The Psychology of Understanding Human Differences

Why are we different?

We exist in an unstable and turbulent environment bombarded with a multitude and diversity of dynamic forces and stimuli acting on us, regulating the way we ought to behave and conduct our way of life. There is no avenue to escape from these forces. We are caught and trapped in it by our existence to survive and grow in our life processes. We are compelled to discriminate, choose, cope, accept, resist and adapt to them for survival and growth. The way we go around coping with these forces varies from one individual to another shaping the way we think, feel and do, and that makes us different from each other.

By an act of God, we are thrown into our mother’s womb, and in that life process, we inherited some genes from the family tree of our ancestors; and that makes us different the day we are born.

We grow up in our family within a society with unique, beliefs, traditions, norms and values. They design life support systems called culture, to regulate and condition our conduct of life. They taught us how to behave, think, feel and do things. Due to our genetic differences, our approach to be conditioned and regulated by these systems varies from individual to individual. Some of us accept, some fight these systems while others adapt. Those who accept are rewarded with the pleasures of life while those who fight means pain and to some even death. Those who adapt learn the pains and pleasures of life. Pain is learnt through resistance while pleasure is learnt through conformity. It is these life experiences that make our gap of differences even bigger and wider.

This gap becomes greater for those who are exposed across a variety of cultural experiences. The exposure to different ways of life enables our phenomenal field to look at the world from different perspectives.

How we view the world determines why and how we do, feel and think about things around us. What to do with them varies from one individual to another, making us so unique from each other in our species.

Why do we need to understand human differences?

We are social beings living in an organized and dynamic world, interdependent on each other to support our daily needs and necessities for our survival and comfort. By virtue of being a part of a massive entity and our role-relationship with others beings, we need to play our roles in supporting, changing and improving these necessities to improve our quality of life. We organize ourselves into groups known as organizations to produce the necessities to meet our daily support system. And to play our roles well, we need to socialize, communicate, interact and connect with others to accomplish common goals.

Dealing with all kinds of people is a daily affair. Each of us has a unique pattern of behavior that constitutes our personality that determines the way we think, feel and do things. The root causes of all human problems arise from our different perspectives looking at things. We need to know ourselves and know others to enable us to find effective solutions to problems caused by our differences.

Personality Psychology – The study of human differences and its contributions and limitations

Personality is the study of human differences. Personality psychologists are interested to know how and why people behave the way they do, why do we feel the way we feel and why do we think the way we think. They attempt to unravel the mysteries of the mind and the body to explain who we are, why are we different and how we how we respond to a variety of situations in our environment.

Over the decades, psychologists vary in their approach to the study of human personality. Some approaches are idiographic. They study human differences on the traits perspectives. They try to identify the key traits and characteristics by which each person can be distinguished from other people. Others are nomothetic and focus on identifying personality types. They focus on investigating similarities between individuals of large groups of people to find patterns of behavior that are common and those that are share by some others.

The aims of studying human behavior is to describe, understand, predict and control behavior. The idiographic approach is useful in describing and understands human behavior while the nomothetic approach contributes significantly to predict and control behavior. Evidently there is a need to develop school of personality using both approaches and methods for a complete understanding of human personality.

Historical Perspectives

The earliest attempt to predict personality begins with the ancient theory that our personality is a result of some external forces. Our personality is influenced by our name, date of birth (numerology), physical features, zodiac sign, element, and the influence of the planetary systems. The classification of personality is based on myth, animism and planetary forces. Over the centuries, people rely on this ancient theory to predict patterns of behavior. The ancient theory is not scientific. It is more like fortune telling as it is not based on any empirical data.

Temperamental Theory

The earliest known theory of personality is based on the medical theory. It was the Greek physician Hippocrates (460-370 BC) who developed the ancient four humors also known as the temperamental theory. He believed certain human moods, emotions and behaviors were caused by four body fluids or humors. Galen (AD 131-200) extended this theory and developed the first typology of personality
into four types. The sanguine, or optimistic, type was associated with blood; the phlegmatic type (slow and lethargic) with phlegm; the melancholic type (sad, depressed) with black bile; and the choleric (angry) type with yellow bile. Individual personality was determined by
the amount of each of the four humors.

Over the decades numerous personality theories are emerged. Generally, they can be categories into six schools of thoughts.

1. Trait theory
2. Psychodynamic theory
3. Behaviorist theory
4. Cognitive theory
5. Humanistic theory
6. Evolutionary and Genetic Perspectives

Trait Theory

The first school of theory is initiated by Gordon Allport, (1897 – 1967) the father of the trait theorists. He hypothesized that: “Those individual differences that are most salient and socially relevant in people’s lives will eventually become encoded into their language; the more important such a difference, the more likely is it to become expressed as a single word.”
From the above lexical hypothesis, he located every term that he thought could describe a person in the dictionary to identify a list of 4500 traits and organized them into three categories to identify an individual personality.

