by Sandi Mann
• Extraversion vs Introversion
• Sensation vs Intuition
• Thinking vs Feeling
• Judging vs Perceiving
This theory later led to the development of the now-famous Myers–Briggs Type Indicator to measure personality (we will return to this later in the chapter).
BEHAVIOURAL THEORIES
These state that personality develops as a result of an interaction between the individual and the environment. According to this view, individuals develop consistent behaviour patterns because they have learned particular ways of responding. Behaviours that have positive consequences tend to increase, while behaviours that have negative consequences tend to decrease. We can also learn behaviours through modelling or observation (see Chapter 5 for more on behaviourism). Because everyone is exposed to different learning experiences, everyone develops their own unique personality.
Whereas Freud in his psychoanalytical approach felt that personality developed mainly in early childhood, the behavioural approach (led by B. F. Skinner as outlined in Chapter 5) stressed that personality develops across a much longer period of time – even a lifetime – as a person encounters new situations.
Skinner also argued that it is possible to change our personality by changing our environment, since it is the environment that shapes personality. This is in contrast with other views that, to make changes, we must change our inner self first.
Skinner was not the only proponent of the behaviourist approach to personality. The American psychologist Julian Rotter (1916–2014) was also very influential in developing these ideas, emphasizing how social learning leads to the development of personality. In contrast with psychoanalytical theories and with strict behavioural approaches, Rotter argued that humans are not motivated to act simply to avoid punishment, but are motivated by life goals and vision to maximize the rewards they want to receive. It is this set of motivations, then, that shape our behaviours and personality.
SOCIAL–COGNITIVE THEORIES
Cognitive theories are theories of personality that emphasize cognitive processes, such as thinking and judging; the social part comes from the idea that these cognitive processes interact with influences from the environment and other people. Albert Bandura was one of the proponents of social-cognitive approaches to personality; we met him in Chapter 5 in connection with his Bobo doll experiments.
In his social-cognitive theory of personality, Bandura stressed the role of observational learning. He argued that the reinforcement of the behaviourist approach must include cognitive processes, too. Bandura agreed with the behaviourist view that environment causes behaviour, but he also maintained that behaviour can ‘cause environment’; a process he called reciprocal determinism. For example, a person may have learned to have an aggressive personality because aggressive behaviour was reinforced at some point in their life by something occurring in their environment. But their aggression then acts on the environment by changing the way others act around him – by perhaps causing people to avoid him or give into him when he becomes aggressive. In this way, the environment has acted on his personality but his personality is also changing the environment.
Bandura later proposed that this two-way process was actually lacking a third factor – the person’s psychological or cognitive processes. He said that our capacity to process language, images and other sensory stimuli in our minds has an effect on how we behave, how we develop our personality traits and, thus, how we affect our environment.
HUMANIST THEORIES
These emphasize free will and the individual experience in the development of personality. Psychologists such as Carl Rogers (1902–87) and Abraham Maslow (1908–70) disliked both psychodynamic and behaviourist explanations of personality because they felt that these theories ignored the qualities that make humans unique among animals, such as striving for self-determination and self-realization. In the humanistic view, people are responsible for their own lives and actions and have the freedom and will to change their attitudes and behaviour – they are able to overcome their biological urges and also overcome their past.
Abraham Maslow is best known for his theories on motivation and for developing a ladder of human motives (see later in this chapter). At the top of this ladder is the need for self-actualization, which is something that Maslow said all humans strive for. Self-actualization is the need to fulfil one’s potential, and this is something people strive for once they have satisfied their more basic needs.
‘Musicians must make music, artists must paint, poets must write if they are to be ultimately at peace with themselves. What human beings can be, they must be. They must be true to their own nature. This need we may call self-actualization.’
Abraham Maslow, Motivation and Personality (New York: Harper, 1954)
Maslow believed that only a self-actualizing individual could have a healthy personality and he studied many well-known successful people to establish what made up their personalities. He then outlined several characteristics that self-actualizing people (and thus people with healthy personalities) share:
• Awareness and acceptance of themselves
• Openness and spontaneity
• The ability to enjoy work and see work as a mission to fulfilment
• The ability to develop close friendships without being overly dependent on other people
• A good sense of humour
• The tendency to have peak experiences that are spiritually or emotionally satisfying.
As referred to earlier, another influential humanistic psychologist is the American Carl Rogers, the founder of Person-Centred Theory. Like Freud (but unlike Maslow), Rogers drew on clinical case studies to come up with his theory and he emphasized the role of self-concept in the development of personality. The self-concept is our image of who we are, what we stand for and who we want to be. It includes all the thoughts, feelings and beliefs people have about themselves.
