Chapter 107. Comparing Personality Theories

1. Your personality is the characteristic way that you think, act, and react to your environment. Your personality makes you who you are; it distinguishes you from other people.

2. Dozens of theories have been proposed to help psychologists understand and explain personality. Four main perspectives have been especially influential in mainstream psychology: psychodynamic theory (which also includes psychoanalytic theory), humanistic theory, trait theory and social-cognitive theory.

3. Psychoanalytic theory is based on the ideas of Sigmund Freud. Freud argued that the adult personality has three components: the id operates in the unconscious and attempts to satisfy basic sexual and aggressive drives. The superego is the voice of our conscience, judging our actions and producing feelings of pride or guilt. Between the id and the superego is the ego, the largely conscious, reality-oriented executive part of the personality. The ego attempts to reconcile the impulses of the id with the demands of the superego and those of the external world.

4. Freud claimed that personality develops through a series of five psychosexual stages as the child moves from infancy to adolescence: the oral stage, anal stage, phallic stage, latency stage, and genital stage. At each stage, the libido, or "life force," is channeled into a different region of the body. If the id doesn’t get enough gratification at a particular stage, the libido could become fixated at that stage and produce maladaptive behavior in adulthood. For example, an oral fixation could lead an adult to chew her fingernails.

5. The other psychodynamic theorists who followed Freud, including Carl Jung, Karen Horney, and Alfred Adler, maintained many of the basic ideas of psychoanalytic theory. However, they shifted the emphasis away from childhood sexuality to the child’s entire social world, and also recognized that the unconscious mind interacts with and is influenced by the person’s conscious awareness and intentions. Horney challenged Freud’s male-dominated perspective of personality. Adler proposed the idea that an inferiority complex based on childhood insecurities can influence adult behavior. Jung claimed that humanity’s shared dream images (such as a threatening shadow) flow from a collective unconscious, shaped by the experiences of early humans.

6. Humanistic theory derives from the work by of Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers. In contrast to Freud’s claim that personality is based on unconscious conflicts stemming from childhood, the humanistic approach focuses on a person’s conscious experience of the self (the self-concept) and the natural progression toward achieving one’s full potential (called self-actualization). In an environment where one’s basic needs are met, personality growth (becoming a "whole person" who is "fully human") requires self-awareness, self-acceptance, and taking responsibility for one’s own actions and feelings.

7. Trait theory focuses on the enduring behavioral characteristics called personality traits. After decades of research, including work by Gordon Allport, Hans Eysenck, Paul Costa, and Robert McRae, five clusters of traits, or "factors," emerged as most important: extraversion, agreeableness, openness, neuroticism, and conscientiousness. These "big five" factors form the basis of the five-factor model of personality. Each of the five factors is considered a continuum from low to high, and a person’s position on each of the factors provides a comprehensive picture of that person’s personality.

8. Social-cognitive theory, as championed by Albert Bandura, emphasizes the interaction between the person and the situation. The principle of reciprocal determinism proposes that our personal tendencies and ways of thinking interact with our social environment to produce our behavior—but then our behavior changes our environment and shapes our future tendencies. From this perspective, our "enduring" personality characteristics are always a bit flexible, and could evolve as our situation changes.