. The inventory's scores have been checked against what people actually do and report, and its validity is well established. For projective tests, the evidence that the answers capture what they claim to is considerably weaker.
Verdict. The self-report inventory is the approach the evidence supports.

In words: a test earns trust by giving the same answer twice and by measuring what it says it measures. A self-report inventory has its own limitation, which is worth stating honestly: people can shade their answers to look good, which is why well-built inventories include ways to check for that.

Misconception check. Students often think projective tests are as reliable as a validated inventory, or even more revealing because they seem to reach "hidden" feelings. It is tempting because the inkblot is famous and feels deep. The cure is the evidence. For projective tests, the evidence for reliability and validity is considerably weaker than for an inventory like the MMPI. Feeling deep is not the same as measuring accurately.

8. Test the online type quiz

Your feed offers a free quiz: "Answer 12 questions and discover which of four personality types you are!" It takes three minutes, and the result sounds exactly like you. Is it personality science?

Run it through the same two questions you used on the inventory.

Worked example — the three-minute quiz. Test it with the chapter's checklist.

Dials or boxes? It sorts you into one of a few types, so it uses boxes, not dials. Like the introvert-or-extravert quiz in section 5, it throws away the continuous range.
Reliability. Would you get the same type if you took it again next month? If nobody has checked, you do not know whether the result is consistent.
Validity. Does your type predict anything about how you actually act at work, in school, or with friends? If nobody has checked, you do not know whether it measures anything real.
Verdict. A quiz that has never been checked for reliability or validity is entertainment, not personality science.

In words: a quiz can be fun and still tell you nothing dependable. Why does the result still feel accurate? Many quiz results are written in broad, flattering sentences ("you care deeply about others but need time for yourself") that fit almost anyone. A description that fits everyone is not falsifiable, the same trouble as the psychodynamic explanations in section 2.

Step back and the four families line up as four questions. The psychodynamic family asks what hidden conflict is at work. The humanistic family asks what helps a person grow. The trait family asks where a person sits on stable dials. The social-cognitive family asks how beliefs and settings shape what a person does. Each family also echoes a Week 1 perspective: psychodynamic and humanistic by name, and social-cognitive as a blend of the behavioral perspective's learning and the cognitive perspective's thinking.

Pause and think. Choose one. Answer it in two or three sentences.

(a) Think of a personality quiz you or a friend has taken, and explain what it would take to check its reliability.

(b) Choose the personality family you find most convincing, and explain whether its claims could be tested with data.

Misconception check. Students often think a quiz result is accurate because it describes them well. It is tempting because recognizing yourself feels like proof. The cure is to ask whether the description would fit a random classmate equally well. If it would, it is not measuring you. Accuracy means reliable, valid, and specific to the person.

Key terms

Personality — A person's characteristic pattern of thinking, feeling, and behaving, one that stays fairly consistent across situations and over time. (first used: 1. Define the target: what makes a personality description scientific)
Id — In Freud's theory, the part of the mind that holds a person's immediate wants and urges and pushes for their satisfaction right away, run on the pleasure principle. (first used: 2. Look beneath the surface: the psychodynamic family)
Ego — In Freud's theory, the realistic manager of the mind that bargains between the id's wants, the superego's rules, and what the world allows. (first used: 2. Look beneath the surface: the psychodynamic family)
Superego — In Freud's theory, the part of the mind that holds the rules and ideals a person has taken in from parents and society, acting as a conscience. (first used: 2. Look beneath the surface: the psychodynamic family)
Defense mechanisms — In Freud's theory, the unconscious strategies the ego uses to protect a person from anxiety by distorting or hiding a threatening reality. (first used: 2. Look beneath the surface: the psychodynamic family)
Repression — A defense mechanism that pushes anxiety-provoking thoughts, feelings, or memories out of conscious awareness without the person realizing it. (first used: 2. Look beneath the surface: the psychodynamic family)
Denial — A defense mechanism in which a person refuses to accept that a painful or threatening fact is true. (first used: 2. Look beneath the surface: the psychodynamic family)
Rationalization — A defense mechanism in which a person replaces the real, uncomfortable reason for an action with an acceptable-sounding excuse. (first used: 2. Look beneath the surface: the psychodynamic family)
Projection — A defense mechanism in which a person sees their own unacceptable feelings or faults in someone else instead of in themselves. (first used: 2. Look beneath the surface: the psychodynamic family)
Displacement — A defense mechanism in which a person redirects a feeling, such as anger, away from its real source and onto a safer target. (first used: 2. Look beneath the surface: the psychodynamic family)
Self-concept — A person's overall picture of who they are, including their beliefs about their abilities, qualities, and worth. (first used: 3. Grow toward your potential: the humanistic family)
Unconditional positive regard — Carl Rogers's term for acceptance and caring that do not depend on what a person does or achieves, which he held helps a person grow. (first used: 3. Grow toward your potential: the humanistic family)
Trait — A stable tendency to think, feel, or act in a certain way across many situations, such as a tendency to be talkative or to be organized. (first used: 4. Turn the dials: the trait family and the Big Five)
Big Five — The five-factor model of personality, which describes every person on five broad, continuous dimensions: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism, remembered as OCEAN. (first used: 4. Turn the dials: the trait family and the Big Five)
Openness — The Big Five dimension that runs from preferring the familiar and routine to seeking new ideas, experiences, and variety. (first used: 4. Turn the dials: the trait family and the Big Five)
Conscientiousness — The Big Five dimension that runs from spontaneous and disorganized to careful, organized, and dependable. (first used: 4. Turn the dials: the trait family and the Big Five)
Extraversion — The Big Five dimension that runs from reserved and energized by time alone to outgoing and energized by other people. (first used: 4. Turn the dials: the trait family and the Big Five)
Agreeableness — The Big Five dimension that runs from competitive and skeptical of others to cooperative, trusting, and kind. (first used: 4. Turn the dials: the trait family and the Big Five)
Neuroticism — The Big Five dimension that runs from calm and emotionally steady to easily worried, tense, and moody. (first used: 4. Turn the dials: the trait family and the Big Five)
Personality type — A category that sorts people into a few separate boxes, such as introvert or extravert; it hides the continuous range that a dimension, or dial, captures. (first used: 4. Turn the dials: the trait family and the Big Five)
Social-cognitive theory — The family of personality theory, associated with Albert Bandura, that explains personality through the interaction of a person's thoughts and beliefs, their behavior, and their environment. (first used: 6. Change the setting: the social-cognitive family)
Reciprocal determinism — Albert Bandura's idea that a person's thoughts and beliefs, their behavior, and their environment each influence the other two. (first used: 6. Change the setting: the social-cognitive family)
Self-efficacy — A person's belief in their ability to succeed at a specific task, such as learning a new station at work. (first used: 6. Change the setting: the social-cognitive family)
Self-report inventory — A personality test that asks a long, fixed set of questions about a person's feelings and behavior and scores every answer the same way. (first used: 7. Measure a personality: inventories versus projective tests)
Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) — A widely used self-report inventory, objectively scored, whose reliability and validity are well established. (first used: 7. Measure a personality: inventories versus projective tests)
Projective test — A personality test that asks a person to describe or tell a story about ambiguous images, on the assumption that the answers reveal hidden feelings. (first used: 7. Measure a personality: inventories versus projective tests)
Rorschach inkblot test — A projective test in which a person says what they see in a series of symmetrical inkblots. (first used: 7. Measure a personality: inventories versus projective tests)
Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) — A projective test in which a person tells a story about each of a series of ambiguous pictures of people. (first used: 7. Measure a personality: inventories versus projective tests)

