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Unit
IV
Lecture
Chapters #10-Personality
Chapter #11-Social
Psychology
Personality
Chapter #10
An individual’s unique and relatively
consistent patterns of thinking, feeling,
and behaving.
Are you more like your mother or father?
Personality Perspectives
 Psychoanalytic—importance of unconscious
processes and childhood experiences
 Humanistic—importance of self and fulfillment of
potential
 Social cognitive—importance of beliefs about self
 Trait—description and measurement of personality
differences
Psychoanalytic Approach
 Developed by Sigmund Freud
 Psychoanalysis is both an approach to
therapy and a theory of personality
 Emphasizes unconscious motivation –
the main causes of behavior lie buried
in the unconscious mind
Psychoanalytic
Divisions of the Mind
 Id—instinctual drives present at birth
 does not distinguish between reality and fantasy
 operates according to the pleasure principle
 Ego—develops out of the id in infancy
 understands reality and logic
 mediator between id and superego
 Superego
 internalization of society’s moral standards
 responsible for guilt
Id: The Pleasure Principle
 Pleasure principle—drive toward immediate
gratification, most fundamental human motive
 Sources of energy
 Eros—life instinct, perpetuates life
 Thanatos—death instinct, aggression, self-
destructive actions
 Libido—sexual energy or motivation
Defense Mechanisms
 Projection—reducing anxiety by
attributing unacceptable impulses to
someone else
 Rationalization—reasoning away
anxiety-producing thoughts
 Regression—retreating to a mode of
behavior characteristic of an earlier
stage of development
Psychosexual Stages
Freud’s five stages of
personality development,
each associated with a
particular erogenous zone
Oral Stage (birth – 1 year)
Mouth is associated with sexual
pleasure
Weaning a child can lead to
fixation if not handled correctly
Fixation can lead to oral activities
in adulthood
Anal Stage (1 – 3 years)
Anus is associated with pleasure
Toilet training can lead to fixation
if not handled correctly
Fixation can lead to anal retentive
or expulsive behaviors in
adulthood
Phallic Stage (3 – 5 years)
 Focus of pleasure shifts to the genitals
 Oedipus or Electra complex can occur
 Fixation can lead to excessive
masculinity in males and the need for
attention or domination in females
Latency Stage (5 – puberty)
Sexuality is repressed
Children participate in hobbies,
school, and same-sex friendships
Genital Stage (puberty on)
Sexual feelings re-emerge and are
oriented toward others
Healthy adults find pleasure in love
and work, fixated adults have their
energy tied up in earlier stages
Fixation
—an attempt to achieve
pleasure as an adult in ways that
are equivalent to how it was
achieved in these stages
Five Factor Model
 Described somewhat differently among researchers
 Factors—usually rated from low to high
 Extraversion
 Neuroticism
 Openness to Experience
 Agreeableness
 Conscientiousness
Personality Assessment
Projective Techniques
 Interpretation of an ambiguous image
 Used to determine unconscious motives, conflicts, and
psychological traits
Rorschach Inkblot Test
 Presentation and interpretation of a series
of black and white and colored inkblots
 Numerous scoring systems exist
Thematic Apperception Test
 Series of pictures depicting
ambiguous scenes
 Subject is asked to create a
story about
the scene
 Answers are scored based on
themes, motives, and anxieties
of main character
Drawbacks to Projective Tests
 Examiner or test situation may influence individual’s
response
 Scoring is highly subjective
 Tests fail to produce consistent results (reliability
problem)
 Tests are poor predictors of future behavior (validity
problem)
Self-Report Inventory
 Psychological test in which an individual answers
standardized questions about their behavior and
feelings
 The answers are then compared to established
norms
MMPI
 Most widely used self-
report inventory
 Originally designed to
assess mental health
and detect
psychological
symptoms
 Has over 500 questions
to which person must
reply “True” or “False”
 Includes “lying scales”
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
Sample questions:
I work under a great deal of
tension
I have diarrhea once a month
or more
Once in a while I think of
things too bad to talk about
I am sure I get a raw deal
from life
My father was a good man
I am very seldom troubled by
constipation
Evil spirits possess me at
times
My sex life is satisfactory
Social Psychology
Chapter #11
The branch of psychology that
studies how people think, feel, and
behave in social situations
Social Cognition
The mental processes that people use to make sense
out of their social environment
 Person perception
 Social categorization
 Implicit personality theory
 Attribution
 Attitudes
 Stereotypes
Person Perception
 Your reactions are determined by your perceptions
of others
 Your goals determine the amount and kind of
information you collect
 You evaluate people partly in terms of how you
expect them to behave (social norms)
 Your self-perception influences how you perceive
others
Physical Attractiveness
 Implicit cultural message is “beautiful is good”
 Attractive people are perceived as more
intelligent, happier, and better adjusted.
 Do you believe they are?
 Really no difference between attractive and less
attractive people on these characteristics
 Attractive people are more likely to attribute other
people’s approval of their accomplishments to
looks rather than effort or talent.
Using Attitudes as Ways
to “Justify” Injustice
 Just-world bias
 a tendency to believe that life is fair, e.g., it would
seem horrible to think that you can be a really good
person and bad things could happen to you anyway
 Just-world bias leads to “blaming the victim”
 we explain others’ misfortunes as being their fault,
 e.g., she deserved to be raped, what was she doing
in that neighborhood anyway?
Attitudes
What is an attitude?
 predisposition to evaluate some people, groups, or issues
in a particular way
 can be negative or positive
 Has three components



