Personality
Chapter 1 - Worldview
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Welcome to the Personality page
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Modern personality psychology has shifted from grand theories of the past, such as Freud, Jung, Adler, Rogers, Skinner, and others, to pragmatic models that focus on distinct domains of analysis: personality traits, motives, skills/abilities, and narrative identity. Each offers a unique lens for understanding individual differences and behavior.
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Personality Traits
The Big Five taxonomy remains the dominant framework for organizing traits:
- Extraversion: Assertive, sociable versus introverted.
- Agreeableness: Warm, kind versus antagonistic, cruel.
- Conscientiousness: Responsible, industrious versus undependable.
- Emotional Stability: Calm, composed versus anxious, neurotic.
- Openness to Experience: Creative, curious versus closed-minded.
Traits within the Big Five overlap, forming a complex and nuanced structure. While useful for broad assessment, this overlap highlights the importance of considering individual facets within each dimension to avoid oversimplification.
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Motives
The motives domain explores what drives people, whether consciously or unconsciously. Motives are grouped differently across frameworks:
- Three domains: Predictability, acceptance, competence.
- Four domains: Prominence, inclusiveness, negativity prevention, tradition.
- Seven domains: Physiological, self-protection, affiliation, status, mate acquisition, mate retention, and parenting.
These categorizations illustrate the diversity in understanding human desire, emphasizing needs ranging from basic survival to complex social and personal aspirations.
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Skills and Abilities
The skills domain includes both cognitive and noncognitive abilities:
- Cognitive skills: Traditional measures of intelligence, problem-solving, and reasoning.
- Noncognitive skills: Socioemotional factors like persistence, self-control, and interpersonal skills.
Emerging interest in noncognitive skills stems from their relevance to educational and real-world success. These skills, often labeled "socioemotional," encompass qualities beyond academic knowledge, such as adaptability and teamwork, highlighting their role in personal and professional achievement.
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Narrative Identity
Narrative identity focuses on the stories individuals tell about their lives, shaping their sense of self. Unlike traits or motives, narrative identity is:
- Concrete: Grounded in specific life events and experiences.
- Time-bound: Reflecting personal history and change over time.
- Qualitative: Rich in meaning and personal interpretation.
Narrative identity emphasizes the integration of experiences into a cohesive self-concept, linking individual stories to broader personality dynamics. It provides a unique, experiential dimension often absent from other personality assessments.
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| Content source |
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| Personality Psychology - B. Roberts - Annual Review of Psychology - 2022 |
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Core ideas
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Your personality is shaped by the intricate interplay of nature (your genetic inheritance) and nurture (your upbringing and environment). However, these two factors are not isolated forces; they are deeply intertwined and influenced by the fundamental human drive for survival. This drive brings with it core emotions such as stress, fear, and loss aversion, which serve as adaptive mechanisms but also leave lasting imprints on personality.
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Nature and Nurture in Survival Context
- Nature: Genes establish the foundation of personality traits—such as temperament, emotional reactivity, and cognitive potential—that influence how you respond to challenges and opportunities.
- Nurture: Environmental factors shape how genetic predispositions manifest. For instance, a child genetically predisposed to anxiety may become more or less anxious depending on parental care or life experiences.
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Their Dynamic Interplay
Nature and nurture do not function independently. They interact dynamically, with genes influencing how we respond to our environment and the environment shaping how our genetic predispositions are expressed. For example:
- A naturally fearless child raised in a highly protective environment may develop risk-averse tendencies due to over-caution from caregivers.
- Conversely, a risk-averse genetic predisposition may be tempered in a supportive, exploratory upbringing.
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Fear / anxiety / vertigo
Increases in positive arousal states lead to a rise in people’s sense of agency. ‘Sense of agency’ refers to the subjective experience of controlling one’s voluntary actions and causing events in the external world through them.
Arousal states with negative emotional valence, such as fear, decrease the sense of agency. Fear reduces the subjective feeling of control over an action outcome, even though the objective causal link between action and outcome remains the same.
Vertigo is anxiety-oriented toward the future: it’s a recognition of the radical freedom of my future self about my present self. Philosophers think we have a strong motive to flee anxiety when it strikes us. Our freedom entails a heavy burden of individual responsibility, which is daunting. Much easier, then, to act as if the big questions of how to live and make sense of things were already settled. Anxiety is discomfiting because it presents us with the stark reminder that it doesn’t have to be this way while providing no guidance about what way it might be instead.
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Stress and the Survival Instinct
The human stress response, an evolutionary tool for survival, plays a pivotal role in shaping personality. Chronic exposure to stress in early life (e.g., poverty, unstable relationships, or trauma) can heighten emotional reactivity or foster traits such as resilience, depending on coping mechanisms and support systems.
