Chapter 2: Personality
In the 1950s, two heart doctors in the United States, Meyer Friedman and Ray Rosenman, called in an upholsterer to re-cover the chairs in their waiting room. The upholsterer looked at the worn seats and asked a strange question: what was wrong with their patients? The chairs, he pointed out, were worn out in an odd way — only along the front edge of the seat and the front of the armrests. Most people sit back in a chair. These patients had been perching on the very edge, tense and ready to spring up.
At the time the two doctors ignored the remark. Years later it came back to them. They had noticed that many of their heart patients shared something beyond blocked arteries: they were hurried, competitive, impatient, always racing the clock. From that pattern grew one of the most famous ideas about personality — the “Type A” and “Type B” personalities — and the claim that how a person habitually behaves might quietly shape the health of their heart.
A worn chair, in other words, had hinted at something deep and stable inside a person. That “something” is what this chapter is about: personality — the lasting pattern that makes each of us recognisably ourselves.
Diagram
Fig. 2.0-1 – a waiting-room chair worn only along the front edge of the seat, with one tense figure perched on the edge and, beside it, a relaxed figure sitting right back, hinting at Type A versus Type B behaviour
Keep these questions in mind as you read; by the end of the chapter you will be able to answer every one of them.
2.1 Meaning of Personality
You describe people all the time without thinking about it. One friend is shy, another is warm, a cousin is hot-tempered, a teacher is calm and patient. When you say such things, you are pointing at something that seems to stay fairly steady in a person — across a bad morning and a good afternoon, across home and school, across this year and the last.
That steady, recognisable something is what psychologists call personality. It is not any single mood or one-off action, but the whole, lasting pattern of how a person tends to think, feel and behave, and how he or she adjusts to the world. Personality is what makes each of us distinct, and what lets people who know us predict, roughly, how we will react.
Studying it is harder than it sounds. People are made of overlapping and even contradictory qualities, and the same person can behave quite differently in different situations. So psychologists have argued for a long time about how best to define and measure personality — the very questions this chapter takes up.
2.1.1 Definitions of Personality
The word itself carries a clue. “Personality” comes from the Latin word persona, meaning the mask that actors wore on stage in ancient Greek and Roman theatre. The mask was the face and role the audience saw — the outward character a performer put on.
Because personality covers a person’s entire psychological make-up, no single definition satisfies everyone; different thinkers stress different parts of the picture. The definition most widely accepted was given by the American psychologist Gordon Allport.
Allport called personality the dynamic organisation, within the individual, of those psycho-physical systems that determine his or her unique adjustment to the environment. Each phrase is doing work. “Dynamic organisation” means personality is active and keeps developing and reorganising — it is not a frozen set of labels. “Psycho-physical systems” means it grows out of mind and body working together, not one alone. And “unique adjustment to the environment” means personality is finally shown in the individual, characteristic way a person copes with the world around them.
2.2 Type Theories
The oldest way of making sense of personality is also the simplest: sort people into a few broad kinds. A type theory places each person into one of a small number of categories, where everyone in a category is said to share a cluster of qualities. Often the category is tied to something about the body.
The appeal is obvious — a handful of labels feels tidy and easy to use. As you read the three type theories below, notice both what each one captures and where the tidiness starts to break down, because that tension is the whole story of the type approach.
2.2.1 The Four Humours: Hippocrates
The Greek physician Hippocrates (about 460–370 BC) offered one of the earliest type theories, built into the ancient medical idea of humorism. He believed the body held four fluids, or humours — blood, yellow bile, black bile and phlegm — and that a person’s temperament depended on which fluid was in excess.
From this came four personality types, each governed by one humour. A person dominated by blood was sanguine; by yellow bile, choleric; by black bile, melancholic; and by phlegm, phlegmatic. Though the underlying biology was wrong, the four temperaments have echoed through Western thought for over two thousand years.
2.2.2 Sheldon’s Somatotype Theory
Centuries later, the American psychologist William Sheldon (1898–1977) revived the idea that body build reveals personality. Studying photographs of around four thousand male college students, he sorted physique into three basic body types, which he called somatotypes.
The three are the endomorph (soft and round), the mesomorph (sturdy and muscular) and the ectomorph (thin and fragile). You can picture the contrast easily in Fig. 2.2-1. Sheldon then matched each build to a temperament: the relaxed and sociable viscerotonia, the energetic and assertive somatotonia, and the restrained and private cerebrotonia.
Diagram
Fig. 2.2-1 – three simple standing body outlines side by side, labelled Ectomorph (thin and lean), Mesomorph (broad and muscular) and Endomorph (soft and rounded)
The correlations Sheldon reported between build and temperament were, in fact, quite weak, and his method of rating people from photographs was open to bias. The idea that a person’s shape dictates their personality has not held up under careful testing.
2.2.3 Friedman’s Type A and Type B Personality
A very different type theory came from medicine in the twentieth century. The cardiologists Meyer Friedman and Ray Rosenman, working with heart patients, noticed a recurring behaviour pattern and named it the Type A personality. As a contrast, they described its opposite, the Type B personality.
A Type A person is competitive, impatient and driven by a constant sense of time pressure, often tense and easily provoked to hostility. A Type B person is more relaxed, patient and easy-going, works steadily, and is far less rushed or irritable. Most people, of course, fall somewhere between the two.
The Limits of Typing People
Type theories deserve real credit. They were the first systematic attempts to describe personality, they treat the person as a whole rather than as scattered parts, and they are quick and simple to apply. That simplicity, however, is also their undoing.
Real people are full of overlapping and contrasting qualities, so most of us do not fit neatly into one box. More seriously, most personality dimensions are not either-or at all; they vary by degree along a smooth scale. Take sociability, captured by the familiar labels “introvert” and “extravert” (from the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung). If people truly came in two separate kinds, a graph of sociability would show two clear humps, as on the left of Fig. 2.2-2.
