Personality & Social Interactions

1. Personality & Social Interactions

2. Mechanisms of Interaction • Personality interacts with the situation in 3 ways: • Selection: who we select to be around • Evocation: the reactions that our personalities evoke in others • Manipulation: how we manipulate other people to get what we want

3. Who do we choose for a mate? • Study of 33 countries found that personality processes are the second biggest factor in mate selection (behind attraction/love) • No support for the complementary needs theory • Attraction similarity theory is supported. • Assortative mating: the finding that people marry those who are similar to themselves.

4. Key to Marital happiness • Having a partner who has the following characteristics (regardless of what you thought you were looking for): • Agreeable • Emotionally stable • Open • The difference scores between what you wanted in a partner and what you got does NOT predict marital satisfaction.

5. Ratings of spouses’ personalities • After the first year (honeymoon effect), in which people rated their partners as high on all of the good traits, perceptions of personality traits became more negative. • Those who maintainpositive illusions about their partner’s personality maintain high levels of satisfaction.

6. Violation of Desire Theory • Breakups occur more often when one’s desires are violated than when they’re fulfilled. • People whose spouses lack desired characteristics will more frequently dissolve the marriage. • Those dissimilar in personality will most often break up. • Research finds that being married to someone who lacks the personality characteristics that most people desire (dependable, agreeable, stable) puts one at risk of breakup.

7. Shyness • The tendency to feel tense, worried, or anxious during social interactions or even anticipating interactions • Experienced by 90% at some point, but some are dispositionally shy. • May be related to objective self-awareness. They’re too self-conscious. • Kagan found that 20% of 4-month-olds show signs of shyness, but half are no longer shy in childhood. • Parents who push their shy children into interactions can make their children less shy. • Parents who give in to child’s shyness reinforce the shyness.

8. Causes of Shyness • Seems to have both a genetic and learned component. • Shy people have an overreactiveamygdala. • Learned component is that shy people learn to have evaluation apprehension (fear of being negatively evaluated by others). • Shy people ruminate over social interactions and wonder if they’ve said something wrong. They’re high in social anxiety. • Others may interpret shyness as unfriendliness.

9. Tips for shyness • Show up and force yourself to talk to people. • Give yourself credit; stop being your own worst critic. • Take baby steps and make small goals at first. • Shift your attention to other people—ask them questions. • Exude warmth. Smile, make eye contact, and look relaxed. • Anticipate failure. It’s a learning curve. • Realize that many people are shy, and no one is perfect all the time.

10. Evocation • Reactions that we evoke from other people because of our personalities • Hostile attributional bias: the tendency to infer hostile intent on the part of others in the face of ambiguous behaviors from them. • Aggressive people are more likely to interpret behaviors from others as being hostile • Expectancy confirmation: like self-fulfilling prophecy; beliefs about personality characteristics of others cause them to evoke in others actions that are consistent with the initial beliefs

11. How personality evokes conflicts in relationships • Someone can behave in ways that make the partner upset. • Someone can elicit actions from another that in turn upset the original elicitor. • Links between personality & conflict show up at least as early as early adolescence. • Strongest predictor of evoked anger and upset are two personality characteristics: • Disagreeableness—the #1 predictor of wife’s being upset with husband • Emotional instability

12. Gottman’s tips for a happy marriage • Get to know your partner’s world. Be empathic. • Remember what made you fall in love with your partner in the first place. • Turn toward, not away from, each other in times of stress. • Share power, even if you think you’re the expert. • Start gently when arguing and back off when feelings get hurt. • Agree to disagree when problems can’t be solved. • Become a “we” instead of an “I.”

13. Manipulation: Social Influence • Charm • Coercion • Silent treatment • Reason • Regression • Self-abasement • Responsibility invocation • Hardball • Pleasure induction • Social comparison • Monetary reward • Only gender difference in these is that women are more likely to use regression.

14. Personality Traits and Manipulation Tactics • Dominance/extraversion: coercion and responsibility invocation • Submission: self-abasement and (surprisingly), hardball • Agreeableness: pleasure induction and reason • Disagreeableness: silent treatment, coercion, revenge • Conscientiousness: reason • Intellect/openness: reason, pleasure induction, responsibility invocation • Low on intellect/openness: social comparison • Neurosis: hardball, coercion, reason, monetary reward, and especially regression

15. Dark Triad of Personality Traits • Narcissism • Psychopathy • Machiavellianism • All of these types manipulate others through coercion, hardball, reciprocity, social comparison, monetary reward, and charm. • Hardball is particularly common.