how would you describe your personality may be friendly creative quirky what about nervous or timid or outgoing but has anyone ever called you a sanguine what about a cava or full of metal ancient Greek physician Hippocrates believed personality manifested itself in four different humors and basically you are who you are because of your balance of phlegm blood and yellow and black bile according to traditional Chinese medicine our personalities depend on the balance of five elements earth wind water metal and fire those who practice traditional Hindu Ayurvedic medicine view each other as unique combinations of three
different mind-body principles called doshas but Sigmund Freud thought our personalities depended in part on who's winning the battle of urges between the Ede ego and super-ego meanwhile humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow suggested that the key to self-actualization was first successfully climbing a hierarchy of more basic needs and then you got your BuzzFeed quizzes to determine what kind of pirate der font or sandwich or Harry Potter character you are but I would never take one of those seriously all this is to say the people have been characterizing one another for a long long time and whether you're
into blood or bile or ego or it or blt or PB&J there are a lot of ways to describe and measure a personality and all these theories all the years of research and cigar-smoking an inkblot gazing in the fans debating whether they're more of a Luke or Leia they're all funneling down the one big central question who or what is the self last week we talked about how psychologists often study personality by examining the differences between characteristics and by looking at how these various characteristics combine to create a whole thinking feeling person the early psychoanalytic
and humanistic theorists had a lot of ideas about personality but some psychologists questioned their lack of clearly measurable standards like there was no way to really quantify someone's inkblot response or how orally fixated they might be so this drive to find a more empirical approach spawned two more popular theories in the 20th century known as the trait and social cognitive perspective instead of focusing on things like lingering unconscious influences or missed growth opportunities trait theory researchers look to define personality through stable and lasting behavior patterns and conscious motivations legend has it that it all began
in 1919 when young American psychologist Gordon Allport paid a visit to none other than Freud himself Allport was telling Freud about his journey there on the train and how there was this little boy who was obsessed with staying clean and didn't want to sit next to anyone or touch anything Albert wondered if the boy's mother had a kind of dirt phobia that had rubbed off on him so yeah yeah yeah he's telling his tale and at the end of it Freud looks at him and says hmm was that little boy you all port was basically
like no man that was just some kid on the train don't try to make this into some big unconscious episode from my repressed childhood Allport thought Freud was digging a little too deep and that sometimes you just need to look at motives in the present not the past to describe behavior so all-ports started his own Club describing personality in terms of fundamental traits or characteristics and conscious motives it wasn't so much interested in explaining traits as he was in describing them modern trait researchers like Robert McRae and Paul Costa have since organized our fundamental characteristics
into what's casually known as the big five openness conscientiousness extraversion agreeableness and neuroticism which you can remember using the mnemonic ocean or canoe whichever one you prefer each of these traits exists on a spectrum so for example your level of openness can range on one end from being totally open to new things in variety or one thing strict regular routine on the other end your degree of conscientiousness can translate into being impulsive and care lists are careful and disciplined someone high on the extraversion in will be sociable while those on the low end will be
shy and reserved a very agreeable person meanwhile is helpful and trusting while someone at the opposite end may be suspicious or uncooperative and finally on the neuroticism spectrum an emotionally stable person will be more calm and secure while a less stable person is often anxious insecure and self-pitying the important idea here is that these traits are hypothesized to predict behavior and attitude like an introvert might prefer communicating through email more than an extroverted and agreeable person is much more likely to help their neighbor move that couch then a suspicious one who's just glaring through the
window my adulthood trait theorists will tell you these characteristics are pretty stable but isn't to say that they can't flex a little in different situations like that same shy person might end up singing Elvis karaoke in a room full of people under the right conditions so our personality traits are better predicting our average behavior than what we do in any specific situation and research indicates that some traits like neuroticism seem to be better predictors of behavior than others this flexibility that we all seem to have leads to the fourth major theory on personality the social
cognitive perspective originally proposed by our Bovo beading friend alfred bandura the social cognitive school emphasizes the interaction between our traits and their social context ventura noted that we learn a lot of our behavior by watching and imitating others that's the social part of the equation but we also think a lot about how these social interactions affect our behavior which is the cognitive part so in this way people and their situations basically work together to create behavior bandura referred to this sort of interplay as reciprocal determinism meaning that for example the kind of books you read
