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Lecture 4. PERSONALITY I:. Class Outline. Video - ABC News “Back with a vengeance” (10 mins) Lecture - What is personality? Why should we care? How do we measure personality?. Personality.
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Lecture 4 PERSONALITY I:
Class Outline • Video - ABC News “Back with a vengeance” (10 mins) • Lecture - • What is personality? • Why should we care? • How do we measure personality?
Personality • The relatively enduring individual traits and dispositions that form a pattern distinguishing one person from all others • Traits - • Dispositions - • Reflected by stylistic differences in behavior of people
What Determines Personality? • Heredity (“nature”) • Personality is determined at conception by an individual’s genes • Environment (“nurture”) • Situations that a person is exposed to shape and alter personality traits • e.g. Birth order
What Determines Personality? (cont.) • Integrated View • Heredity may predispose a person to certain patterns of behavior • Environmental factors such as birth order and traumatic experiences, influence the development of specific personality traits (e.g. extraversion; emotional stability)
Assessing Personality Traits • Personality Ratings • Situational Tests • Personality Inventories • Projective Techniques
Personality Ratings • Typically involve the use of five or seven-point scales containing a list of adjectives acting as anchors for the scales • Approach is open to various interpretations of users • Improvement is seen when scales are tied to specific behavioral dimensions e.g. competitiveness • Observations of rater can distort results
Situational Tests • Involve the direct observation of an individual’s behavior in a setting designed to provide information about personality • Very expensive • Less subjective than rating scales • Assessment in natural settings • Certain traits don’t lend to this
Personality Inventories • The most widely used method of assessing personality characteristics • Ease of administration • Social Desirability is a potential problem, where people answer as they perceive they should and not according to their actual feelings
Projective Techniques • Designed to probe subtle aspects of personality • Based on belief of individualistic interpretation • Types of Projective Techniques • Story Telling • Sentence Completion
Story Telling • Good in standardized interpretation, reliability, and usefulness • Most widely used is TAT, Thematic Apperception Test • 20 Pictures, each portraying a social setting of ambiguous meaning
Sentence Completion • Asks respondents to supply endings for a series of partial sentences • Best used when respondents have little to gain by faking answers • Team building exercises may appropriately use this technique
Review • Individual personality has serious behavioral implications for organizations • Adult personality is the result of both heredity and environment • There are many ways to measure personality with varying accuracy and cost