THEORIES OF

PERSONALITY

Seminar 10: The Trait

Approach – Gordon Allport
and Raymond Cattell
 Today,  The Trait Approach

we’ll  Gordon Allport’s Theory

 Raymond Cattell’s Theory
discuss
The Trait Approach
• Trait = distinguishing personal characteristic or
quality
• Characteristics or features to summarize what a
person is like. E.g., “Alyssa is very self-assured,” or
“Kito is so competitive,” or “Mohammed is really
smart.”
• The field begun by Allport and Cattell several decades
ago is central to the study of personality today.
• They studied personality by observing emotionally
healthy persons in an academic laboratory setting.
• Theirs was an interactionist approach, recognizing
that behavior is a function of the interaction between
both personal and situational variables.
• Allport and Cattell agreed on the importance of
genetic factors in the formation of traits.
MOTIVATION AND
PERSONALITY

Gordon Allport
Gordon Allport
• Born in Montezuma, Indiana, Allport was the youngest of
four sons.
• Arising from his childhood conditions of isolation and
rejection, Allport developed inferiority feelings for which
he attempted to compensate by striving to excel.
• He followed his brother Floyd to Harvard University and
earned a Ph.D. in psychology
• The attempt to emulate Floyd may have threatened
Gordon’s sense of identity.
• To assert his individuality, Gordon Allport may have been
motivated to refute his identification with Floyd by
declaring in his personality theory that his adult motives
and interests were independent of his childhood feelings.
• After a meeting with Freud & disagreeing with his views,
Allport decided that psychology should pay more
attention to conscious or visible motivations.
Nature of Personality
• “Personality is the dynamic organization within the individual of
those psychophysical systems that determine . . . characteristic
behavior and thought” (Allport, 1961, p. 28).
• Dynamic organization = although personality is constantly
changing and growing, the growth is organized, not
random.
• Psychophysical = personality is composed of mind and
body functioning together as a unit; personality is neither
all mental nor all biological.
• Determine = all facets of personality activate or direct
specific behaviors and thoughts.
• Characteristic behavior and thought = everything we think
and do is characteristic, or typical, of us.
• Thus, each person is unique.
• Personality structure is primarily represented in terms of traits,
behavior is motivated or driven by traits
• His theory is often known as trait psychology
 • Allport stated that we reflect both our heredity and
our environment.
• Heredity provides the personality with raw materials
(such as physique, intelligence, and temperament)
that may be shaped, expanded, or limited by the
conditions of our environment.

Nature of • He found no continuum of personality between

childhood and adulthood.
Personality • Primitive biological urges and reflexes drive infant
behavior, whereas adult functioning is more
psychological in nature.
• In a sense there are two personalities: one for
childhood and one for adulthood.
• The adult personality is not constrained by childhood
experiences.
Allport defined personality traits as consistent and enduring ways of reacting to our
environment.
He summarized the characteristics of traits as follows (Allport, 1937):

• Personality traits are real and exist within each of us. They are not theoretical
constructs or labels made up to account for behavior.
• Traits determine or cause behavior. They do not arise only in response to certain
stimuli. They motivate us to seek appropriate stimuli, and they interact with the
environment to produce behavior.
• Traits can be demonstrated empirically. By observing behavior over time, we can infer
the existence of traits in the consistency of a person’s responses to the same or
similar stimuli.
• Traits are interrelated; they may overlap, even though they represent different
characteristics. For example, aggressiveness and hostility are distinct but related traits
and are frequently observed to occur together in a person’s behavior.
• Traits vary with the situation. For example, a person may display the trait of neatness
in one situation and the trait of disorderliness in another situation.