Summary

Personality is a characteristic, fairly consistent pattern of thinking, feeling, and behaving.
A scientific description has an operational definition, a reliable and valid measure, and testable predictions.
Psychodynamic: id, ego, superego, and unconscious defense mechanisms; hard to test.
The five defenses: repression, denial, rationalization, projection, displacement.
Humanistic: self-concept, unconditional positive regard, and growth toward self-actualization.
Trait: the Big Five in OCEAN order are openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism.
Each Big Five dimension is a continuous dial, not a type.
Social-cognitive: reciprocal determinism links person, behavior, and environment; self-efficacy is task-specific belief.
The MMPI's reliability and validity are well established; projective tests' evidence is considerably weaker.
An untested online type quiz is entertainment, not personality science.

Check your understanding

Work these before looking at the answers — they are ungraded, and the answers (with reasoning) are at the bottom of the page.

After failing her driving test, Rosa tells a friend, "The examiner was so nervous he couldn't even judge me fairly." Later that evening she slams the door on her younger brother for no reason. Which two defense mechanisms do her two reactions show?
A hospital volunteer named Arjun greets every visitor by name, reorganizes the supply closet without being asked, and has worked the same weekend shift for 4 years without missing one. A classmate says Arjun is "high in honesty, one of the Big Five." Read Arjun on the two dials his behavior shows most plainly, and correct the classmate.
A new youth-league referee, Bea, doubts she can handle angry parents. After a mentor coaches her through two calm games, she volunteers for a playoff game and handles it well. Trace reciprocal determinism through her story and name the belief that changed.
An app gave 40 users a personality type, then gave the same 40 users the same quiz one month later. 22 of the 40 got a different type the second time. What share of users changed type, and what does that suggest about the quiz's reliability?

Answers (worked reasoning — read after attempting)

The first reaction is projection: Rosa was the nervous one, and she sees her own unacceptable feeling in the examiner. The second is displacement: her anger at failing the test is redirected onto a safer target, her brother. In Freud's theory, both happen without her realizing it; if she knew she was doing it, it would be ordinary blaming, not a defense.
Greeting every visitor by name points to high extraversion, and reorganizing the closet and 4 years of unbroken weekend shifts point to high conscientiousness. The classmate is wrong: honesty is not one of the Big Five. The Big Five are exactly openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.
Environment to person: the mentor's coaching and two calm games raise Bea's belief that she can handle angry parents. Person to behavior: that belief leads her to volunteer for a playoff game. Behavior to environment: volunteering puts her in a harder setting, and handling it well feeds back into her belief. The belief that changed is her self-efficacy for refereeing tense games, a belief about one specific task.
22 ÷ 40 = 0.55, so 55% of users changed type in one month. A reliable measure gives the same or a very similar result when repeated, and here more than half the users got a different result. That suggests the quiz's reliability is poor, and a quiz that is not reliable cannot be valid either, because it cannot consistently measure anything.

Next up in this module: the Readings & Resources page, the lecture tutorial, the practice set, and the quiz — and next week, Social Psychology's fundamental attribution error shows how often people blame personality for what the situation caused.

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