In the short term, robust, well-orchestrated activations of the stress system support adaptive functioning. But, over prolonged periods of chronic activation, the suppressive effects of elevated cortisol can have deleterious effects on physical and mental health. As such, one of the most interesting findings emerging from the research on the psychobiology of stress is that in the absence of supportive care, stressors experienced during sensitive periods of development can, in fact, leave permanent imprints in the neural substrate of emotional and cognitive processes. Chronic, severe stress delivered during vulnerable periods of neural development will ripple through all levels of an organism’s vital activity. Frequent activation of the stress response tilts the organism toward consuming resources without sufficient recovery and increases the risk for physical and behavioural problems and even low self-esteem.
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Loss aversion
Loss aversion, the tendency to avoid losses even at the cost of potential gains, has a profound impact on everyone. It stems from a complex interplay of neurological, socioeconomic, and cultural factors that influence our responses to risk and reward.
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Neurological Foundations
Several brain regions play pivotal roles in loss aversion:
- Amygdala: This region is integral to processing fear and anxiety, triggering hormonal responses like adrenaline and cortisol when danger or loss is perceived. This explains why the visceral response to losing possessions mirrors our instinctive reaction to physical threats.
- Striatum: Responsible for evaluating prediction errors and anticipating outcomes, the striatum exhibits heightened activity in response to losses compared to equivalent gains. This imbalance suggests its primary function is to steer us away from losses rather than toward gains.
- Insula: This area processes feelings of disgust and collaborates with the amygdala to amplify aversion to loss. Neuroscientific studies indicate that the insula's activity intensifies as the perceived likelihood of loss increases, reinforcing our reluctance to risk losing.
These neurological processes are foundational to understanding why loss aversion is so pervasive, with individual differences in brain activity contributing to varying levels of the bias.
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Socioeconomic Influences
Socioeconomic status significantly shapes loss aversion:
- Power and Wealth: Powerful individuals tend to be less loss-averse because their social and economic safety nets buffer potential losses. Similarly, wealthy individuals are more willing to take risks due to their financial security. Research shows that these groups not only fear loss less but also place greater emphasis on potential gains.
- Relative Wealth in Communities: A study highlighted the influence of community wealth. Affluent individuals in wealthy environments were less loss-averse, while those in poorer surroundings exhibited greater fear of loss. This indicates that socioeconomic context—both personal and communal—affects risk tolerance.
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Cultural Dynamics
Cultural values also play a crucial role in shaping loss aversion:
- Collectivist vs. Individualist Cultures: Collectivist societies, which prioritize social connections, often foster less loss-averse behavior. Their strong support networks provide a safety net that reduces the perceived impact of losses. Conversely, individualistic cultures, which emphasize personal independence, may exacerbate loss aversion due to the absence of such communal support.
- Geographic Variations: Studies reveal that individuals from Eastern Europe exhibit the highest levels of loss aversion, while those from African nations display the lowest. These patterns suggest that cultural norms, economic conditions, and social structures collectively influence how losses are perceived and managed.
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Deep dive
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APGAR model
We all experience stress (in the workplace), but too much stress can affect you and cause your work and relationships to suffer. Thomas Hellwig and colleagues modeled the Stress-APGAR test after the APGAR scoring system used to evaluate newborns.
Each individual is different, so there are deliberately no devised good or bad scores. The Stress-APGAR can be used by anyone to gather information and begin a conversation with the individual concerned.
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| Factors | Description | |
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| A | Appearance | How does the person look? Does he/she seem overly tired? Has he/she been gaining or losing weight? Is there any indication of substance abuse? |
| P | Performance | A decrease in performance, particularly over time, may be linked to increasing distress. On the other hand, a forced effort to over-perform — becoming a workaholic — is also a warning sign. |
| G | Growth tension | Growth is a result of learning and stretch goals. Everyone is different; some people take to new challenges easily, whereas others may find them more difficult. Is the person becoming bored? Or conversely, does the person seem overwhelmed? |
| A | Affect control | “Affect” is another word for “emotion.” Everyone has good and bad days, but most people can regulate their emotions in a way that is appropriate for the workplace. However, noticeable and lasting changes in emotional state —including emotional outbursts or high and low mood swings — can be related to an overload of physical and psychological pressure. |
| R | Relationship | Personal relationships are an essential part of mental health. In situations of increased stress, it is possible to observe deterioration in the quality of relationships at work, including social isolation. |
| Content source |
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| An Early Warning System for Your Team’s Stress Level - Thomas Hellwig - INSEAD - 2017 |
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