Personality Traits - Characteristics

Types of Traits
• Initially, Allport proposed two types of traits: individual
and common.
• Individual traits are unique to a person and define his
or her character.
• Common traits are shared traits by a number of people,
such as the members of a culture. It follows that people
in different cultures will have different common traits.
• He later revised his terminology and relabeled common
traits as traits and individual traits as personal
dispositions.
 • A cardinal trait is so pervasive and influential that it touches
almost every aspect of a person’s life. Allport described it as
Car a ruling passion, a powerful force that dominates behavior.
He offered the examples of sadism and chauvinism. Not
dina everyone has a ruling passion, and those who do may not
l display it in every situation.
Trait

Personal Cen
• Everyone has a few central traits, some 5 to 10 themes that
best describe our behavior. Allport’s examples are
aggressiveness, self-pity, and cynicism. These are the kinds

Dispositions tral
Trait
s
of characteristics we would mention when discussing a
friend’s personality or writing a letter of recommendation.

Our personal dispositions do • The least influential individual traits are the secondary traits,
not all have the same intensity Sec
which appear much less consistently than cardinal and
central traits. Secondary traits may be so inconspicuous or
or significance. They may be ond weak that only a close friend would notice evidence of them.
cardinal traits, central traits, or ary They may include, for example, a minor preference for a
particular type of music or for a certain food.
secondary traits. Trait
s
 Habits and Attitudes

• As Allport developed his system, he argued that traits and personal dispositions are
distinct from other characteristics, such as habits and attitudes.
• Habits: Specific, inflexible responses to specific stimuli; several habits may combine
to form a trait.
– For e.g., Children learning to brush their teeth or wash their hands before eating. After a
while, these behaviors become automatic, or habitual. Taken together, these habits are
directed toward the same purpose and form the trait we label cleanliness.
• Attitudes: To Allport, attitudes are similar to traits. However, attitudes have specific
objects of reference and involve either positive or negative evaluations.
– A person has an attitude toward something, for example, toward red-haired people, a
musical group, or a brand of athletic shoe. A trait or personal disposition is not specifically
directed toward a single object or category of objects. A person with the personal
disposition of shyness will interact with most other people in the same way, regardless of
their hair or shoes. Therefore, traits are broader in scope than attitudes.
 Motivation

• Functional autonomy of motives: The idea that motives in the normal, mature
adult are independent of the childhood experiences in which they originally
appeared.
• The only way to understand adult motives, Allport stressed, is to investigate why
people behave as they do today.
• Allport proposed two levels of functional autonomy: perseverative functional
autonomy and propriate functional autonomy.
• Perseverative functional autonomy: The level of functional autonomy that
relates to low-level and routine behaviors. The actions once served a purpose, but
they no longer do and are at too basic and low a level to be considered an integral
part of personality.
• Propriate functional autonomy: The level of functional autonomy that relates to
our values, self-image, and lifestyle. The word propriate derives from proprium,
 Assessment

• Personality is so complex that to evaluate it we must employ many

techniques. He listed 11 major methods: • Constitutional and physiological
diagnosis • Cultural setting, membership, role • Personal documents and
case studies • Self-appraisal • Conduct analysis • Ratings • Tests and scales
• Projective techniques • Depth analysis • Expressive behavior • Synoptic
procedures (combining information from several sources in a synopsis)
Criticism

• It is difficult to translate Allport’s concepts

into specific terms and propositions suitable
for study by the experimental method.
• Allport’s emphasis on the uniqueness of
personality has been challenged because his
position focuses so exclusively on the
individual that it is impossible to generalize
from one person to another.
TRAIT THEORY

Raymond Cattell
 Raymond
•
Cattell
Raymond Cattell was a British-American psychologist
• Born in 1905, Cattell witnessed the advent of many
20th-century inventions such as electricity, telephones,
cars, and airplanes. He was inspired by these
innovations and was eager to apply the scientific
methods used to make such discoveries to the human
mind and personality.
• Personality, he believed, was not just some
unknowable and untestable mystery. It was something
that could be studied and organized.
• Through scientific study, human characteristics and
behaviors could be predicted based on underlying
personality traits.
• Cattell worked with psychologist Charles Spearman,
who was known for his pioneering work in statistics.
• Cattell would later use the factor analysis techniques
developed by Spearman to create his own personality
taxonomy.
 • Cattell’s goal in his study of personality was to predict how a
person will behave in response to a given stimulus situation.
• A Scientific Approach: Cattell’s approach to personality was
rigorously scientific, relying on observations of behavior and
masses of data.
• Factor Analysis: A statistical technique based on correlations
between several measures, which may be explained in terms