People tend to be aware of their self-concept, but their self-awareness may be somewhat skewed and not matching reality. He called this state incongruence. Incongruence can develop when a person’s self-concept is threatened, causing anxiety. To protect themselves from this anxiety, they distort their experiences so that they can hold on to their self-concept. People who have a high degree of incongruence are likely to feel very anxious because reality continually threatens their self-concept (and thus self-esteem). For example, someone may be a successful and respected individual but regard themselves as a failure. The reality is incongruent with their view of themselves. The greater the gap between the self-image and reality, the more likelihood there is of anxiety and emotional disturbances (there is more on this in Chapter 16).
Assessment of personality
Personality tests are used in occupational settings as well as clinical ones, and they can be used to match personality types with those thought to be required in different job roles.
Common personality tests include:
• Occupational Personality Questionnaire (published by Saville & Holdsworth Ltd, 1984): this measures 32 facets of temperament thought to be relevant in occupational settings. These facets are grouped into three domains: relationships with people, thinking style and feelings/emotions. Each domain is divided into subdomains. For example, relationships with people are grouped in the three subdomains of assertiveness, gregariousness and empathy.
• 16PF (published by OPP): this is widely used and was developed from a statistical analysis that located 16 personality factors from a mass of personality measures. This is based on Cattell’s theory as outlined above. It was first created by Cattell in 1949 and is now in its fifth edition.
• Eysenck Personality Questionnaire (EPQ): this is short; it takes about ten minutes to compete. It was devised by the psychologists Hans Eysenck and his wife, Sybil Eysenck in 1975. It yields scores on psychoticism, extroversion, neuroticism and a lie scale. In 1985 a revised version of EPQ was described – the EPQ-R – in the journal
Personality and Individual Differences. This version has 100 yes/no questions in its full version and 48 yes/no questions in its short-scale version.
• NEO-FFI Inventory (Neuroticism, Extroversion, Openness, Five-Factor Inventory): this was produced by Paul Costa and Robert McCrae in 1989 and is based on analyses that identify the ‘Big Five’ personality factors: neuroticism, extroversion, openness, agreeableness and conscientiousness. The first three of these aspects have subscales to measure these facets. For example, neuroticism is divided into anxiety, hostility, depression, self-consciousness, impulsiveness and vulnerability.
• Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI): this was developed in the 1940s and revised in the 1980s. The revised version is called the MMPI-2. The MMPI-2 contains a list of 567 questions. The MMPI was originally developed to help clinical psychologists diagnose psychological disorders.
• Myer–Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI): this was also published by OPP and is designed to measure psychological preferences in how people perceive the world and make decisions. These preferences were identified by Katharine Cook Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers from the type theories proposed by Carl Gustav Jung, first published in his 1921 book Psychological Types. The MBTI asks the candidate to answer a series of ‘forced-choice’ questions, where one choice identifies you as belonging to one of four paired traits. The basic test takes 20 minutes, and at the end you are presented with a precise, multi-dimensional summary of your personality. The MBTI test classifies people into types based on the four bipolar dimensions identified by Carl Jung (see above).
Spotlight: MBTI
‘The Myers–Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is one of the most popular personality tests in the world. Two-and-a-half million US citizens a year take the Myers–Briggs. Eighty-nine companies out of the US Fortune 100 make use of it, for recruitment and selection or to help employees understand themselves or their co-workers.’ (http://www.psychometric-success.com/personality-tests/personality-tests-popular-tests.htm)
Case study: Rorschach inkblots
The Rorschach personality test was developed almost 100 years ago and consists of a series of ten inkblots. Psychologists asked subjects to look at the inkblots and describe what they saw, and the psychologists then used complex scoring systems to interpret the subjects’ responses. It was thought that people would project their personality on to the inkblots. In the 1960s the Rorschach was the most widely used projective test of personality.
Using interpretation of ‘ambiguous designs’ to assess an individual’s personality is an idea that goes back to Leonardo da Vinci. The Rorschach is what psychologists call a projective test. The basic idea of this is that when a person is shown an ambiguous, meaningless image (i.e. an inkblot) the mind will work hard at imposing meaning on the image by ‘projecting’ their personality on to it. Hermann Rorschach created the Rorschach inkblot test in 1921 but he never intended the inkblots to be used as a general personality test; he developed them as a tool for the diagnosis of schizophrenia. It was not until 1939 that the test was used as a projective test of personality, a use for which Rorschach had always been sceptical.
This was a view that came to be shared more widely: in the 1959 edition of Mental Measurement Yearbook, Lee Cronbach (former President of the Psychometric Society and American Psychological Association) is quoted as stating: ‘The test has repeatedly failed as a prediction of practical criteria. There is nothing in the literature to encourage reliance on Rorschach interpretations.’ Problems with the Rorschach include the fact that it is possible that the testing psychologist might also project his or her views on to the inkblots when interpreting responses. For example, if the person being tested says that they see a skirt, a male psychologist might classify this as a sexual response, whereas a female psychologist may classify it simply as clothing. Critics have also suggested that the Rorschach lacks reliability; two different testers might come up with two different personality profiles for the same person that they are testing.