Diagram
Fig. 2.2-2 – two graphs side by side. Left graph labelled “if types were real”: a twin-peaked curve with humps at ‘introvert’ and ‘extravert’. Right graph labelled “what we actually find”: a single bell-shaped normal curve of sociability, most people clustered in the middle, few at each extreme
What we actually find is the right-hand graph — a single bell-shaped curve, with most people bunched in the middle and only a few at the extremes. Someone who shows a mix of both tendencies is called an ambivert, and ambiverts are the majority. Because sharp categories do not match this reality, and because type theories over-stress the extremes, the type approach is now largely replaced by theories that describe personality in degrees rather than in kinds.
2.3 Freud’s Psychoanalytic Theory
If type theories look at the surface of a person, Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) turned attention to the depths. Born in Moravia, in what is now the Czech Republic, he spent most of his working life as a doctor in Vienna, treating patients whose distressing physical symptoms seemed to have no bodily cause.
Listening to these patients, first under hypnosis and later by letting them simply talk, Freud became convinced that much of mental life goes on outside our awareness. Out of this grew his psychoanalytic theory — the first full theory of personality, and one of the most influential ideas in all of psychology.
The theory rests on three linked pictures of the mind: the layers of awareness, the three-part structure of personality, and the stages through which personality develops in childhood. We take them in turn.
2.3.1 Levels of Consciousness
Freud pictured the mind as an iceberg. Only a small tip shows above the water; the great bulk lies hidden beneath. In the same way, he argued, only a little of our mental life is available to awareness, while most of it stays out of sight — yet still steers what we do.
The conscious mind is the tip: whatever you are aware of at this very moment, such as the words you are reading now. Just below the waterline lies the preconscious, holding memories and knowledge you are not thinking of right now but can easily call up — your address, or what you ate yesterday.
Far below, forming most of the iceberg, is the unconscious. It holds wishes, urges and painful experiences that we are entirely unaware of. Many of these were pushed down by repression, the mind’s way of forcing threatening or unacceptable thoughts out of awareness. Repressed material does not vanish; it presses on us from below and shapes behaviour in ways we do not recognise. You can see the three layers in Fig. 2.3-1.
Diagram
Fig. 2.3-1 – an iceberg in water: the small tip above the surface labelled ‘Conscious’; the zone around the waterline labelled ‘Preconscious’; the large submerged mass labelled ‘Unconscious’
2.3.2 Structure of Personality
Freud proposed that personality is built from three parts that develop one after another and work by three different rules: the id, the ego and the superego.
The id is present from birth and lies entirely in the unconscious. It is the store of our basic, primitive urges, and it runs on the pleasure principle — it demands immediate satisfaction of every need, without any regard for reality, rules or consequences. A hungry newborn crying at once, with no patience, is pure id.
The ego develops next, as the child learns that the world will not always give in. It works on the reality principle, acting as a practical manager that finds realistic, acceptable ways to satisfy the id, and delays gratification when it must. The ego is the negotiator between what we want and what the world allows.
The superego forms last, as the child takes in the standards of parents and society. It works on the morality principle and acts as our conscience — the inner voice of right and wrong that praises good behaviour and punishes wrongdoing with guilt.
These three are in constant tension, and Freud saw a healthy personality as one where the ego keeps the balance — meeting some of the id’s demands, respecting the superego’s rules, and staying in touch with reality. When the id’s forbidden urges threaten to break through, the ego feels anxiety and quietly defends itself to keep those urges in check.
The whole system is powered by energy Freud called the libido — the life energy behind our drives, which he saw as the engine of both survival and development.
2.3.3 Psychosexual Stages of Development
Freud argued that the libido settles on a different part of the body as a child grows, and that each stage brings a conflict the child must work through. If a stage is handled with too little or too much gratification, some libido stays stuck there — a state Freud called fixation — and this leaves its mark on the adult personality.
He described five stages, always in the same order.
In the oral stage (birth to about 18 months), pleasure centres on the mouth, through sucking and biting. Fixation here may show up later as over-dependence and gullibility, or as sarcasm and verbal aggression.
In the anal stage (about 18 months to 3 years), pleasure centres on control of the bowels, and the key conflict is toilet training. Harsh training may produce an adult who is rigidly orderly and stingy; very relaxed training may produce one who is messy and careless.
In the phallic stage (about 3 to 6 years), attention turns to the genitals, and Freud placed his most controversial ideas here. A boy, he claimed, develops the Oedipus complex — an attachment to his mother and rivalry with his father, along with a fear of the father’s punishment. A girl develops the Electra complex (a term later coined by Jung), which Freud linked to penis envy. In each case the conflict is resolved through identification — the child copies the same-sex parent, taking on their values and, in doing so, forming the superego.
In the latency stage (about 6 years to puberty), sexual urges become quiet, and the child pours energy into school, friendships and skills. Finally, in the genital stage (from puberty onward), mature sexuality emerges, and a person who has resolved the earlier conflicts becomes capable of healthy love and work.
How Freud’s Theory Holds Up
Freud’s influence is hard to overstate. He put the unconscious at the centre of psychology, showed that early childhood shapes the adult, and pioneered the “talking cure” that treatment still builds on today. Ordinary language — talking of someone being “in denial” or having a “Freudian slip” — carries his stamp.
Yet the theory faces one central criticism: much of it cannot be scientifically tested or disproved. Ideas such as the unconscious mind and the Oedipus complex are almost impossible to observe or measure directly, so there is no clear way to show they are wrong — and a claim that can never be tested sits uneasily within science.
2.4 Post-Freudian Theories
Freud gathered a circle of followers, but several of them came to disagree with parts of his teaching. These thinkers are called the neo-Freudians, or post-Freudians. They kept Freud’s great insight — that childhood and the unconscious matter — but they rejected his heavy stress on sexuality and biology.
In its place they emphasised social and cultural forces: how we are treated by parents, how our society is arranged, and the relationships we form across a whole lifetime. Two of the most important were Karen Horney and Erik Erikson.
