Personality
Psychology · Section 3.4 · 18 study cards
Psychodynamic, humanistic, trait and social-cognitive accounts of personality, the tests built on them, and the evidence for each.
Practice this set → Spaced repetition, card by card. No account needed.
Method
Sort every idea by its approach first
Personality is taught as four competing accounts, and most marks are lost by attaching a term to the wrong one. Before you learn what a term means, learn whose it is: unconscious conflict and defences are psychodynamic, growth and self-concept are humanistic, dimensions and factor analysis are trait, and beliefs about control and capability are social-cognitive.
Judge each approach on the same four questions
- What does it say personality is made of?
- What motivates behaviour on this account?
- How would you measure it, and does that measure work?
- What evidence supports it, and what does the evidence fail to support?
Answering those four for each approach gives you a ready-made essay plan and forces you to separate the historically important from the empirically supported, which is precisely where Freud sits.
Practise defences as a discrimination task
Defence mechanisms are almost always tested through short scenarios. Ask two questions of every scenario: did the impulse change owner, and did the behaviour become the opposite of the impulse. Owner changed means projection. Owner the same but target changed means displacement. Opposite behaviour means reaction formation. A plausible excuse means rationalisation. Refusal of the fact itself means denial.
Know the measurement argument
Each approach comes with a test and a verdict on that test. Projective tests are unreliable and weakly valid; empirically keyed inventories such as the MMPI perform far better; type indicators such as the Myers-Briggs are popular but psychometrically weak. Being able to say why one is better than another, in terms of reliability and validity, is worth more than remembering the tests themselves.
Hold the person-situation question in mind throughout
Trait theory claims consistency; social-cognitive theory claims interaction. The examinable resolution is that traits predict averaged behaviour across many occasions, while situations dominate any single occasion.
Definitions and theorems
Worked example
Priya applies for a promotion and does not get it. She tells her friends the selection panel was biased, insists she never really wanted the extra hours, and for the next fortnight is unusually critical of a colleague who did get promoted. A year later she is offered a similar post and turns it down, saying she would not be capable of it.
Identify the psychodynamic mechanisms in the first part of this account and the social-cognitive concept in the last sentence, and say which framework better explains her refusal of the second post.
Take the claim about the panel first. Priya accepts that she was not promoted but supplies a face-saving reason for it. That is rationalisation, not denial, because the fact itself is not disputed.
Take the claim that she never wanted the hours. The desire is disowned and converted into indifference, so this is also rationalisation on most marking schemes; if the behaviour had become active enthusiasm for staying in her old role, you would argue reaction formation.
Take the criticism of the colleague. The anger belongs to the panel but is aimed at a safer target, so this is displacement. It is not projection: Priya is not attributing her own anger to the colleague.
Note the attribution pattern across all three. Failure is assigned to outside forces, which is the self-serving bias, and the external attribution is consistent with an external locus of control for this domain.
Now take the refusal a year later. The stated reason is a belief about her own capability, which is low self-efficacy for that specific role, in Bandura's terms rather than Freud's.
Apply reciprocal determinism to explain the sequence: the environment (the rejection) altered a personal factor (her efficacy belief), and that belief then altered behaviour (not applying), which in turn keeps her out of environments that could disconfirm it.
Conclude that the psychodynamic account labels the short-term anxiety management well but predicts nothing, whereas the social-cognitive account specifies a testable mechanism for the later refusal and a way to intervene, namely graded mastery experiences.
Common mistakes
- Projection and displacement swapped. Students match on the word another person and pick either at random. Check whether the feeling is being attributed to someone else (projection) or merely aimed at someone else while still owned (displacement).
- Treating the id, ego and superego as brain structures. They are hypothetical functions in conflict, not locations, and writing that the superego is in the frontal lobe will be marked wrong. Say functions or processes.
- Self-efficacy confused with self-esteem. Self-efficacy is Bandura's, task-specific, and about capability. Self-esteem is global and about worth. A person can have high self-esteem and low self-efficacy for statistics.
- Claiming traits do not predict behaviour. The person-situation controversy showed that traits predict single acts weakly, not that they predict nothing. Traits predict aggregated behaviour across occasions quite well, and conscientiousness predicts performance outcomes.
- Describing the Big Five as five types. They are continuous dimensions. Writing that someone is an extravert as though it were a category, rather than a high scorer on extraversion, loses the point that most scores cluster in the middle.
Practice it
Reading the method is not the same as being able to recall it under pressure. This set drills 18 cards one at a time and schedules each card separately, so the ones you keep missing come back sooner.