Personality

1
Personality

• Overview of the Day
• Personality
• Traditional approaches
• EP questions of traditional approaches
• EP and personality

2
Personality

• Relatively stable constellations of behaviors and
  attitudes that reflect how
• a person responds to social (and other) stimuli
• a person thinks about himself or herself
• how other people regard the person

3
Traditional Approaches to Personality in
Psychology

• Dysfunctional personality and how to help people
  deal with their troublesome personalities (Freud
  and others)
• The actualized, well-functioning personality and
  how it serves as a model for the rest of us
  (Maslow and others)
• Individual differences identifying classifying
  thousands of personality traits and showing how
  high (or low) levels on some traits relate life
  success (Cattell and many applied psychologists)

4
Evolutionary Questions about Traditional
Approaches to Personality

• Why is there so much variability in personality
  traits?
• Why has the variability persisted? (When a
  characteristic is adaptive and heritable,
  variation on that trait becomes very small)
• If some traits (or levels of some traits) are
  better than others, why do the others persist?
• Why are possible functions of personality?

5
Personality Traits as Genetic Noise

• Personality traits are random noise
• Not adaptive (that is, not related to survival
  and reproduction)
• An analogy Like color on wires in car
  arbitrary and unrelated to how well the car
  functions

6
Niche Picking and Specialization

• Individual differences are adaptively patterned
  but not generally heritable
• They are a species-typical mechanisms for niche
  specialization
• For example, people with aggressive personalities
  will survive and reproduce in hostile
  environments.

7
Frequency Dependency

• Differential occurrence as a function of the
  frequency of other traits
• bluegill sunfish male personality traits
  (parental, sneak, mimic)
• Mealeys theory of psychopathy
• small numbers of psychopaths can be maintained in
  large populations of cooperators

8
Facultative Adaptations

• Highly variable environments lead to traits that
  manifest themselves differently depending on
  differential environmental exposure
• Belsky-Draper theory of the effects of
  father-presence and father-absence on daughters
  personality

9
The Functional Value of Traits may Not Always be
Obvious

• Traits may serve different functions. Useful
  functions in one context may not be useful in
  another.
• Examples
• Emotional instability is positively related to
  kin altruism. (People who are not much
  distressed by others suffering are less likely
  to assist them).
• Emotional instability discourages behaviors that
  are dangerously bold

10
Assessing Personality

• How important is it that we accurately assess our
  own and others personalities?
• Individuals who can accurately assess others as
  resources and threats are more likely to survive
  and reproduce
• universal tendency to attribute personality
  characteristics to others
• nature of personality descriptions (evaluative)

11
Reactive Heritability

• The ability to assess ones own abilities and
  traits and those of others. This is adaptive,
  although the traits are not.

12
Sex Difference in Personality Traits

• The importance of the Big Five
• OCEAN
• Sex differences
• aggression, nurturance, emotional stability

13
Personality inTosca

• Describe the personalities of Maurizia, Ezio, and
  Leonardo.
• How important were their personalities to the
  course of their lives?
• What do you think caused their personalities?
• Would you like any of them as a friend? Why or
  why not?

14
Summary

• Personality
• Traditional approaches
• EP questions of traditional approaches
• EP and personality

15
For Next Time

• Cognition and Intelligence Buss, pp. 374-384.
  12 G M 179-192 Allende, If You Touched My
  Heart