2.4.1 Karen Horney
Karen Horney (1885–1952) was one of the first women in the psychoanalytic movement, and she used that position to challenge Freud directly. Freud had claimed that women feel inferior because of “penis envy” rooted in anatomy. Horney disagreed: women’s sense of inferiority, she argued, comes not from their bodies but from the lesser power and freedom that society hands them. She even turned the idea around, suggesting men may feel womb envy — envy of women’s ability to create and bear life.
For Horney, psychological difficulties grow out of disturbed relationships in childhood. A small child is helpless and depends completely on adults. When parents are unreliable, cold or rejecting, the child comes to feel small and unsafe in a threatening world — a feeling Horney called basic anxiety.
The same poor parenting also stirs up basic hostility, resentment toward the very parents the child depends on. Because that hostility cannot be safely shown to those who provide care, it is repressed — which only deepens the anxiety. To manage this bind, the child leans on one of three ways of relating to others, a style that can harden and carry into adult life.
Moving towards people is the compliant style: seeking safety by being over-agreeable and winning everyone’s love and approval. Moving against people is the aggressive style: seeking safety by dominating, competing and overpowering others. Moving away from people is the withdrawn style: seeking safety by keeping a distance and relying only on oneself.
A well-adjusted person, Horney said, uses all three flexibly, choosing what a situation calls for. Trouble begins when one style becomes rigid and dominates every relationship.
2.4.2 Erik Erikson
Erik Erikson (1902–1994) accepted Freud’s foundations but stretched them in two ways. First, he held that personality develops across the whole lifespan, not only in childhood. Second, he replaced Freud’s focus on sexual energy with a focus on social relationships, so his stages are called psychosocial development rather than psychosexual.
Erikson proposed eight stages, running from birth to old age. Each stage centres on a conflict, or crisis, between two possible outcomes. Handling the crisis well builds a lasting strength; handling it poorly leaves a weakness that is carried forward. The eight stages, in order, are shown in Fig. 2.4-1.
Diagram
Fig. 2.4-1 – a rising staircase of eight blocks, each step labelled with its life stage, and its crisis, from ‘Infancy: Trust vs Mistrust’ at the bottom up to ‘Maturity: Integrity vs Despair’ at the top
The fifth stage matters a great deal for readers your age. In adolescence the central task is forming an identity — a clear, stable sense of who you are, what you value and where you are heading. Succeeding gives a firm sense of self; failing leaves confusion about one’s place in the world.
Between them, Horney and Erikson show why the neo-Freudians mattered. They kept psychoanalysis alive while pulling it toward the social world — the family, the culture and the relationships in which a personality is actually formed.
2.5 Humanistic Theories
Freud saw the person as driven by dark, unconscious urges. A very different school, the humanistic approach, rejected that gloomy picture. Humanistic theorists believe people are basically good, that we have free will, and that we are pulled forward by a natural drive to grow and fulfil our potential.
Because they place the person’s own experience of themselves at the centre, these are sometimes called “self theories.” What matters is not what an outsider observes, but how the world looks and feels from inside the person. The two leading figures are Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow.
2.5.1 Carl Rogers
Carl Rogers (1902–1987) built his theory around the self. Left to grow in the right conditions, he argued, a person naturally becomes a fully functioning person — someone open to experience, in touch with their own feelings, and living life fully rather than anxiously conforming to others.
At the heart of the theory sit two versions of the self. The real self is who a person actually is — their genuine experience, feelings and qualities. The ideal self is the person one wishes to be, or feels one ought to be. Rogers used the already familiar idea of the self-concept to describe how we see ourselves, and asked how well that picture fits reality.
When the real self and the ideal self match closely, a state Rogers called congruence, the person is comfortable and well-adjusted. When a wide gap opens between them — incongruence — the person feels anxious and unhappy. To protect the self-concept, people may distort reality or deny parts of their experience, but this only stores up trouble. Fig. 2.5-1 shows the difference as two overlapping circles.
Diagram
Fig. 2.5-1 – two pairs of overlapping circles labelled ‘self-concept’ and ‘experience’. Left pair: large overlap, labelled ‘Congruence — well-adjusted’. Right pair: small overlap, labelled ‘Incongruence — poorly adjusted’
Where does incongruence come from? Rogers traced it to how we are treated as children. When love and approval are given only if we behave in certain ways, we absorb conditions of worth — the sense that we are valued only when we meet others’ standards. We then bend ourselves out of shape to win that approval.
The cure lies in the kind of acceptance we receive. Conditional positive regard is acceptance offered only when the person meets set conditions. Unconditional positive regard is acceptance and warmth given no matter what the person says or does. Rogers held that unconditional positive regard is what allows healthy growth, and he made it the foundation of his client-centred therapy.
2.5.2 Abraham Maslow
Abraham Maslow (1908–1970) shared Rogers’s optimism but focused on human needs. He argued that our needs are arranged in a hierarchy of needs, usually drawn as a pyramid, and that lower needs must be reasonably satisfied before higher ones can be pursued.
At the base are physiological needs — hunger, thirst, sleep. Above them come safety needs — security, shelter and stability. Next are love and belongingness needs — family, friendship and community. Higher still are esteem needs — self-respect and the respect, status and recognition of others. At the very top is the need for self-actualization, the drive to realise one’s full potential and become all one is capable of being. The five levels are shown in Fig. 2.5-2.
Diagram
Fig. 2.5-2 – Maslow’s pyramid in five layers, from Physiological at the base up through Safety, Love and Belongingness, Esteem, to Self-Actualization at the apex; the lower four bracketed as ‘deficiency needs’ and the top as ‘growth need’
Maslow drew a key line across the pyramid. The lower four levels are deficiency needs: they arise from a lack, and we feel driven to fill them. Self-actualization is a growth need: it does not come from lack but from the positive urge to develop. Very few people reach full self-actualization, and those who do sometimes report a peak experience — a moment of intense joy and wonder, a feeling of being deeply connected to something greater than oneself, in which self-consciousness falls away.
