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Personality Development: Alternative Views
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Defining Personality
o Personality—the collection of relatively enduring patterns of reacting to and interacting
with others and the environment that distinguishes each child or adult
o Dimensions—clusters of characteristics—how many are there?
o One principle is that infant temperament makes a sizeable contribution to later
personality
o The second principle Is that five basic dimensions emerge as the core of individual’s
personality during early and middle childhood and they ways in which these dimensions
are manifested in an individual’s life are fairly stable across adolescence and adulthood
o Temperament
 Three Views of Temperament
 Stella Chess and Alexander Thomas
 Proposed three temperament types—difficult, easy, and slow-to-warmup—that reflected profiles on nine different dimensions
 Arnold Buss and Robert Plomin originally proposed only three key
dimensions: activity level, emotionality (primarily negative
emotionality), and sociability
 Jerome Kagan who has focused on only a single dimension, which he
calls behavioral inhibition—an aspect of what most people call
“shyness”
 An Emerging Consensus
 Researchers have come to favor the dimensions approach proposed by
Buss, Plomin, and Kagan
 Many theorists are now emphasizing the following five key dimensions
of temperament
o Activity level—a tendency to move often and vigorously, rather
than to remain passive or immobile
o Approach/positive emotionality—a tendency to move toward
rather than away from new people, situations, or objects
o Inhibition and anxiety—the flip side of approach is the tendency
to respond with fear or to withdraw from new people,
situations, or objects
o Negative emotionality/irritability/anger
o Effortful control/ task persistence—an ability to stay focused
 Temperament across Cultures
 Chinese and Native American infants were less active than Caucasian
American or Japanese babies
 Chinese infants are significantly less active, less irritable, and less vocal
than Irish or Caucasian Americans

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Native American babies are less irritable, less excitable, and more able
to quiet themselves than Caucasian American babies
These results cannot be the result of systematic shaping by the parents
But the parents bring their temperaments as well as their cultural
training to interactions with their newborns
The distinction between temperament and personality is like the
difference between a genotype and a phenotype
o The genotype sets the basic pattern, but the eventual outcome
depends on the way the basic pattern is affected by specific
experiences

The Big Five
 The five primary dimensions of adult personality identified by researchers:
extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and
openness/intellect
 Extraversion—a person who scores high on this trait is characterized by
assertiveness, energy, enthusiasm, and outgoingness
 Agreeableness—a person who scores high on this trait is characterized by trust,
generosity, kindness, and sympathy
 Openness/intellect—a person who scores high on this trait is characterized by
curiosity, imagination, insight, originality, and wide interests
 Conscientiousness—a person who scores high on this trait is characterized by
efficiency, organization, planfulness, and reliability
 Neuroticism—a person who scores high on this trait is characterized by anxiety,
self-pity, tenseness, and emotional instability
 There is good evidence that the Big Five are stable traits
 Provide a useful description of personality structure in late childhood and
adolescence as well as adulthood
 Researchers may need more than five dimensions to describe children’s
personality
Genetic and Biological Explanations of Personality
o Proposition 1: each individual is born with genetically determined characteristic
patterns of responding to the environment and to other people
 Assumption that temperament is inborn
 Strong evidence to support this assertion
 Identical twins are much more alike in their temperament than fraternal twins
o Proposition 2: genetic differences operate via variations in fundamental physiological
processes
 Basic differences in behavior are because of psychological patterns
 Kagan has suggested that differences in behavioral inhibition are based on
differing thresholds for arousal in those parts of the brain—the amygdala and
the hypothalamus

