Self and Personality

Written and reviewed by Subhra Gupta, Humanities faculty at UniDrill (M.A. Sociology, University of Delhi · 7 years teaching Humanities). Based on NCERT Psychology Class XII (Psychology), Chapter 2.

Why do two children in the same family turn out so different?

Same house, same parents, same meals, yet one sibling loves adventure and the other prefers a book. One child is shy and the other chatty. Psychologists answer with two linked ideas. Self is how you see and define who you are. Personality is your relatively stable pattern of responding to people and situations. Self lies at the core of personality, which is why they share a chapter. The rest of the chapter asks what the self is, what personality is, how seven approaches explain it, and how psychologists assess it.

Concept of self

Self is the totality of an individual's conscious experiences, ideas, thoughts and feelings about herself or himself. A newborn has no idea of self. It forms as the child grows, through interaction with parents, friends, teachers and other significant people, and through the meaning the child gives to experiences. The self can change in the light of new experiences.

Self as subject and self as object. "I am a dancer" describes the self as something that does (subject, the knower). "I easily get hurt" describes the self as something acted upon (object, the known). The self is both.

Kinds of self.

Self-concept, self-esteem, self-efficacy and self-regulation

These four ideas are easy to confuse, so compare them.

Self esteem and behaviour. Children with high academic self esteem do better in school, and those with high social self esteem are better liked by peers. Children with low self esteem in all areas often show anxiety, depression and rising antisocial behaviour. Warm and positive parenting builds high self esteem. Parents who help or decide for children even when help is not needed tend to produce low self esteem.

Self regulation techniques. People who change their behaviour according to situational demands are high on self monitoring. Self control means deferring the satisfaction of needs, which is called delay of gratification. It plays a key role in long term goals. Indian tradition offers mechanisms such as fasting (vrata or roza) and non attachment to worldly things.

Pause and predict: two students are equally capable. Maya says "I know I can finish this project if I plan it well." Nina says "I am a worthless student." Which idea does each statement illustrate?

Check your answer: Maya shows high self efficacy, the belief in her ability to handle the task. Nina shows low self esteem, a negative value judgment about her own worth. Self efficacy is about "can I do it", and self esteem is about "how much am I worth".

Culture and self

Self is linked to the features of the culture in which people live. The chapter contrasts the Indian and the Western views as broad tendencies.

Beyond the textbook. For the exam: many Western cultures are individualistic and many Asian cultures collectivistic. In reality: these labels describe average tendencies across large groups. Within any society, individuals differ and cultures change over time, so no single person should be assumed to fit the label. Why it matters: options that say "all individuals in culture X are..." overstate the point.

The concept of personality

The word comes from the Latin persona, the mask worn by actors in Roman theatre. The mask told the audience what role to expect, but the actor need not have actually possessed those qualities. For most people, personality means appearance, so a "good looking" person is assumed to have a charming personality. That rests on superficial impressions. In psychology, personality refers to unique and relatively stable qualities that characterise a person's behaviour across situations and over time. Consistency in behaviour, thought and emotion is its mark. An honest person remains honest at most times and places, though situations still cause some variation, which helps people adapt.

Four features mark personality: it has both physical and psychological components, its expression in behaviour is fairly unique to an individual, its main features do not easily change with time, and it is dynamic, because some features may change due to internal or external demands, so personality is adaptive. Knowing someone's personality lets us predict behaviour, as when a child who dislikes orders is better offered acceptable alternatives to choose from.

Terms often confused with personality.

Approaches to personality at a glance

Type approaches

A type approach places people into broad categories according to similarity of behavioural patterns.

Typologies are appealing but too simplistic. People do not fit into such neat categories, and body typologies are more like stereotypes with limited use in predicting behaviour.

Trait approaches

A trait is a relatively enduring attribute on which one person differs from another. Traits are relatively stable over time, generally consistent across situations, and their strengths and combinations vary among people. Trait theories try to find the "building blocks" of personality.

The Big Five. Paul Costa and Robert McCrae examined all possible personality traits and found five factors. The model has been found useful across cultures and is consistent with trait words in different languages. It is now considered the most promising empirical approach. A handy memory aid is OCEAN.

Types versus traits.

Beyond the textbook. For the exam: a type puts a person in a category, and a trait rates the degree. In reality: when researchers measure a trait such as extraversion, scores in a population are mostly spread along a continuum with most people near the middle, and only a few at the extremes. This is why most personality researchers prefer traits to two box types. Why it matters: it explains why "introvert or extravert" is a simplification.

Beyond the textbook. For the exam: Type A people are at greater risk of coronary heart disease. In reality: later research suggested that the part of Type A most linked with heart disease is hostility and anger, not being busy or hurried. Why it matters: the type label is useful for the exam, but it is a bundle of behaviours, and not all of them carry the risk.

Two views. For the exam: traits are fairly stable and consistent across situations. Another reading: the interactional approach argues that situations play an important role, and that people may act dependent or independent because of rewards or threats in a setting (a market, a courtroom, a place of worship), not because of an inner trait. It notes that cross situational consistency of traits is found to be quite low.

The psychodynamic approach: Freud

Sigmund Freud was a physician who developed his theory in clinical practice. He found that patients felt better after talking about their problems. He used free association (openly sharing every thought that comes to mind), dream analysis and analysis of errors to understand the mind. Freud's theory covers three areas.