Together, Rogers and Maslow shifted psychology’s attention toward health, growth and human potential, and their work is a root of today’s positive psychology. Their shared weakness is also clear: the very ideas that make the approach inspiring are often too vague and subjective to test scientifically.
2.6 Trait Theories
Recall from the type theories that people rarely fit into neat boxes; sociability, and every other quality, is spread smoothly across a range. Trait theories build on exactly this insight. Instead of sorting people into types, they describe personality along continuous dimensions called traits.
A trait is a relatively stable, enduring characteristic that makes a person tend to behave in a consistent way across different situations and over time. The key idea is that everyone possesses the same traits, but in differing amounts — you and your friend are both somewhere on the “shyness” scale, just at different points.
We look at three trait approaches, from the earliest to the most widely accepted today.
2.6.1 Allport’s Trait Theory
Gordon Allport (1897–1967), whose definition of personality opened this chapter, was also a pioneer of trait theory. Combing through a dictionary, he and a colleague found around eighteen thousand words that describe human characteristics. Studying them, Allport concluded that traits differ in how central they are to a person, and he sorted them into three kinds.
A cardinal trait is a single, dominant trait that shapes almost everything a person does. It is rare; when present, the person becomes almost defined by it — think of someone so selflessly giving that “generous” sums up their whole life.
Central traits are the handful of core characteristics — usually five to ten — that best capture a person’s general character, such as honest, anxious or kind. These are the traits we naturally reach for when describing someone.
Secondary traits are narrower and surface only in particular situations — becoming impatient in heavy traffic, or shy only among strangers. They are real but less revealing of the whole person.
Allport stressed that no two people share exactly the same pattern of traits, which is what makes every personality unique.
2.6.2 Cattell’s Trait Theory
Raymond Cattell (1905–1998) wanted to find the true building blocks of personality. To do so he used factor analysis — a statistical method that sifts through many measurements and groups together those that rise and fall together, revealing the smaller number of underlying factors behind them.
Cattell distinguished two levels of traits. Surface traits are clusters of behaviour that are easily seen and tend to go together, such as curiosity, honesty and nervousness. Source traits are the deeper, underlying factors that give rise to the surface traits — the real roots of personality. Using factor analysis, Cattell identified sixteen source traits, and built them into a well-known personality questionnaire, the Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire (16PF).
2.6.3 The Five-Factor Model
Later researchers, applying the same factor-analysis approach to a huge range of personality descriptions, kept arriving at a smaller, tidier answer: five broad dimensions. Paul Costa and Robert McCrae developed this into the Five-Factor Model, widely known as the Big Five and remembered by the acronym OCEAN. Each dimension is a spectrum, and every person falls somewhere between its high and low ends.
Openness to experience runs from imaginative, curious and fond of novelty at the high end to conventional and down-to-earth at the low end. Conscientiousness runs from organised, dependable and disciplined to careless and impulsive. Extraversion runs from outgoing, energetic and sociable to reserved and quiet. Agreeableness runs from warm, cooperative and trusting to suspicious and uncooperative. Neuroticism, whose opposite pole is emotional stability, runs from anxious and easily upset to calm and secure.
How Well Do Traits Explain Us?
Trait theories are among the most popular approaches in psychology today. They describe personality richly, on dimensions that can actually be measured, and they predict everyday behaviour reasonably well.
Yet they carry some honest limitations. They are strong on description but weak on explanation: they tell us what a person is like without saying how those traits developed. Trait theorists have also not fully agreed on which traits are the most basic. And although traits are treated as stable, behaviour clearly shifts with the situation — the same person is bold among friends and timid before an interviewer — so traits capture tendencies, not fixed certainties.
2.8 Personality Assessment: Self-Report Inventories
Every theory in this chapter tries to describe personality — but how do psychologists actually measure something so private? That is the task of personality assessment, and it matters in real life: employers use it to select staff, counsellors and clinicians use it to understand difficulties, and schools use it to guide students.
Because personality lies partly hidden, no single method captures it perfectly. Psychologists therefore use three broad approaches: self-report inventories, projective techniques, and behavioural analysis. Often they combine more than one, since each has blind spots. This section takes up the first; the two that follow take up the others.
Asking People About Themselves
A self-report inventory is a standard set of questions or statements about a person’s feelings, preferences, beliefs and behaviour, which the person answers about themselves. Everyone receives the same items in the same order, and the answers are scored with a fixed key. This makes the method objective and easy to compare fairly from one person to another.
The MMPI
The best-known self-report inventory is the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), developed by Starke Hathaway and J. C. McKinley at the University of Minnesota and first published in 1943. It is the most widely used inventory for assessing personality and psychological difficulties in adults. A revised version, the MMPI-2, appeared in 1989.
In the test, the person reads a large set of statements and marks each as True, False or Cannot Say. The MMPI-2 contains 567 items and is meant for adults aged eighteen and above; completing it takes around two hours. The answers are summed into ten clinical scales, each pointing to a particular area of psychological functioning.
Before reading the scales, one caution is essential. These are technical scale names, not verdicts. Scoring high on a scale is a signal that a trained clinician weighs alongside much other information — it is never, by itself, a diagnosis. A person cannot be assessed from a checklist, and only a qualified professional can make a diagnosis.
Strengths and Limits
The MMPI’s great strengths are that it is standardised, objective and quick to score, and it has been researched for decades. This makes it a valuable aid in clinical assessment.
It has clear limits too. Because it relies on honest self-report, people may answer untruthfully — trying to look either healthier or more troubled than they are — or may simply lack insight into themselves. To catch this, the test includes built-in checks for careless or untruthful answering. A further problem is cultural bias: a statement can carry a different meaning for people from different backgrounds, so the same score need not mean the same thing for everyone.
2.9 Projective Techniques
Self-report inventories work only if people can, and will, describe themselves honestly. But some of the most important parts of personality — hidden wishes, fears and conflicts — lie below awareness, where a person cannot simply report them. Projective techniques were designed to reach exactly this hidden material.
