Name: 心理學速成班 #22（Measuring Personality: Crash Course Psychology #22）
Uploaded: 2022-02-18T06:54:11.000Z
Duration: 11 min 8 s
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What about nervous, or timid, or outgoing?

But has anyone ever called you a sanguine?

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,

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 was winning the battle

of urges between the Id, Ego, and Superego.

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've got your BuzzFeed quizzes to determine what kind of pirate, or font,

or sandwich, or Harry Potter character you are, but, that, I would never take one of

All this is to say that people have been characterizing one another for a long, long time, and whether

you're into blood, or bile, or ego, or id, or BLT, or PB&J, there are a lot of ways to

And all these theories, all the years of research, and cigar smoking, and inkblot gazing, and

the fans debating whether they're more of a Luke or a Leia, they're all funneling down

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 question their lack of clearly measurable standards.

Like, there was no way to really quantify someone's inkblot response, or how orally

So this drive to find a more empirical approach spawned two more popular theories in the twentieth

century, known as the trait and social cognitive perspectives.

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

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

Allport wondered if the boy's mother had a kind of dirt phobia that had rubbed off on

So yadda yadda yadda, he's telling his tale, and at the end of it Freud looks at him and

Allport 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 Allport started his own club, describing personality in terms of fundamental traits,

or characteristic behaviors and conscious motives.

He wasn't so much interested in explaining traits as he was in describing them.

Modern trait researchers like Robert McCrae and Paul Costa have since organized our fundamental

characteristics into what's casually known as The Big Five: openness, conscientiousness,

extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism, which you can remember using the mnemonic

OCEAN, or CANOE, whichever one you prefer.

Each of these traits exist on a spectrum, so, for example, your level of openness can

range, on one end, from being totally open to new things and variety, or wanting strict,

Your degree of conscientiousness can translate into being impulsive and careless, or careful

Someone high on the extroversion end will be sociable, while those on the low end will

A very agreeable person, meanwhile, is helpful and trusting, while someone at the opposite

And finally, on the neuroticism spectrum, an emotionally stable person will be 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 e-mail more than an extrovert, and

an agreeable person is much more likely to help their neighbor move that couch than a

suspicious one who's just glaring through the window.

By adulthood, trait theorists will tell you these characteristics are pretty stable, but

it 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

So our personality traits are better at predicting our average behavior that what we'd 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,

Originally proposed by our Bobo-beating friend Alfred Bandura, the social cognitive school

emphasizes the interaction between our traits and their social context.

Bandura noted that we learn a lot of our behavior by watching and imitating others.

But we also think a lot about how these social interactions affect our behavior, which is

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

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

But the more she sees the world in that way, the more anxious and suspicious she gets.