1. Cardinal Traits – traits that dominates the personality across time and situations.
2. Central Traits – common traits that are consistent across time and situations. They form the building blocks of personality.
3. Secondary Traits – Traits that are less evident and inconsistent across time and situations.

Raymond Cattell organized the thousands of traits described by Allport and condensed them down to 16 primary traits using the statistical method of factor analysis into 16 PF (Personality Factors) to explore the basic dimensions of personality. Hans Eysenck further simplified the traits into three fundamental factors: psychotics (such antisocial traits as cruelty and rejection of social customs), introversion-extroversion, and emotionality-stability (also called neuroticism). Eysenck also formulated a quadrant based on intersecting emotional-stable and introverted-extroverted axes. Goldberg and Costa & McCrae simplified the trait theories using factor analysis to develop the Big Five OCEAN (Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism)

Contribution of the trait theories

1. It provides a scientific method of classify traits using factor analysis under their adjective descriptors.
2. The use of idiographic and nomothetic approach to identify human differences.

Limitations of the traits theories

1. Classifying personality based the composition of traits is too simplistic. The lexicon approach to a certain degree may enable them to understand and describe behavior that is stable and persistent and not affected by the environment.
2. The development of trait theories is not based on any psychological construct. Apparently, they cannot explain how traits are developed.
3. Trait theorists cannot explain adaptive behavior where a person pattern of behavior varies across situations and over time.
4. Traits theorist can explain what you are but cannot explain why you behave, feel and think the way you do
5. The trait theorists are interested in the conscious awareness where behavior is overt and observable
6. The trait theory does not inherently provide an avenue of personality change.
7. The use of adjectival descriptors to cluster traits is not inclusive of all psychological traits

The above pitfalls need to be addressed to provide a complete and accurate picture of a person’s personality.

Psychodynamic Theories

Towards the twentieth-century Sigmund Freud became the pioneer of the second school of personality theories. He attempts to unravel the mysteries of the psyche by structuring our mind into three levels, conscious, pre-conscious and unconscious. Conscious deals with the part of our awareness in touch with the reality of our life. It explains our mental activity in which all thought processes occur. The pre-conscious is where information on our past experiences is stored away, but it is easily retrievable. The unconscious is a reservoir of our inner states such as desire, wants, needs and motives. It is also storage of information of our painful past that is being repressed and cannot be accessed readily.

Freud investigated the interplay of our conscious awareness and unconsciousness to explain personality.
He proposed a three-part personality structure consisting of the id (concerned with the gratification of basic instincts), the ego (which mediates between the demands of the id and the constraints of society), and the superego (through which parental and social values are internalized). In contrast to type or trait theories of personality, the dynamic model proposed by Freud involved an ongoing element of conflict, and it was these conflicts that Freud saw as the primary determinant of personality. His psychoanalytic method was designed to help patients resolve their conflicts by exploring unconscious thoughts, motivations, and conflicts through the use of free association and other techniques. Another distinctive feature of Freudian psychoanalysis is its emphasis on the importance of childhood experiences in personality formation.

Carl Jung
Carl Jung, a follower of Sigmund Freud went against his teacher by modifying the three structure of the mind. According to Jung: Ego is conscious mind – anything which we are aware of what is happening around in our environment. He replaced the pre-conscious and unconscious with the concept of personal conscious. Personal unconscious is anything which is not presently conscious, but can be. The personal unconscious is like most people’s understanding of the unconscious in that it includes both memories that are easily brought to mind and those that have been suppressed for some reason. Jung introduced the concept of collective unconscious – the part of the unconscious from our cultural heritage. It is the reservoir of our experiences as a species, a kind of knowledge we are all born with. And yet we can never be directly conscious of it.
It influences all of our experiences and behaviors, most especially the emotional ones, but we only know about it indirectly, by looking at those influences.

Jung replaced the Freudian structure of personality with the processes of the psyche and its functions to explain human behavior. He developed four pairs of polar traits from the eight mental functions to interpret personality

• Perceiving Vs Judging – How people prefer to deal with the outer world?
• Sensing Vs Intuition – How people prefer to take in information?
• Thinking Vs Feeling – How people prefer to make decision?
• Extroversion Vs Introversion – how people prefer to focus their attention and energy

Jung sequences the 4 pairs of mental processes:
How people direct their energy?
Observable Behavior (Extroversion Vs Introversion)
Dominant Function (Sensing Vs and Intuition)
Auxiliary Function (Thinking and Feeling)
Inferior Function (Judging Vs Perceiving)