A projective technique presents the person with a vague, unstructured stimulus — an inkblot, or an unclear picture — that has no fixed meaning. Because there is no “correct” answer, the response comes from within: the person unconsciously projects their own feelings, needs and conflicts onto the stimulus. The term was coined by the psychologist Lawrence Frank. Two projective tests are studied here.
2.9.1 Rorschach Inkblot Test
The Rorschach Inkblot Test was created by the Swiss psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach, who published it in 1921. After his early death the scoring system was refined by Bruno Klopfer and others.
The test uses ten official inkblots, each printed on a separate white card and each bilaterally symmetrical, so that its two halves mirror each other, as in Fig. 2.9-1. Five blots are black and grey, two are black and red, and three are multi-coloured. The blots are deliberately meaningless.
Diagram
Fig. 2.9-1 – an example of a symmetrical black inkblot on a white card, of the kind used in the Rorschach test, carrying no fixed meaning
In administration, the tester works in a relaxed but controlled setting, handing the person the cards one at a time and asking what each blot might be or what it resembles. There is no time limit, and the person may give as many responses as they wish.
The responses are then scored along several categories, shown below.
For interpretation, a trained clinician studies the pattern across all the responses rather than any single answer — for instance, whether the person tends to see whole blots or tiny details, and how far they rely on colour or on movement. From such patterns, inferences are drawn about the person’s thinking style and emotional functioning. The interpretation is complex and demands considerable training.
2.9.2 Thematic Apperception Test
The Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) was developed by Christiana Morgan and Henry Murray at Harvard University in 1935.
The test material is a set of thirty-one cards. Thirty of them show vague pictures, usually of people in ambiguous situations like the scene in Fig. 2.9-2, and one card is left blank. Any single person is shown up to about twenty cards, generally spread over two sessions.
Diagram
Fig. 2.9-2 – an example of an ambiguous TAT-style picture showing one or two people in an unclear situation whose meaning and mood are open to interpretation
In administration, the person is told there are no right or wrong answers and is asked to make up a story for each picture — what is happening, what led up to it, what the characters are thinking and feeling, and how it will turn out. They are given no time to plan, so their responses come out spontaneously.
For scoring and interpretation, the key idea is that, as the person invents stories, they project their own needs, motives and conflicts onto the characters — above all onto the “hero”, the character they identify with. The interpreter studies recurring themes across the stories: who the hero is, what the main theme is, what needs and pressures appear, and how the stories end. It is the pattern that repeats across many pictures, not any single story, that is taken to reveal the person.
Merits and Limitations
Projective techniques have a real strength: they can reach unconscious material that a person cannot or will not put into words, yielding rich and subtle information about hidden conflicts.
Their weaknesses are equally real. Judged by psychometric standards they show low reliability; the scoring of the TAT in particular is not well standardised; and because interpretation depends so heavily on the clinician’s judgement, the interpreter can unintentionally shape the result.
2.10 Behavioural Analysis
The third and final approach to assessing personality does something the others do not: instead of asking people about themselves, or reading their projections, behavioural analysis studies how a person actually behaves. It draws on five methods, each opening a different window on behaviour.
An interview assesses a person through their answers to a series of questions that probe deeper than everyday conversation. Interviews come in two forms. A structured interview uses fixed, pre-set questions asked in the same order, giving objective answers that can be compared across people. An unstructured interview uses open-ended questions and flows freely; in skilled hands it can reveal a great deal about the person.
Observation is the direct watching of a person’s behaviour, ideally by trained professionals following set guidelines. It can yield deep insight — for example, watching how someone interacts with their family — but it is time-consuming, and people may not behave naturally when they know they are being watched.
Nomination is a method of peer assessment. Members of a group are asked to name one or more people they would prefer to work or study with, and to give reasons. Because it draws on the judgement of many people who know the person well, nomination is usually dependable, though it can be coloured by personal bias.
Behavioural ratings are made by people who have known and interacted with a person for a long time, who rate them on given categories or scales. Such ratings are prone to certain errors. The best known is the halo effect, in which the rater’s overall liking or disliking of the person colours every separate rating.
Other rating errors include placing everyone near the middle of the scale, or always giving extreme high or low ratings. Raters are usually trained to reduce these biases.
A situational test places the person in a specially arranged situation, often mildly stressful, and observes how they respond. For example, they may be asked to complete a task with a team whose members have secretly been told to be unhelpful. Their behaviour is watched while they also report how they felt. Because the situation is designed to create pressure, this is sometimes called a situational stress test.
No single method — inventory, projective test or behavioural analysis — is enough on its own to capture something as complex as personality. In practice, psychologists combine several, letting the strengths of one make up for the blind spots of another.
2.11 Summary
Personality is the stable and distinctive pattern in how a person thinks, feels and behaves. It covers both visible behaviour and the hidden values, motives and feelings behind it. The word comes from the Latin persona, a stage mask, and Allport defined personality as the dynamic organisation within a person of the psychophysical systems that shape their characteristic behaviour.
Some related terms sit close to personality: temperament is its inborn, biological base; habit is a learned automatic response; values are beliefs about what is right and important; and the self-concept is the overall idea a person holds of who they are.
Type theories sort people into a few categories. Hippocrates linked four temperaments to four body humours; Sheldon linked three body builds (somatotypes) to three temperaments; and Friedman described the hurried, hostile Type A and the relaxed Type B, tying Type A to greater heart-disease risk.
Type theories are simple but flawed, because real people rarely fit one box. A quality like sociability is spread on a smooth bell-shaped curve, with most people in the middle — which is why later psychologists moved to trait approaches that use continuous dimensions.
Freud’s psychoanalytic theory holds that behaviour is driven by the unconscious. He pictured the mind as an iceberg with three levels — conscious, preconscious and unconscious.
