AP Psychology 4.5: Social-Cognitive and Trait Theories of Personality

Social-cognitive theory, most closely tied to Albert Bandura, grows out of the social learning you met in 3.9. It says personality forms through an exchange that never stops. Three things keep acting on one another:

• the person: thoughts, beliefs, expectations and feelings;
• the person's behavior: what they actually do;
• the environment: the people, places and situations around them.

This is reciprocal determinism. Reciprocal because the influence runs in every direction, and determinism because together the three shape who someone becomes.

Take Kenji, who believes he is bad at math (person). He skips the extra practice problems (behavior), falls behind and gets moved to a slower class (environment), where little is asked of him, and that confirms his belief (person). The loop can turn the other way from any point. A teacher who pairs him with a patient study partner changes his environment. Working problems with her changes his behavior. Getting them right changes what he believes.

So in this view, personality is not a fixed thing a person carries from place to place unchanged. It is a pattern that keeps forming as a person and their situations act on each other.

The same loop shapes your self-concept: how you view yourself, and how you see yourself in relation to others. Two kinds of belief feed it, and students mix them up all the time.

Self-efficacy is your belief that you can succeed at a particular task, such as sinking a free throw, giving a speech or passing chemistry. It is specific. You can have high self-efficacy for drawing and low self-efficacy for parallel parking on the same afternoon. It matters for the loop in 2a, because people tend to try harder and stick with tasks longer when they believe they can do them, and succeeding then raises the belief.

Self-esteem is your overall sense of your own worth: whether, on the whole, you think well of yourself. It is general, not about any one task.

The two can point in different directions. A student can like herself a great deal and still be sure she will fail her driving test. Another can be certain he will ace calculus and still think poorly of himself overall. Both kinds of belief contribute to the self-concept, so a change in either one changes how a person sees themselves.

Social-cognitive psychologists usually measure these beliefs by asking. A self-efficacy scale, for example, has people rate how sure they are that they can do one particular task, from not sure at all to completely sure.

Trait theories ask a different question. Instead of how personality forms, they ask how to describe it. They conclude that personality is a set of enduring characteristics that lead to typical responses to stimuli: the ways a person tends to act across many situations and over long stretches of time. Typical matters. Someone high in a trait does not show it every minute; they show it more often than most people do.

The Big Five theory proposes five traits that make up a personality. Each is a range, and everyone sits somewhere on each one:

• Agreeableness: kind, trusting and cooperative at the high end; critical and quick to clash at the low end.
• Openness to experience: curious and drawn to new ideas, art and activities at the high end; preferring the familiar at the low end.
• Extraversion: outgoing and energized by other people at the high end; quieter and more reserved at the low end.
• Conscientiousness: organized, careful and dependable at the high end; disorganized and careless at the low end.
• Emotional stability: calm and steady under stress at the high end; anxious and easily upset at the low end.

One angry outburst on a terrible day says little about agreeableness. Starting arguments at school, at home and at work for years says a lot.

Trait psychologists measure traits with personality inventories: questionnaires with many statements, such as "I get my chores done right away," each answered on a scale from 1 (disagree strongly) to 5 (agree strongly). The projective tests of 4.4 ask for responses to ambiguous images. An inventory asks direct questions instead, and every answer is scored the same way for everyone.

So where do the five traits come from? Researchers write a long list of items and give it to many people. Then they run factor analysis, a statistical method that organizes the item responses by finding groups of items whose answers go together: people who agree with one item in a group tend to agree with the others in it. Each group is a factor, and the researchers name it by what its items have in common. The groups come from how people actually answered, not from which items a researcher expected to belong together.

Like any psychological test (2.8), an inventory is useful only if it is reliable, giving similar scores each time a person takes it, and valid, measuring the trait it claims to measure. Inventories are also self-report, so they depend on people describing themselves honestly.