or music you listen to or friends you hang out with say something about your personality because different people choose to be in different environments and then those environments in turn continue to reinforce our personalities so if Bernice has a kind of anxious suspicious personality and she has a serious Titanic crush on Sherlock Holmes she might be extra attuned to potentially dangerous or fishy situations the more she sees the world in that way the more anxious and suspicious she gets in this way we're both the creators and the products of the situation's we surround ourselves with
that's why one of the key indicators of personality in this school of thought has to do with our sense of personal control that is the extent to which you perceive that you have control over your environment someone who believes that they control their own fate or make their own luck is said to have an internal locus of control while those who feel like they're just guided by forces beyond their control are said to have an external locus now whether we're talking about control versus helplessness introversion versus extraversion calm versus anxious or whatever each of these
different personality perspectives have their own methods of testing and measuring personality we talked before about how the psychoanalyst super hunk Hermann Rorschach used his ink blot test to infer information about a person's personality we know that Freud used dream analysis and both he and Young were fans of free association the broader school of theorists now known as the psychodynamic camp that descended from Freud and pals also use other projective psychological tests including the famous Thematic Apperception tests in this kind of test you'd be presented with evocative but ambiguous pictures and then asked to provide information
about them you might be asked to tell a story about the scenes considering things like how are the characters feeling or what's going on or what happened before this event and what will happen after like check it out is the woman crying because her brother just died from a bee sting or is she a maid laughing because some royal just passed out drunk in his bed or perhaps the object of her long burning affection has just confessed his love and a fever hazel jane austen style and she's having a mini breakdown in the hall the
idea is that your responses will reveal something about your concerns and motivations in real life or how you see the world or about your unconscious processes that drive you by contrast with that approach though modern trait personality researchers believe that you can assess personality traits by having people answer a series of test questions there are lots of so called personality trait inventories out there some provide a quick reading on a particular enduring trait like anxiety or self-esteem while others gauge a wide range of traits like our friends the Big Five these tests like the myers-briggs
which you might have heard of involve long questionnaires of true false or agree/disagree questions like do you enjoy being the center of attention do you find it easy to empathize with others or do you value justice over mercy but the classic Minnesota multiphasic personality inventory is probably the most widely used personality test the most recent version asks a series of five in 67 true/false questions varying from no one seems to understand me too I like mechanics magazines too I loved my father and is often used to identify emotional disorders and there's how bandura's social cognitive
camp sizes you up because this school of thought emphasizes the interaction of environment and behavior rather than just traits alone they aren't solely into questions and answers instead they might measure personality in different contexts understanding behavior in one situation is best predicted by how you acted in a similar situation like if Bernice freaked out and tried to hide under the bed during the last five thunderstorms we can predict the chip will do that again next time and if we conducted a controlled lab experiment where say we looked at the effects of thunderstorm noises on people's
behavior we might get an even better sense of what baseline psychological factors could best predict storm induced freak-outs and finally there are the humanistic theorists like Maslow they often reject standardized assessments altogether instead they tend to measure your self-concept through therapy interviews and questionnaires that asked subjects to describe both how they would ideally like to be and how they actually are the idea is that the closer the actual and ideal are the more positive the subjects sense of self which brings us back to that biggest motherlode question of them all who or what is the
self all the books out there about self esteem self-help self awareness self control and so on are built upon one assumption that the self is the organizer of our thoughts and feelings and actions essentially the center of a personality but of course it's a sticky issue one way to think about self is through the concept of possible selves like your ideal self perhaps devastatingly attractive and intelligent successful and well loved as well as your most feared self the one who could end up unemployed and lonely and run down this balance of potential best and worst
selves motivates us through life. In the end, once you factor in environment and childhood experiences, culture, and all that mess, not to mention biology, which we haven't even touched on today, can we really firmly define self or answer certainly that we even have one? That, my friend, is one of life's biggest questions, insofar as it has yet to be universally answered. But you learned a lot, anyway, today, right? As we've talked about the trait and social cognitive perspectives and also about different ways these schools and others measure and test personality we also talked about what
self is and how our self-esteem works thanks for watching especially to our subbable subscribers who make crash course possible to find out how you can become a supporter just go to subbable.com/crashcourse this episode was written by Kathleen Yale edited by Blake de pastino and our consultant is dr. Ranjit Bhagwat our director and editor is Nicholas Jenkins and the script supervisor is Michael Aranda who is also our sound designer and the graphics team is thought cafe you