Cognitive—thoughts about given topic or situation
Affective—feelings or emotions about topic
Behavioral—your actions regarding the topic or situation
Cognitive Dissonance
 Unpleasant state of psychological tension or arousal
that occurs when two thoughts or perceptions are
inconsistent
 What is your “cognitive dissonance”?
 Attitudes and behaviors are in conflict
 it is uncomfortable for us
 we seek ways to decrease discomfort caused by the
inconsistency
A negative attitude toward
people who belong to a
specific social group
Stereotypes
What is a stereotype?
 A cluster of characteristics associated with all members
of a specific group of people
 a belief held by members of one group about members
of another group
1. Name some stereotypes of white people.-race
2. Name some stereotypes of Japanese people.-culture
3. Name some stereotypes of women.-gender
4. Name some stereotypes of rich people.-economic
Social Influence
• How behavior is influenced by the social environment
and the presence of other people
Conformity
 Obedience
 Helping Behaviors

Conformity
 Adopting attitudes or behaviors of others because of
pressure to do so; the pressure can be real or
imagined
 2 general reasons for conformity
 Informational social influence—other people can
provide useful and crucial information
 Normative social influence—desire to be accepted
as part of a group leads to that group having an
influence
Obedience
 Obedience
 compliance of person
is due to perceived
authority of asker
 request is perceived as
a command
 Milgram interested in
unquestioning
obedience to orders
Milgram video
Stanley Milgram’s Studies
Basic study procedure
 teacher and learner
(learner always
confederate)
 watch learner being
strapped into chair
 learner expresses concern
over his “heart condition”
Stanley Milgram’s Studies
 Teacher goes to another room with
experimenter
 Shock generator panel – 15 to 450
volts, labels “slight shock” to “XXX”
 Asked to give higher shocks for every
mistake learner makes
Stanley Milgram’s Studies
 Learner protests more
and more as shock
increases
 Experimenter continues
to request obedience
even if teacher balks
Obedience
• How many people would go to the
highest shock level?
• 65% of the subjects went to the
end, even those that protested,
over 450 volts!!! Does this relate
to the Nazi movement and
holocaust?
Obedience
Percentage
of subjects
who obeyed
experimenter
100
90
80
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
The majority of
subjects continued
to obey to the end
Moderate
Very
Extreme
XXX
Slight (75-120) Strong
strong Intense intensity Danger (435-450)
(15-60)
(135-180) (195-240) (255-300) (315-360) severe
(375-420)
Shock levels in volts
Why Don’t People Always
Help Others in Need?
Diffusion of responsibility
 presence of others leads to decreased
help response
 we all think someone else will help,
so we don’t
Individual and Groups
 Social Loafing—tendency to expend less effort on a
task when it is a group effort
 Reduced when
 Group is composed of people we know
 We are members of a highly valued group
 Task is meaningful
 Not as common in collectivist cultures
Influence of Others’ Requests
—Compliance
Sales techniques and cognitive
dissonance
 four-walls technique


question customer in such a way that gets
answers consistent with the idea that they
need to own object
feeling of cognitive dissonance results if person
chooses not to buy this thing that they “need”
Sales Techniques and
Cognitive Dissonance
Foot-in-the-door technique
 ask for something small at first, then hit customer with
larger request later
 small request has paved the way to compliance with the
larger request
 cognitive dissonance results if person has already
granted a request for one thing, then refuses to give the
larger item
The Reciprocity Norm
and Compliance
We feel obliged to return favors, even
those we did not want in the first place
 opposite of foot-in-the-door
 salesperson gives something to customer with idea that
they will feel compelled to give something back (buying
the product)
 even if person did not wish for favor in the first place
Defense against Persuasion
Techniques
 Sleep on it—don’t act on something right
away
 Play devil’s advocate—think of all the
reasons you shouldn’t buy the product or
comply with the request
 Pay attention to your gut feelings—if you
feel pressured, you probably are