A moratorium on its use was finally called in 1999 and very few psychologists would use it now as a personality test.
Motivation
Motivation is what gets us to act or do something and is clearly linked to personality. Motivation is about setting goals and going out to meet them; our personality strongly influences what these goals or drives might be.
Psychologists have proposed a number of different theories to account for motivation, and it is sometimes useful to group the most influential theories into two categories: content and process theories. Content theories attempt to explain specific things that motivate people in different situations. They are concerned with identifying people’s needs and strengths, looking at what motivates a person. Some of these needs are primary, physical needs that are biologically driven (e.g. food, water, shelter) and some are secondary, psychological needs that vary from person to person but might include power and achievement.
Process theories, on the other hand, try to identify relationships among variables that make up motivation – how motivation is initiated and sustained. These approaches look at the process of motivation rather than the content.
CONTENT THEORIES OF MOTIVATION
There are several content theories that attempt to explain the needs that motivate people, including:
• Maslow’s Theory of Hierarchical Needs
Abraham Maslow (mentioned earlier in this chapter) believed that needs are physiological or psychological deficiencies that a person feels a compulsion to satisfy (Maslow 1943). These needs create tensions that can influence a person’s attitudes and behaviours. Maslow’s theory is based on the following two principles:
• The deficit principle: this states that a satisfied need no longer motivates behaviour.
• The progression principle: Maslow identified five needs that he believed were arranged in a hierarchy, as shown in the diagram below; the next level only becomes relevant when the previous level has been satisfied (e.g. we are not motivated to satisfy our safety needs until our physiological needs have been met).
Maslow’s Theory of Hierarchical Needs
Maslow’s theory has been criticized because little evidence has been found for his hierarchical structure and progression principle.
• Herzberg’s Two-Factor Theory
The American psychologist Frederick Herzberg (1923–2000) was mainly concerned with workplace motivation. In 1959 he published The Motivation to Work, in which he identified certain factors in the workplace that cause job satisfaction (called ‘motivators’ or ‘satisfiers’) – while a separate set of factors, if missing, cause dissatisfaction (‘hygiene factors’ or ‘dissatisfiers’).
Motivators or satisfiers: these are the things that really motivate people and include achievement, recognition, the work itself and so on.
Hygiene factors or dissatisfiers: although these factors do not motivate people, they can cause dissatisfaction if they are missing. In the workplace they include things such as job security, salary and working conditions. Increasing these factors may not increase satisfaction, but getting rid of them would cause dissatisfaction.
Essentially, hygiene factors are needed to ensure that an employee is not dissatisfied. Motivation factors are needed to motivate an employee to higher performance. The theory has been criticized for being too simplistic: what satisfies one person might be a motivator for another.
PROCESS THEORIES OF MOTIVATION
Whereas the content theories concentrate on the question of ‘what’ motivates, the process theories are more concerned with how the process works and sustains itself, such as factors that determine how much effort people will put into attaining a goal. There are a number of process theories, although the best known is arguably Vroom’s Expectancy Theory.
Expectancy Theory (also called Expectancy-Valency Theory) was first proposed by Victor Vroom of the Yale School of Management in 1964. Whereas Maslow and Herzberg look at internal needs, Vroom’s expectancy theory separates out e
ffort (which arises from motivation), performance and outcomes. Expectancy theory proposes that the desirability of an outcome determines whether or not someone will be motivated to act to achieve that outcome. In other words, we choose to do things that give us the greatest rewards. This theory is thus concerned with the mental processes regarding that choice.
There are three key elements to the theory:
1 Expectancy: this is the belief that effort will lead to a level of performance necessary to obtain rewards (‘What are the chances that if I work hard I will reach a certain level of performance?’). A number of factors can contribute to expectancy perceptions:
– The level of confidence in the skills required for the task
– The availability of relevant information or resources
– Previous success at the task.
2 Instrumentality: this is the belief that if you reach that level of performance, the reward will be forthcoming (‘What are the chances that if I reach that level of performance, I will be rewarded?’).
3 Valence: this is the importance or value that the individual places upon the reward (‘How much do I want that reward?’).
Thus, a person will not be motivated to do something if:
• They do not think they are capable of doing it; OR
• They don’t think the rewards associated with doing it are very likely; OR
• They don’t really care that much about the reward.
Dig deeper
More on the Rorschach inkblot controversy:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-18952667
Take a personality test:
http://www.humanmetrics.com/cgi-win/jtypes1.htm