Chapter Introduction

Personality

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  • Personality: What It Is and How It Is Measured
    • Describing and Explaining Personality
    • Measuring Personality
  • The Trait Approach: Identifying Patterns of Behavior
    • Traits as Behavioral Dispositions and Motives
    • The Search for Core Traits

    • HOT SCIENCE Personality on the Surface

    • Traits as Biological Building Blocks

    • THE REAL WORLD Are There “Male” and “Female” Personalities?

  • The Psychodynamic Approach: Forces That Lie beneath Awareness
    • The Structure of the Mind: Id, Ego, and Superego
    • Psychosexual Stages and the Development of Personality
  • The Humanistic–Existential Approach: Personality as Choice
    • Human Needs and Self-Actualization
    • Personality as Existence
  • The Social-Cognitive Approach: Personalities in Situations
    • Consistency of Personality across Situations
    • Personal Constructs

    • CULTURE & COMMUNITY Does your personality change according to the language you’re speaking?

    • Personal Goals and Expectancies
  • The Self: Personality in the Mirror
    • Self-Concept
    • Self-Esteem

    • OTHER VOICES Does the Study of Personality Lack…Personality?

Growing up, Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta seemed to have personality. As a child, she was said to have shown up at the occasional family gathering naked. As the pop star now known as Lady Gaga, she continues the tradition of being different. Her first albums, The Fame and The Fame Monster, and the fact that she calls her fans “Little Monsters” and herself the “Mother Monster,” hinted she might have issues. But she, like most of us, is not one-dimensional. Yes, her style is eccentric and seems silly to many (we’re looking at you, raw meat dress), but she also is a serious supporter of humanitarian and personal causes, including equality for people who are gay, bisexual, lesbian, or transgendered (as in her song “Born This Way”). Lady Gaga is one of a kind. She has personality in an important sense—she has qualities that make her psychologically different from other people.

Singer Lady Gaga in her meat dress at the MTV Video Music Awards, September 2010.
PRESS ASSOCIATION VIA AP IMAGES

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THE FORCES THAT CREATE ANY ONE PERSONALITY ARE ALWAYS something of a mystery. Your personality is different from anyone else’s and expresses itself pretty consistently across settings—at home, in the classroom, and elsewhere. But how and why do people differ psychologically? By studying many unique individuals, psychologists seek to gather enough information to answer these central questions of personality psychology scientifically.

Personality is an individual’s characteristic style of behaving, thinking, and feeling. Whether Lady Gaga’s quirks are real or merely for publicity, they are certainly hers and they show her distinct personality. In this chapter, we will explore personality, first by looking at what it is and how it is measured, and then by focusing on each of four main approaches to understanding personality: trait–biological, psychodynamic, humanistic–existential, and social cognitive. Psychologists have personalities, too (well, most of them), so their different approaches, even to the topic of personality, shouldn’t be that surprising. At the end of the chapter, we discuss the psychology of self to see how our views of what we are like can shape and define our personality.