11.7 SUMMARY

• In psychology, personality refers to a person’s characteristic style of behaving, thinking, and feeling.
• Personality psychologists attempt to find the best ways to describe personality, to explain how personalities come about, and to measure personality.
• Two general classes of personality tests are personality inventories, such as the MMPI–2–RF, and projective techniques, such as the Rorschach Inkblot Test and the TAT. Newer high-tech methods are proving to be even more effective.

• The trait approach tries to identify core personality dimensions that can be used to characterize an individual’s behavior.
• Many personality psychologists currently focus on the Big Five personality factors: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.
• Trait theorists often adopt a biological perspective, seeing personality largely as the result of genetic influences on brain functioning.

• Freud believed that the personality results from forces that are largely unconscious, shaped by the interplay among id, superego, and ego.
• Defense mechanisms are methods the mind may use to reduce anxiety generated from unacceptable impulses.
• Freud believed that the developing person passes through a series of psychosexual stages and that failing to progress beyond one of the stages results in fixation, which is associated with corresponding personality traits.

• Humanists see personality as directed by an inherent striving toward self-actualization and development of our unique human potentials.
• Existentialists focus on angst and the defensive response people often have to questions about the meaning of life and the inevitability of death.

• The social-cognitive approach focuses on personality as arising from individuals’ behavior in situations.
• According to social-cognitive personality theorists, the same person may behave differently in different situations but should behave consistently in similar situations.
• People translate their goals into behavior through outcome expectancies, their assumptions about the likely consequences of future behaviors.

• The self-concept is a person’s knowledge of self, including both specific self-narratives and more abstract personality traits or personal characteristics.
• People’s self-concept develops through social feedback, and people often act to try to confirm these views through a process of self-verification.
• Self-esteem is a person’s evaluation of self; it is derived from being accepted by others, as well as by how we evaluate ourselves by comparison to others. Theories suggest that we seek positive self-esteem to achieve perceptions of status, or belonging, or of being symbolically protected against mortality.
• People strive for positive self-views through self-serving biases and implicit egotism.