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Personality

Classic Perspectives on Personality

Contemporary Perspectives on Personality

491

LADY GAGA dazzles millions with her unique musical arrangements, tantalizing outfits, and provocative performance theatrics. In shows around the world, Lady Gaga’s most predictable feature is her unpredictability. She has worn a meat dress to an awards show, sported 16-inch heels to meet with U.S. President Barack Obama (who later described the interaction as “a little intimidating”), and wowed Oscar viewers with her Sound of Music tribute to Julie Andrews.

Yet even Lady Gaga exhibits distinctive and enduring ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving, including an openness to new experiences, a spotlight-fueled energy, and a painstaking dedication to her performances. “I’m very detailed—every minute of the show has got to be perfect,” she says. This conscientiousness continues from her high school self, which she describes as “very dedicated, very studious, and very disciplined.” This chapter focuses on the ways we all demonstrate unique and persisting patterns of thinking and behaving—our personality.

Much of this book deals with personality. Earlier chapters considered biological influences on personality; personality development across the life span; how personality relates to learning, motivation, emotion, and health; and social influences on personality. The next chapter will study disorders of personality. This chapter focuses on personality itself—what it is and how researchers study it.

We begin with two historically important theories of personality: Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory and the humanistic approach. These sweeping perspectives on human nature laid the foundation for later personality theorists and for what this chapter presents next: newer scientific explorations of personality. Today’s personality researchers study the basic dimensions of personality, and the interaction of persons and environments. They also study self-esteem, self-serving bias, and cultural influences on our concept of self—that sense of “Who I am.” And they study the unconscious mind—with findings that probably would have surprised even Freud.