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Chapter 1 Introduction to Personality Psychology 14

1.3 DEFINITIONS OF PERSONALITY

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How should we define what falls under the rubric of personality psychology? Personality theories came from different sources, but most (not all) have com mon assumptions. Most approaches to personality description and explanation contain the idea of an entity within the person that is agentic . Trait psychol ogy took up the challenge of defining and measuring these internal factors (see Chapter 5). To get a con ceptual and empirical grip on personality, it seems especially appropriate to define it as, ‘what a person will do when faced with a defined situation’ (Cattell, 1979, p. 14). That is, traits can be seen to predict re sponses to situational stimuli in certain ways (e.g. a shy person will respond to a busy social situation with behavioural avoidance). In contrast to the trait approach, behaviourally inspired definitions are much less impressed with the need to postulate complex the ories which, so often, are without strong supporting empirical evidence, especially as many of the elements of such theories can neither be directly observed nor easily measured. Indeed, in its most radical form, be haviourism avoided all concepts that could not be directly observed and measured (Skinner, 1950) and simply assumed that behaviours, however consistently shown, are merely habits formed by prior experiences. To the behaviourist, there was really nothing else to know, scientifically speaking. However, as we will see when we discuss behaviourism in Chapter 3, advocates failed to provide a coherent account of personality and just invited the reader to accept that personality de veloped from experiences (to get a sense of this style of reasoning, read B. F. Skinner’s 1974 book, About Behaviourism ). Later behaviourally inspired accounts, though, started to include internal notions of expecta tions and other forms of cognitions (e.g. perception, knowledge, interpretations, and attributions) (e.g. Bandura, 1986), reflecting the ‘cognitive revolution’ that thundered through academic psychology but left a lighter imprint on the general public’s understanding of psychology. Before we review the contemporary views on personality, let us return to the past, in an cient Greek history, to see on whose ‘shoulders’

contemporary thinkers were standing while trying to define personality.

1.3.1 ANCIENT GREEK THEORIES OF HUMOURS AND TEMPERAMENT

Various attempts by Ancient Greek philosophers and physicians were made to characterize personality— usually referred to as temperament. For example, Theophrastus in his Characters written in the fourth century bce (Rusten, Cunningham, & Knox, 1993; Diggle, 2004). He said: Often before now have I applied my thoughts to the puzzling question—one, probably, which will puz zle me for ever—why it is that, while all Greece lies under the same sky and all the Greeks are educated alike, it has befallen us to have characters so variously constituted. Theophrastus, who worked with Aristotle, described many characters that we can easily recognize today: The Reckless, The Gossip, The Shameless Man, etc. to name a few. The first known attempt to devise a theory of per sonality is found in the cosmological writings of the Greek philosopher and physiologist Empedocles, who lived some 500 years bc. His views were related to the other famous Greek physician, Hippocrates, who lived around the same time. Empedocles’ theory contains cosmic elements related to health:

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• Air—warm and moist. • Earth—cold and dry. • Fire—warm and dry. • Water—cold and moist.

Writing in 370 bce, these cosmic elements were re lated by Hippocrates to four physical humours (i.e. bodily fluids) which, in turn, were related to tempera ment differences between people (Eysenck & Eysenck, 1985; Lecci & Magnavita, 2013). Centuries later,

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