PERSONALITY

DEVELOPMENT EDU
413
TRAIT THEORY
THE TRAIT
THEORY
• Almost any
personality
characteristics you
can think of –
optimism, self
esteem,
achievement
motivation – can be
illustrated with the
trait continuum.
• A trait is a dimension of personality used to categorize
people according to the degree to which they manifest a
particular characteristic.
• The trait approach to personality is built on two important
assumptions:
• 1. trait psychologists assume that personality characteristics
are relatively stable over time.
• 2. the personality characteristics are stable across situations.
TRAIT THEORISTS
• Gordon Allport:
• After visiting Freud concluded “to give full recognition to
manifest motives before probing the unconscious”.
• Allport identified two general strategies researchers might
use when investigating personality:
• 1. Nomothetic approach which assumes that all people can
be described along a single dimension according to their
level of for example, assertiveness or anxiety.
• 2. Idiographic approach identifies the unique combinations
of traits that best accounts for the personality of a single
individual. He referred to the 5-10 traits that best describe
an individual as central traits.
TRAIT THEORISTS
• Henry Murray:
• His approach represents a blend of psychoanalytic and trait
concepts unlike most trait theorists who disregard
psychoanalytic theory.
• Murray called his approach personology and identified the
basic elements of personality as needs. He was not
concerned with viscerogenic (body) needs, such as food and
water.
• His work focused on Psychogenic needs, which he described
as a “readiness to respond in a certain way under certain
conditions”
• According to Murray, each one of us can be described in
terms of a personal hierarchy of needs. He eventually arrived
at 27 psychogenic needs.
Ambition Needs

• Ambition needs are related to the need for achievement

and recognition. The need for achievement is often
expressed by succeeding, achieving goals, and
overcoming obstacles. The need for recognition is met
by gaining social status and displaying achievements.
Sometimes the ambition needs even involve a need for
exhibition, or the desire to shock and thrill other people
Materialistic Needs

• The materialistic needs center on the acquisition,

construction, order, and retention. These needs often
involve obtaining items, such as buying material objects
that we desire. In other instances, these needs compel
us to create new things. Obtaining and creating items
are an important part of the materialistic needs, but
keeping objects and organizing them is also important.
Power Needs

• The power needs tend to center on our own

independence as well as our need to control others.
Murray believed that autonomy was a powerful need
involving the desire for independence and resistance.
• Other key power needs that he identified include
abasement (confessing and apologizing), aggression
(attacking or ridiculing others), blame avoidance
(following the rules and avoiding blame), deference
(obeying and cooperating with others), and dominance
(controlling others).
Affection Needs
• The affection needs are centered on our desire to love and be loved
. We have a need for affiliation and seek out the company of other
people. Nurturance, or taking care of other people, is also
important for psychological well-being. The need for succorance
involves being helped or protected by others. Murray also
suggested that play and having fun with other people was also a
critical affection need.
• While most of the affection needs a center on building relationships
and connections, Murray also recognized that rejection could also
be a need. Sometimes, turning people away is an important part of
maintaining mental wellness. Unhealthy relationships can be a
major detriment to an individual's well-being, so sometimes
knowing when to walk away can be important.
Information Needs
• The information needs center around both gaining
knowledge and sharing it with others. According to
Murray, people have an innate need to learn more
about the world around them. He referred to cognizance
as the need to seek knowledge and ask questions.
• In addition to gaining knowledge, he also believed that
people have a need for what he referred to as
exposition. Exposition is the desire to share what they
have learned with other people.
TRAIT THEORISTS
• Raymond Cattell:
• Argued that just as chemists did not begin by guessing what chemical
elements must exist, psychologists should not begin with a
preconceived list of personality traits. Much of his work was devoted
to discovering just how many basic personality traits there are.
• He identified 16 basic traits in his research.
THE BIG FIVE
• Efforts to identify and describe the dimensions of personality
did not end with Cattell’s original model. Rather, this has
been an ongoing issue in personality research for decades.
Different teams of investigators using many different kinds of
data find evidence for five basic dimensions of personality.
These are: Digman, Goldberg, John, McCrae & Costa.
Different Teams: Digman, Goldberg,
John, McCrae & Costa
• Evidence from many different sources indicates that the
many different sources indicates that the many traits
comprising our personalities can be organized along five
basic personality dimensions.
Criticism and Limitations of the Big
Five Model
• 1. there is some debate about what the five factors mean.
Thus these factors may simply represent five dimensions
built into the English language. That is, although personality
may in reality have a very different structure, our ability to
describe personality traits is limited to the adjectives
available, which may fall into 5 primary categories. This
model may, therefore, not accurately capture the
complexities and subtleties of human personality.
• 2. there remains some disagreement about the structure of the
five- factor structure. Researchers sometimes find three or four
factors, and sometimes as many as seven. This confusion has led
some psychologists to refer to “The Big Five, plus or minus two”
• 3. the Big Five-factor model has been criticized for being
atheoretical. That is, researchers did not anticipate ahead of
time how many factors they would generate from their factor
analytic studies or what those factors might be. This lack of
prediction before-hand leaves the results of the research open
to any number of explanations.
Strengths and Criticisms of the Trait
Approach
• 1. Rather than relying on intuition and subjective judgment
as did Freud and many of the neo-Freudians, these trait
theorists used objective measures to examine their
constructs.
• Cattell specifically allowed the data to determine the theory,
which was then subject to further empirical validation. This
approach reduces some of the biases and subjectivity that
plague other approaches.
Strengths Of the Trait Approach
• 2. its many practical applications.
• Mental health workers routinely use trait measures when
evaluating clients. Similarly, many educational psychologists
have embraced trait measures in their work. Psychologists
working in industrial and organizational settings often use
personality trait measures in hiring and promotion decisions.
Job counselors frequently rely on trait scores to match clients
with careers.
• Predicting behavior from personality trait measures has
become a standard feature in research by clinical, social,
industrial-organizational, educational, and developmental
psychologists.
Criticisms of the Trait theory:
• 1. These are often based not so much on what the approach
says but on what it leaves out. Trait psychologists describe
people in terms of traits, but they often do not explain how
these traits develop or what can be done to help teachers
and employers match people with tasks and jobs best suited
to them, but no schools of psychotherapy have originated
from the trait approach.
• The failure of the trait approach to do more than identify
potential problems limits its usefulness.
• 2. The lack of agreed upon framework.
• Although all trait theorists use empirical methods and are
concerned with the identification of traits, no single theory
or underlying structure ties all of the theories together.
• We can see the confusion this creates by asking how many
basic traits there are. Murray reduced personality to 27
psychogenic needs. Cattell found 16 basic elements of
personality. More recent investigations suggest the number
is really 5, and a few studies even challenge this number.