Personality and Social Psychology — the Five-Factor Model, the Person–Situation Debate, Attitudes and Persuasion, Prejudice and Contact, and the Replication Crisis

How do we describe personality? Trait theory

The lexical hypothesis and the five-factor model

Following the lexical hypothesis — “personality differences that matter to people are preserved as words in language” — researchers gathered thousands of personality adjectives from dictionaries and factor-analysed them. The five dimensions that emerged repeatedly across cultures and languages are the five-factor model (the Big Five) (Goldberg, 1990; McCrae & Costa, 1987).

Factor	High end	Low end
Openness	Curious, imaginative, drawn to new experiences	Prefers the familiar, practical
Conscientiousness	Planful, thorough, self-disciplined	Spontaneous, easy-going
Extraversion	Sociable, active, positive emotions	Quiet, prefers time alone
Agreeableness	Cooperative, trusting, empathetic	Competitive, sceptical
Neuroticism	Anxious, worried, emotionally changeable	Emotionally stable

Ashton and Lee (2007) proposed the HEXACO model, adding Honesty-Humility: a tendency to act fairly and not exploit others, which sits opposite the Dark Triad discussed elsewhere.

How much does personality matter?

Roberts et al. (2007) showed that personality traits predict longevity, divorce and occupational attainment about as well as socioeconomic status or cognitive ability. A meta-analysis of twin studies put the heritability of personality traits at about 40% (Vukasović & Bratko, 2015).

The limits of typologies

Typologies such as the MBTI, which sort people into 16 types, are easy to grasp, but most personality traits form continuous distributions with most people in the middle rather than at the extremes. As a result, people near the boundaries often get a different type on retesting (Pittenger, 2005). Types are best used as conversation starters, while research and hiring generally use dimensional scores.

The person–situation debate

Mischel (1968) pointed out that correlations between personality scores and behaviour in a particular situation usually top out around .30, arguing that behaviour depends more on the situation than on personality. The challenge sparked decades of debate.

The debate settled into two insights.

• Distributions of behaviour: recording people’s behaviour several times a day, Fleeson (2001) showed that extraverted behaviour fluctuates widely even within one person, yet the average of that distribution differs stably between people.
• If–then signatures: Mischel and Shoda (1995) explained that situation-specific response patterns — “angry when criticised, but shy when praised” — are themselves a person’s stable personality.

In the end, personality and situation are not either/or: they interact to produce behaviour. Classic experiments on the power of situations (Milgram, the bystander effect and others) are covered in the article on behaviour in context.

Attitudes and persuasion

Cognitive dissonance

Festinger and Carlsmith (1959) asked participants who had done a boring task to tell the next person it was “fun,” paying them either $1 or $20. When later asked how enjoyable the task had really been, those paid $1 rated it as more enjoyable. Lacking sufficient reason to justify the lie, they reduced the discomfort (dissonance) by changing their attitude itself.

The elaboration likelihood model

Petty and Cacioppo (1986) proposed that persuasion follows two routes.

• Central route: when motivated and able, people scrutinise the quality of the arguments. Attitudes changed this way last and predict behaviour well.
• Peripheral route: when interest or capacity is lacking, people rely on cues such as expert image, attractiveness or the number of arguments. Attitudes changed this way easily revert.

Persuasion techniques and check questions against them are covered in the articles on impressions and persuasion and reciprocity and foot-in-the-door.

Prejudice and intergroup relations

Competition and superordinate goals

In Sherif’s Robbers Cave experiment (Sherif et al., 1961), boys at a summer camp were split into two groups and set in competition, and hostility grew quickly. What eased it was not mere contact but superordinate goals achievable only together, such as jointly repairing a broken water supply.

The contact hypothesis

Allport (1954) proposed that intergroup contact reduces prejudice under conditions of equal status, common goals, cooperation and institutional support. A meta-analysis of 515 studies found that contact consistently reduced prejudice, with larger effects when Allport’s conditions were met (Pettigrew & Tropp, 2006).

The debate over measuring implicit bias

The Implicit Association Test (IAT) measures associations people may not be aware of through reaction times in pairing concepts (Greenwald, McGhee & Schwartz, 1998). But critics note that IAT scores predict actual discriminatory behaviour only weakly and that an individual’s score changes considerably on retest, making it unsuitable for judging individuals (Oswald et al., 2013).

Closing the course: lessons from the replication crisis

In 2015, some 270 researchers repeated 100 studies from leading psychology journals; only about 36% reproduced a statistically significant result (Open Science Collaboration, 2015). Famous effects such as ego depletion — the idea that willpower runs out — and power posing — the idea that confident postures change hormones — also struggled to replicate.

Since then, psychology has been correcting itself through preregistration of study plans, large-scale replications across many labs, and open data. That is why Chapters 7 through 10 present original studies side by side with follow-up research. Studying psychology is less about memorising conclusions than about developing an eye for the size and limits of the evidence.

Check questions

Question 1. Someone scores high on extraversion yet is often quiet in meetings. Is this evidence that personality is useless?

Answer. No. As Fleeson’s research shows, a person’s behaviour fluctuates widely across situations, but the average distribution of behaviour differs stably between people. Moreover, “quiet in meetings” may itself be part of that person’s if–then signature.

Question 2. A student made to do volunteer work actually came to feel more positively about volunteering. Is this change more likely when the reward is large or small?

Answer. When it is small. According to cognitive dissonance theory, the less external justification there is for a behaviour, the more people change their attitudes to reduce dissonance.

Question 3. A company plans to judge whether individual job applicants are biased by their IAT scores. What is the problem, in light of research?

Answer. The IAT is useful for studying group-level tendencies, but it has weak power to predict individual behaviour and modest test–retest reliability. There is not enough evidence to use it as a tool for judging individuals.

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References

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