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| Chapter 7: Using Personality Traits to Understand Behavior |
- Traits are useful not just for predicting behavior, but for increasing our understanding of the reasons for behavior. This chapter examined four basic approaches to the study of traits.
- The single-trait approach zeros in on one particular trait and its consequences for behavior; it has been used to study authoritarianism, conscientiousness, and self-monitoring, among others.
- The many-trait approach looks at the relationship between a particular behavior and as many different traits as possible. One test used in this approach, the California Q-sort, assesses one hundred different traits at once. The Q-sort has been used to explore the bases of delay of gratification, drug use, depression, and political ideology.
- The essential-trait approach attempts to identify the few traits, out of the thousands of possibilities, that are truly central to understanding all of the others. The most widely accepted essential-trait list is the Big Five, which identifies extraversion, neuroticism, conscientiousness, agreeableness, and openness as broad traits that can organize the understanding of personality.
- The typological approach attempts to capture the ways in which people might differ in kind, not just in degree. Recent research has identified three basic types of personality: well-adjusted, maladjusted overcontrolled, and maladjusted undercontrolled. However, while these types may be useful for thinking about how traits work in combination, they add little if any predictive validity to what can be achieved using trait measures.
- Personality development concerns the questions of where personality comes from, and how it changes over the lifespan.
- Individual differences in personality are highly stable across the lifespan, and they become more stable as one gets older.
- At the same time, some personality traits show substantial changes in average level across the lifespan for most people, with notable increases in social dominance, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and emotional stability, especially between the ages of 20 and 30.
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