Freud said personality has three parts in constant conflict: the id (pleasure principle, immediate satisfaction), the ego (reality principle, realistic action) and the superego (morality principle, conscience). A healthy personality depends on the ego balancing the other two.
Freud proposed five psychosexual stages in a fixed order — oral, anal, phallic, latency and genital — with too little or too much satisfaction at a stage causing fixation that marks the adult personality. His theory’s main criticism is that its key ideas cannot be tested scientifically.
Neo-Freudians kept the importance of the unconscious and childhood but stressed social and cultural forces over sexual drives. Horney argued that poor early relationships breed basic anxiety and basic hostility, which a person manages by moving towards, against or away from others.
Erikson extended development across the whole lifespan through eight psychosocial stages, each a crisis (from trust vs mistrust to integrity vs despair) whose resolution builds a strength. Its main criticism is that it is vague about what causes movement from one stage to the next.
Humanistic (self) theories see people as basically good, free and driven to grow. Rogers held that well-being depends on congruence between the self-concept and experience, and that unconditional positive regard, rather than conditions of worth, lets a person become fully functioning. Its criticism is that its concepts are hard to measure.
Maslow arranged needs in a five-level hierarchy — physiological, safety, love and belongingness, esteem, and self-actualisation — with lower deficiency needs generally met before the higher growth need. Its criticism is that the order is not rigid and self-actualisation is hard to measure.
Trait theories describe personality on continuous dimensions. Allport distinguished cardinal, central and secondary traits; Cattell used factor analysis to reduce surface traits to sixteen deep source traits; and Costa and McCrae’s Five-Factor Model (OCEAN) captures personality in five dimensions, each running from high to low.
Trait theories describe personality well but explain it poorly, and behaviour still shifts with the situation, so traits capture tendencies rather than fixed certainties.
Bandura’s social cognitive theory says personality is largely learned — through observational learning and modeling, and through the self-system of self-efficacy, self-reinforcement and self-set goals. Behaviour, the person and the environment shape one another (reciprocal determinism), which means personality is stable but not fixed.
Personality is assessed in three broad ways, usually in combination. Self-report inventories like the MMPI use standard questions and, in the MMPI, ten clinical scales — but a scale score is a signal for a clinician, never a diagnosis.
Projective techniques present ambiguous stimuli so that the person projects hidden material: the Rorschach uses inkblots to tap thinking and emotion, and the TAT uses picture-based stories to tap needs and conflicts. They reach the unconscious but are subjective and low in reliability.
Behavioural analysis studies behaviour directly through interviews, observation, nomination, behavioural ratings (watch for the halo effect) and situational tests. Because every method has blind spots, psychologists combine several to assess personality.
2.12 Key Terms
- Agreeableness — one of the Big Five; the tendency to be warm, cooperative and trusting rather than suspicious and uncooperative.
- ambivert — a person who shows a mix of introvert and extravert qualities, falling between the two extremes.
- anal stage — Freud’s second psychosexual stage (about 18 months–3 years), centred on bowel control and toilet training.
- basic anxiety — Horney’s term for a child’s deep feeling of being helpless and alone in a potentially hostile world.
- basic hostility — Horney’s term for the repressed resentment a child feels towards parents who fail to give love and security.
- behavioural analysis — assessing personality by studying actual behaviour, through interview, observation, nomination, ratings and situational tests.
- behavioural ratings — assessment in which people who know a person well rate them on set categories or scales.
- cardinal trait — Allport’s term for a single dominant trait that shapes almost all of a person’s behaviour (rare).
- central traits — Allport’s term for the handful of core traits that best describe a person’s general character.
- conditional positive regard — acceptance and approval given only when a person behaves as others want.
- conditions of worth — the standards a person feels they must meet to be accepted, which push the real self and self-concept apart.
- congruence — in Rogers’s theory, a close match between the self-concept and actual experience, linked to well-being.
- Conscientiousness — one of the Big Five; the tendency to be organised, dependable and disciplined rather than careless and impulsive.
- conscious — the level of mind holding whatever a person is aware of at the present moment.
- deficiency needs — Maslow’s lower four needs (physiological, safety, love and esteem) that arise from a lack.
- ectomorph — Sheldon’s thin, fragile body build, linked to a restrained, private temperament.
- ego — the reality-based part of personality that mediates between the id and the superego.
- Electra complex — in Freud’s theory, a girl’s attachment to her father in the phallic stage (a term later coined by Jung).
- endomorph — Sheldon’s soft, round body build, linked to a relaxed, sociable temperament.
- esteem needs — Maslow’s fourth level: the need for self-respect and the respect of others.
- Extraversion — one of the Big Five; the tendency to be outgoing, sociable and energetic rather than reserved and quiet.
- factor analysis — a statistical method that groups related measurements to reveal a smaller number of underlying factors.
- Five-Factor Model — Costa and McCrae’s model describing personality on five broad dimensions (OCEAN).
- fixation — the state in which some psychic energy stays tied to an earlier psychosexual stage and shapes adult personality.
- fully functioning person — Rogers’s term for a psychologically healthy individual, open to experience and true to their own feelings.
- genital stage — Freud’s final psychosexual stage (puberty onwards), directed towards mature relationships.
- growth need — Maslow’s higher need (self-actualization) that arises from the wish to develop, not from lack.
- habit — a learned tendency to respond in the same fixed, almost automatic way to a particular situation.
- halo effect — the tendency to let a general impression of a person bias the rating of their separate qualities.
- hierarchy of needs — Maslow’s five-level ordering of human needs, from physiological needs up to self-actualization.
- humanistic theories — approaches (Rogers, Maslow) that stress subjective experience, free will and the drive to grow.
- id — the primitive, unconscious part of personality that seeks immediate satisfaction on the pleasure principle.
- ideal self — the person one wishes to be.
- identification — copying a same-sex parent’s values, by which Freud said the superego forms.
- identity — Erikson’s adolescent task of forming a clear, stable sense of who one is.
- incongruence — a wide gap between self-concept and experience, linked to anxiety and maladjustment.