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Proposition 3: Temperamental dispositions persist through childhood and into
adulthood
 If temperamental patterns create a bias toward particular behaviors,
temperament ought to exhibit at least some stability over time
o Proposition 4: Temperamental characteristics interact with the child’s environment in
ways that may either strengthen or modify the basic temperamental pattern
 We all choose our experiences
 Temperament may affect the way a child interprets a given experience
 Tendency of parents to respond differently to children with different
temperaments
o Critique of Biological Theories
 The biological approach is strongly supported by a large body of empirical
research
 This approach is not purely biological—good
 Lack of agreement on the basic dimensions of temperament
 Many biological oriented temperament theories have not been fundamentally
developmental theories
 They do not address the question of whether there are systematic age
differences in children’s responses to new situations or people
 They do not focus on whether the child’s emergnin cognitive skills have
anything to do with changes in the child’s temperamental patterns
 They do not address how the shared developmental patterns may
interacted with inborn individual differences
Learning Explanations of Personality
o The Learning Argument
 Radical behaviorists—argue that only the basic principles of classical and
operant conditioning are need to account for variations in behavior, including
personality
 Proposition 1: behavior is strengthened by reinforcement
 Proposition 2: Behavior that is reinforced on a partial schedule should be even
stronger and more resistant to extinction than behavior that is consistently
reinforced
 Proposition 3: Children learn new behaviors largely through modeling—
Bandura
 Proposition 4: From reinforcement and modeling, children learn not only overt
behavior but also ideas, expectations, internal standards, and self-concepts
 Self-efficacy—Bandura’s term for an individual’s belief in his or her
ability to accomplish tasks
o Critique of Learning Models
 Learning theories can explain either consistency or inconsistency in children’s
behavior

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Learning theorists are supremely optimistic about the possibility of change
 Children’s behavior can change if the reinforcement system changes
 It gives an accurate picture of the way in which many specific behaviors are
learned
 Children do learn through modeling
 Children will continue to perform behaviors that “pay off” for them
 Reciprocal determinism—Bandura’s model in which personal, behavioral, and
environmental factors interact to influence personality development
 These theories place too much emphasis on what happens to the child and not
enough on what the child is doing with the information she has
 Learning theories are not really developmental
 They can say how a child might acquire a particular behavior pattern or
belief, but they do not take into account the underlying development
changes that are occurring
Psychoanalytic Explanations of Personality
o The Psychoanalytic Argument
 Proposition 1: behavior is governed by unconscious as well as conscious
motives and processes—Freud
 The sexual drive—libido
 Life-preserving drives—avoidance of hunger and pain
 Aggressive drives
 Proposition 2: Personality structure develops over time, as a result of the
interaction between the child’s inborn drives and needs and the responses of
the key people in the child’s world
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Some shame and doubt is needed for the child to understand which
behaviors are acceptable and which are not
 Initiative Versus Guilt: 4 to 5 years
 The child tries out new cognitive skills and attempts to conquer the
world around him
 It is a time of vigorous action and of behaviors that parents may see as
too aggressive
o The risk is that the child may go too far in his forcefulness or
that the parents may restrict and punish him too much
 Some guilt is needed or the child would develop no conscience and no
self-control
 Industry (Competence) Versus Inferiority: 6 to 12 years
 The child is now faced with the need to win approval by developing
specific competences—learning to read, to do math, and to succeed at
other school skills
 The task of this period is to develop the repertoire of abilities society
demands of the child
 If the child does not develop these skills, she will develop a sense of
inferiority
 Identity Versus Role Confusion: 13 to 18 years
 The adolescent examines his identity and the roles he mush occupy
 Erikson suggested that two “identities” are involved—a sexual identity
and an occupational identity
Evidence and Applications
 Empirical explorations of Freud’s and Erikson’s theories are relatively rare
because both theories are so general that specific tests are very difficult to
perform
 Many 4-year-olds show more affectionate behavior toward the opposite-sex
parent and more aggressive or antagonistic behavior toward the same-sex
parent
 Research has shown that that the quality of the child’s earliest relationship
affects the whole course of her later development
Critique of Psychoanalytic Theories
 They provide us with a better account of the complexities of personality
development than other perspectives
 Psychoanalytic theories focus on the importance of the emotional quality of the
child’s relationship with caregivers
 These theories suggest that the child’s needs or tasks change with age



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