Predicting of underlying factors. If the two measures showed a high

correlation with one another, Cattell concluded that they
measured similar or related aspects of personality. For

Behavior example, if the anxiety and introversion scales of a

personality test yielded a high correlation coefficient, we
could conclude that both scales were measuring the same
personality characteristic. Thus, two sets of data about a
person are combined to form a single dimension, or factor.
• Personality Traits: Cattell referred to these factors as traits,
which he defined as the mental elements of the personality.
Only when we know someone’s traits can we predict how that
person will behave in a given situation.
Cattell’s approach to theory building was to
begin with empirical observation and description
and, on this basis, to generate a tentative rough

Scientific
hypothesis.

Approach
From this hypothesis is derived an experiment
for testing it empirically.

The resulting observations, or experimental

data, are used to generate a more precise
hypothesis, from which the investigator deduces
a new experiment to test it.

New data are collected, and the process begins

again.

Cattell called this process the inductive-

hypothetico-deductive spiral
Personalit
y Traits Cattell defined traits as
relatively permanent reaction
tendencies that are the basic
structural units of the
personality

Cattell distinguishes between

surface and source traits;
constitutional and
environmental-mold traits;
ability, temperament, and
dynamic traits
Source
Traits
• After more than two decades
of intensive factor-analytic
research, Cattell (1965)
identified 16 source traits as
the basic factors of
personality.
• These factors are best known
in the form in which they are
most often used, in an
objective personality test
called the Sixteen Personality
Factor (16 PF) Questionnaire
Dynamic traits are of three kinds – attitudes,
ergs and sentiments

Personalit
Ergs - biologically based drives
y Traits
The self is one of the
Sentiments focus on a sentiments, it is linked to
the expression of most or
social object all the ergs or other
sentiments

Attitudes are dynamic surface traits,

specific manifestations or combinations of
underlying motives

The interrelationship among these is

dynamic lattice
Development of personality –
• The Role of Heredity and Environment
– The results of his analyses showed that for some traits, heredity plays a major role.
– For example, Cattell’s data suggest that 80 percent of intelligence (Factor B) and 80 percent of timidity versus
boldness (Factor H) can be accounted for by genetic factors.
– Cattell concluded that overall, one-third of our personality is genetically based, and two-thirds is determined
by social and environmental influences.
• The Role of Learning - classical conditioning, instrumental conditioning (reward learning), and integration
learning
– Integration learning - It appears to be a form of cognitive and instrumental learning in which the
developing person uses ego and superego processes to maximize long-term satisfactions. The person learns
to seek realistic satisfactions
– Confluence learning - that is, the acquisition of behaviors and attitudes that simultaneously contribute to
the satisfaction of two or more different goals

Motivating Forces
 Assessme
•
nt
Information gathered from Personal Interviews by Cattell resulted in
three sources of information :
– L- Data : One’s life record, as seen through significant others.
– Q- Data : Self-reports from the presenting client
– T - Data : Data from testing measures, thought to be objective

• The 16 PF (Personality Factor) Test

– based on the 16 major source traits.
– The test is intended for use with people 16 years of age and
older and yields scores on each of the 16 scales.
– The responses are scored objectively; computerized scoring
and interpretation are available.
– The 16 PF Test is widely used to assess personality for
research, clinical diagnosis, and predicting success on a job.
– It has been translated into some 40 languages
– Consider a sample 16 PF Test profile for a hypothetical airline
pilot (see Figure 8.1). By reading the high and low points of the
plot of test scores, we can see that this person is emotionally
stable, conscientious, adventurous, tough-minded, practical,
self-assured, controlled, and relaxed. The pilot is not tense,
apprehensive, or timid
Criticism
• At several stages in the research process, decisions are
required that may be influenced by personal
preferences
• Once the factors, or traits, have been identified, the
researcher labels them. If these names are ambiguous
in any way, they may not accurately express the nature
of the factors.
• This criticism does not suggest inherent weaknesses in
Cattell’s theory but that there is potential for subjective
error in the factor-analytic approach
THAT’S ALL, FOLKS!