- interview — assessing a person through their answers to a series of questions (structured or unstructured).
- latency stage — Freud’s fourth psychosexual stage (about 6 years–puberty), when sexual urges are dormant.
- libido — the psychic energy that, in Freud’s theory, powers mental activity and drives development.
- love and belongingness needs — Maslow’s third level: the need for family, friendship and acceptance.
- mesomorph — Sheldon’s sturdy, muscular body build, linked to an energetic, assertive temperament.
- Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) — the most widely used self-report inventory, scored on ten clinical scales.
- modeling — learning by observing and imitating another person (a model).
- morality principle — the principle on which the superego works, pressing towards moral ideals.
- moving against others — Horney’s aggressive coping style, seeking security by dominating others.
- moving away from others — Horney’s detached coping style, seeking security by withdrawing from others.
- moving towards others — Horney’s compliant coping style, seeking security by winning others’ approval.
- neo-Freudians — post-Freudian theorists who kept Freud’s core ideas but stressed social and cultural forces.
- Neuroticism — one of the Big Five; the tendency to experience anxiety and moodiness rather than calm stability.
- nomination — peer assessment in which group members name, and give reasons for, people they would choose to work with.
- observation — assessing personality by directly watching a person’s behaviour.
- observational learning — learning behaviour by watching and imitating others.
- Oedipus complex — in Freud’s theory, a boy’s attachment to his mother and rivalry with his father in the phallic stage.
- Openness to experience — one of the Big Five; the tendency to be imaginative and curious rather than conventional.
- oral stage — Freud’s first psychosexual stage (birth–18 months), centred on the mouth.
- peak experience — Maslow’s term for a moment of intense joy, wonder and connection with something greater than oneself.
- penis envy — in Freud’s theory, a girl’s supposed envy of the male anatomy during the phallic stage.
- personality — the stable and distinctive pattern in how a person thinks, feels and behaves.
- personality assessment — the measurement of personality using inventories, projective techniques and behavioural analysis.
- phallic stage — Freud’s third psychosexual stage (about 3–6 years), centred on the genitals and the Oedipus/Electra complex.
- physiological needs — Maslow’s base level: basic survival needs such as hunger, thirst and sleep.
- pleasure principle — the principle on which the id works, demanding immediate satisfaction of urges.
- post-Freudians — another name for the neo-Freudians.
- preconscious — the level of mind holding memories not in current awareness but easily recalled.
- projective technique — a test using ambiguous stimuli onto which a person projects hidden feelings, needs and conflicts.
- psychoanalytic theory — Freud’s theory that personality is driven by unconscious forces and the id–ego–superego conflict.
- psychosocial development — Erikson’s eight-stage lifespan theory in which each stage poses a social crisis.
- real self — the person one actually is.
- reality principle — the principle on which the ego works, satisfying urges in realistic, acceptable ways.
- reciprocal determinism — Bandura’s idea that behaviour, the person and the environment all influence one another.
- repression — pushing unacceptable or painful thoughts and urges down into the unconscious.
- Rorschach Inkblot Test — a projective test in which a person says what ten ambiguous inkblots resemble.
- safety needs — Maslow’s second level: the need for security, shelter and stability.
- secondary traits — Allport’s term for narrower traits that appear only in particular situations.
- self-actualization — the need and process of realising one’s full potential.
- self-concept — the overall idea a person holds about who they are.
- self-efficacy — a person’s belief in their ability to succeed at a particular task or situation.
- self-reinforcement — rewarding oneself with pride or satisfaction for meeting one’s own standards.
- self-report inventory — a standard set of questions a person answers about themselves, scored with a fixed key.
- self-set goals — targets a person sets for themselves, which guide and motivate behaviour.
- self-system — Bandura’s term for the cognitive processes by which a person perceives, judges and regulates their own behaviour.
- situational test — assessment that places a person in an arranged, often stressful, situation to observe their response.
- social cognitive theory — Bandura’s theory that personality is learned through observation and the self-system.
- somatotype — Sheldon’s term for a basic body build (endomorph, mesomorph or ectomorph).
- source traits — Cattell’s deep, underlying traits that give rise to surface traits.
- superego — the moral part of personality, the conscience, working on the morality principle.
- surface traits — Cattell’s easily observed clusters of behaviour that stem from source traits.
- temperament — the inborn, biologically based part of personality.
- Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) — a projective test in which a person makes up stories about ambiguous pictures.
- trait — a relatively stable, enduring characteristic that disposes a person to behave consistently.
- Type A personality — a hurried, competitive, impatient and often hostile pattern, linked to higher heart-disease risk.
- Type B personality — a relaxed, patient and easy-going pattern, linked to lower heart-disease risk.
- type theory — an approach that sorts people into a small number of personality categories.
- unconditional positive regard — accepting and valuing a person no matter what they say or do.
- unconscious — the vast hidden level of mind holding wishes, urges and memories we are largely unaware of.
- values — the beliefs a person holds about what is right, important or desirable.
- womb envy — Horney’s counter to penis envy: men’s envy of women’s ability to bear children.
2.13 Points to Ponder
- If personality is largely learned, as Bandura argues, how far can a person be held responsible for who they have become — and how much can they be expected to change?
- Freud’s ideas cannot be tested by experiment, yet they transformed how the world thinks about the mind. Can a theory be valuable even when it cannot be proved right or wrong?
- Type labels like “sanguine” and “Type A” survive in everyday speech even though psychologists reject sharp typing. Why do simple categories stay so appealing when the evidence is against them?
- Rogers held that people flourish under unconditional positive regard. Can a parent, teacher or friend truly accept someone “no matter what” and still set firm limits on their behaviour?
- Trait theories treat personality as fairly stable, yet you behave differently with friends, teachers and strangers. Are you one personality across every situation, or several?
- Maslow placed individual self-actualisation at the summit of human needs. In a society that prizes family duty and belonging, should personal self-fulfilment really sit at the very top?