Levels of consciousness.

Unsuccessful resolution of conflicts produces abnormal behaviour. Forgetting, slips of the tongue, jokes and dreams offer ways to approach the unconscious. Freud's therapy, psychoanalysis, aims to bring repressed unconscious material to consciousness, helping people live in a more self aware and integrated way.

Structure of personality. Id, ego and superego are concepts, not physical structures.

The relative strength of the three forces determines a person's stability. The id is energised by life and death instincts. Freud paid more attention to the life (sexual) instinct, whose energy is called libido.

Ego defence mechanisms. Defence mechanisms reduce anxiety by distorting reality. Some defence is normal, but heavy use that truly distorts reality leads to maladjustment.

People often use these without being aware. Freud's ideas on defence mechanisms have been questioned, for example the claim that projection reduces anxiety has not found support in several studies.

Pause and predict: after failing a driving test, Ravi tells everyone the examiner was biased and the road was badly marked. Which defence mechanism is closest?

Check your answer: rationalisation, because he gives a reasonable sounding explanation for an unwelcome result. It is not projection, which attributes one's own traits to others, and it is not denial, since he accepts that he failed.

Psychosexual stages. Freud believed that core aspects of personality are set early, remain stable and change only with great difficulty. Problems at any stage can arrest development.

Failure to pass successfully through a stage causes fixation, where development is arrested at an earlier stage. Regression takes a person back to an earlier stage when problems at a later stage are poorly resolved, so a person shows behaviour typical of a less mature stage.

Post Freudian approaches. These neo analytic thinkers gave less weight to the sexual and aggressive id and expanded the role of the ego, emphasising creativity, competence and problem solving.

Criticisms of psychodynamic theories. They are based largely on case studies and lack rigorous scientific basis. They generalise from small and atypical samples. Their concepts are not properly defined and are hard to test scientifically. Freud used males as the prototype of human development and overlooked female experiences.

Two views. For the exam: Freud's theory is a major approach in which unconscious conflict drives personality, but it has strong criticisms. Another reading: even many critics accept that much mental activity occurs outside awareness, and research on implicit memory supports that general idea, though not Freud's specific drive based explanations. So the broad insight has lasted better than the details.

Behavioural and cultural approaches

Behavioural theorists do not give importance to internal dynamics; they rely on observable, measurable data.

The humanistic approach

Humanistic theories grew in response to Freud, mainly through Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow.

Rogers noted that when social conditions are positive, self concept and self esteem are high, and such people are flexible and open to new experiences, so they keep growing. The healthy person, for humanists, is not just adjusted to society. She is aware of her feelings and limits, accepts responsibility for her life ("the courage to be"), lives in the here and now and does not dwell on the past or on anxious expectations.

Two views. For the exam: humanistic theorists see people as basically good and growth seeking. Another reading: critics of humanistic theories say their key ideas, such as self actualisation, are hard to define and measure scientifically, a criticism similar to the one made of psychodynamic theory. Supporters reply that subjective experience is a legitimate subject for psychology.

Assessing personality

Personality assessment is a formal effort to understand a person and predict behaviour with minimum error and maximum accuracy. It is also useful for diagnosis, training, placement and counselling. Four kinds of technique are used: psychometric tests (covered in the previous chapter), self report measures, projective techniques and behavioural analysis.

Self report measures. Allport suggested that the best way to assess a person is to ask her. These are fairly structured, often theory based measures in which the person gives verbal responses on a rating scale. Responses are accepted at face value, scored quantitatively and interpreted using norms.

Self report measures suffer from social desirability (answering in a socially desirable way) and acquiescence (agreeing with items whatever their content). These make assessment less reliable.

Projective techniques. Direct techniques depend on what the person is willing to say, and people often hold back private feelings or answer in socially desirable ways. They also cannot reach the unconscious. Projective techniques were developed to assess unconscious motives and feelings. They assume that an unstructured stimulus lets the person project her feelings, desires and needs onto it.

All projective techniques share these features: the stimuli are relatively or fully unstructured; the person is usually not told the purpose or scoring; she is told there are no correct or incorrect responses; each response is seen as revealing something significant; scoring and interpretation are lengthy and sometimes subjective.

Projective techniques help in understanding unconscious motives and deep conflicts, but they need specialised training, and there are problems with the reliability of scoring and validity of interpretation.

Behavioural analysis.

The halo effect is the tendency to judge a person on everything from one favourable or unfavourable trait. Middle category bias is a tendency to avoid extremes, and extreme response bias is a tendency to avoid the middle. Training the raters and designing scales well can reduce these.

Who said what

Exam traps

60-second revision

Where this chapter connects

• Previous chapter: Variations in Psychological Attributes introduces personality as one of the five assessable attributes and psychological testing in general.
• Next chapter: Meeting Life Challenges shows how self efficacy, optimism and personality shape the way people cope with stress.
• Related chapter: Psychological Disorders draws on psychodynamic and behavioural ideas when explaining abnormal behaviour.
• Related chapter: Therapeutic Approaches covers psychoanalysis and Rogers' client centred therapy in practice.
• Class XI link: Motivation and Emotion explains Maslow's hierarchy of needs, which the humanistic approach builds on.