Personality

by David C. Funder

Funder, D. C. (2001). Personality. Annual Review of Psychology, 52(1), 197–221. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.psych.52.1.197

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Overall Summary

A good article that summarizes the status quo of some current paradigms in psychology.

Framing

The mission of personality psychology is theoretical, empirical, and institutional:

• Theoretical: account for individuals' characteristic pattern of thought, emotion, and behavior, together with the psychological mechanism

• Empirical: gather and analyze data that reveal how persons, situations, and behaviors are interrelated, and to develop psychometric tools to clarify the nature of these relations

• Institutional mission: provide an integrative force in an era of scientific specialization and fragmentation.

Paradigm TLDR

Trait

Two empirical recognitions

• The behavior of a sample of individuals observed in one situation correlates with their behavior in a second situation, with a magnitude that routinely reaches $r=0.4$

  • Some nuggets about the correlation size

    • The practice of squaring correlations to interpret their size is misleading (Correlation and the coefficient of determination, by Ozer in Psychological Bulletin)

    • A 0.4 correlation represents 70% accuracy in predicting a dichotomous criterion ( A simple, general purpose display of magnitude of experimental effect by Rosenthal & Rubin in Journal of Educational Psychology)

• Behavioral consistency and change are orthogonal phenomena. i.e., differences across situations do not imply that individual differences do not exist.

The Big Five

• Two remaining issues:

  1. Whether the five traits are independent of each other. Although the conceptualization ensured the factors were independent, the scales did not.

  2. Whether the big five subsume all there is to say about personality.

Behaviorist

Behavior was viewed exclusively as a function of environmentally imposed reinforcement contingencies. This view is no longer sustainable and has started to incorporate psychology.

Social-Cognitive

Focus on cognitive processes of the individual, especially perception and memory.

Biological

Evolutionary

Basic Research Issues

Imbalance in personality triad: the person, the situation, and behavior. Situation and behaviors were less studied then.