2.14 Objective Questions
- The word “personality” comes from the Latin persona, meaning: [1 mark]
- soul
- mask
- mind
- self
- According to Freud, the part of personality that works on the reality principle is the: [1 mark]
- id
- ego
- superego
- libido
- The Oedipus and Electra complexes appear in Freud’s: [1 mark]
- oral stage
- anal stage
- phallic stage
- latency stage
- In Sheldon’s theory, the soft and round body build is the: [1 mark]
- mesomorph
- endomorph
- ectomorph
- somatotonia
- The Five-Factor Model of personality is remembered by the acronym: [1 mark]
- OCEAN
- MMPI
- 16PF
- TAT
- Cattell identified his source traits using: [1 mark]
- hypnosis
- free association
- factor analysis
- role play
- In Rogers’s theory, accepting a person no matter what they say or do is called: [1 mark]
- conditions of worth
- conditional positive regard
- unconditional positive regard
- congruence
- The number of official inkblots in the Rorschach test is: [1 mark]
- five
- ten
- twenty
- thirty
- Which of the following is NOT a level in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs? [1 mark]
- safety needs
- esteem needs
- achievement needs
- physiological needs
- A person’s belief in their ability to succeed at a particular task is called: [1 mark]
- self-esteem
- self-concept
- self-efficacy
- self-system
For questions 11–13, choose the correct option: a. Both A and R are true and R is the correct explanation of A. b. Both A and R are true but R is not the correct explanation of A. c. A is true but R is false. d. A is false but R is true.
Assertion (A): Type theories have largely been replaced by trait approaches. Reason (R): A personality quality such as sociability is spread across people on a smooth bell-shaped curve rather than in separate types. [1 mark]
Assertion (A): Erikson’s theory is described as psychosocial rather than psychosexual. Reason (R): Erikson stressed social relationships and the conscious ego over sexual drives and the unconscious. [1 mark]
Assertion (A): A high score on the MMPI Depression scale confirms that a person has depression. Reason (R): MMPI scales are interpreted by trained clinicians alongside much other information. [1 mark]
Match each theorist in Column A with the associated concept in Column B. [1 mark]
| Column A | Column B |
|---|---|
| a. Hippocrates | i. hierarchy of needs |
| b. Sigmund Freud | ii. observational learning |
| c. Abraham Maslow | iii. four humours |
| d. Albert Bandura | iv. psychosexual stages |
Fill in the blank: The three parts of personality in Freud’s theory are the id, the ego and the __________. [1 mark]
State whether True or False: The Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) uses inkblots as its stimulus material. [1 mark]
2.15 Check Your Concepts
State the definition of personality given by Gordon Allport. [2 marks] (about 30 words)
Name the three coping styles Karen Horney described. [2 marks] (about 30 words)
What is meant by self-efficacy? Give one example. [2 marks] (about 30 words)
List the five levels of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, in order from the base to the top. [2 marks] (about 30 words)
Differentiate between the id and the superego. [3 marks] (about 60 words)
Differentiate between surface traits and source traits. [3 marks] (about 60 words)
Differentiate between conditional positive regard and unconditional positive regard. [3 marks] (about 60 words)
Give reasons why type theories are considered scientifically weak. [3 marks] (about 60 words)
Explain, with an example, the concept of fixation in Freud’s theory. [4 marks] (about 100 words)
Describe how the Rorschach Inkblot Test is administered and how the responses are scored. [4 marks] (about 100 words)
Explain Bandura’s concept of observational learning, with an example from everyday life. [4 marks] (about 100 words)
Explain the halo effect in behavioural ratings with an example, and name one other error that can affect such ratings. [4 marks] (about 100 words)
Describe Freud’s structure of personality — the id, the ego and the superego — and the principle on which each works, and state one criticism of his theory. [6 marks] (about 150 words)
Describe Erikson’s eight stages of psychosocial development, naming the crisis faced at each stage. [6 marks] (about 150 words)
Discuss the Five-Factor Model of personality, explaining each of the five dimensions with its high and low ends. [6 marks] (about 150 words)
Compare Freud’s and Horney’s explanations of how personality develops. [6 marks] (about 150 words)
2.16 Case-Based Questions
- Rohan, a young manager, is always in a hurry. He checks the time constantly, gets irritated in traffic, takes on more work than he can handle, and finds it hard to relax even on holidays. His doctor advises him to slow down for the sake of his heart. [4 marks]
- Which personality type does Rohan show? [1]
- Name the two researchers who described this type. [1]
- How does this type differ from its opposite? [2]
- Meera is an adult who is extremely orderly and neat, very stubborn, and unwilling to part with money or possessions. A psychologist links these traits to a fixation in one of Freud’s psychosexual stages. [4 marks]
- In which psychosexual stage does this fixation lie? [1]
- What is meant by fixation? [1]
- Briefly describe this stage and how a fixation there can shape the adult personality. [2]
- Ananya’s parents show her warmth and praise only when she stands first in class. When she does not, they grow cold and distant. Over time Ananya becomes anxious and feels she is worthwhile only when she succeeds. [6 marks]
- Which concept of Rogers explains being valued only when one meets others’ expectations? [2]
- What kind of environment does Rogers say Ananya needs for healthy growth, and why? [2]
- Using the terms self-concept and experience, explain the incongruence Ananya may develop. [2]
- A clinical psychologist is assessing a client who finds it hard to speak openly about his feelings. She decides to use a test made up of ambiguous pictures and asks him to make up a story about each one. [5 marks]
- Which broad type of technique is she using? [1]
- Name this specific test and its developers, and state what the client is asked to do. [2]
- State one strength and one limitation of such techniques. [2]
- Six-year-old Kabir has begun copying the rude, aggressive way a character behaves in a show he watches daily on a phone, repeating the same actions with his younger sister. [4 marks]
- Which learning process best explains Kabir’s behaviour? [1]
- Name the psychologist and a study associated with this process. [2]
- What is meant by a “model”, and must a model always be a real person present in the room? [1]