Contributions of the psychodynamic theorists
It provides a distinct structure of the mind and its mental processes to understand human personality
It helps us to understand the underlying causes of abnormal behavior and how to treat them

Limitations of Carl Jung

1. The psychodynamic theories assume behavior is stable and consistent. It is not sensitive to the environmental influences that may cause the behavior patterns to vary over time and across situations.
2. It does not differentiate positive and negative behavior. Hence it is good only to predict positive behavior. Negative behavior are being left out
3. Psychodynamic theories investigate the mind to predict human behavior. How the mind work is extremely complex. For example, preference for thinking and feeling depends on the situations. If an issue is important a person may think a lot before he makes a decision. If the issue is unimportant he may use his gut feeling. Likewise being an extrovert or an introvert is on the situation basis. In the midst of very important people, a person may choose to be an introvert while in the midst of friends he may prefer to be an extrovert.
4. Classifying human characteristics under the four polar traits is debatable and can be mooted. It does not necessary that a person with a deep well for feeling is compassionate, empathetic, tender hearted and fair. A person who is emotionally unstable and neurotic may not possess the characteristics mentioned above.
5. It does not differentiate simple and complex human
6. Human being is not that simple to slot them into preferred 16 types.

Behaviorist Theorist

Behaviorist theorists believe that Human Personality can be best understood by our learning, cognition and the laws in the natural environment. They focus on objectively observable behaviors and discount the interplay of the psyche of the psychodynamic theorists. Behavior theorists define learning as nothing more than the acquisition of new behavior based on environmental conditions. The environment is perceived as a set of stimuli for an individual to interact (response). The response between the individual and the stimuli of the environment provides an avenue for us to learn from our actions. The oldest theory of behaviorism dates back to Descartes, who introduced the idea of a stimulus. He posits that “human personality is rooted in the mind or rational soul. It is distinct from but related to the body. Its essential attribute is thought and its association with the body is primarily in the pineal gland of the brain. The mind has a cognitive faculty of understanding for acquiring knowledge and a free will towards our feelings or emotions. Other behaviorists doing researches include:

1. Dollard and Miller’s Stimulus-Response Theory focusing on the law of action (response) and reactions (stimuli) in the natural environment.
2. Ivan Pahlov’s Classical Conditioning in his drooling dog experiments developed a technique used in behavioral training in which a naturally occurring stimulus is paired with a response.

Next, a previously neutral stimulus is paired with the naturally occurring stimulus. Eventually, the previously neutral stimulus comes to evoke the response without the presence of the naturally occurring stimulus.

The two elements are then known as the conditioned stimulus and the conditioned response.

1. Skinner’s Operant Condition using pigeons and rats in his experiment developed a method of learning that occurs through rewards and punishments for behavior. Through operant conditioning, an association is made between a behavior and a consequence for that behavior.
2. Thornsdikes in his experiment on cats discovered behavior become dominant and habits are formed when behavior produced the desired effect. He proposed that humans and animals acquire behaviors through the association of stimuli and responses. He advanced two laws of learning to explain why behaviors occur the way they do: The Law of Effect specifies that any time a behavior is followed by a pleasant outcome, that behavior is likely to recur. The Law of Exercise states that the more a stimulus is connected with a response, the stronger the link between stimulus and response.

Contributions of the behaviorist theories

1. Behavior can be learned. It provides us a method and choice to develop our positive behavior and defreeze our negative behavior
2. Behavior can be nurtured. It helps us to develop, motivate and control the behavior of a significant other
3. It provides a medium for personality changes for better or for worse. Behavior can be reinforced, strengthened and sustained by rewards and diminished by punishment and extinction.

Limitations of behaviorism

• The approach is nomothetic in that it is investigating animals and people to try to find general laws of behavior that apply to both people and brutes. It is not idiographic and is unable to help us to understand and describe the unique patterns of behavior of an individual.
• It excludes the functions of the human psyche and its mental processes of explaining human behavior
• It does predict human difference as it does not classify personality in personality traits or types.
• It assumes that the general laws relating to the behavior of animals can be applied to describe human beings. This assumption is debated by the cognitive theorists that there is a gap for the intellect (mind) to mediate between stimulus and response.
• It is unable to explain complex behavior where an individual response to stimuli varies with the situations and across time

Social Cognitive Theory

Social cognitive theories focus the importance of socialization and the effect of thought processes to create one’s unique patterning of behavior.

Cognitive psychologists attempt to explain human behavior by understanding the mental learning processes. They assume that human beings are rational beings capable of making sensible choices that benefits them.

Cognitive psychologists view behavior as a function of cognition, learning and experiences in the environment.

They assert that people organize their values, expectations and goals to guide and direct their behavior.
This set of personal standards is unique in each person and grows out of one’s life experiences.

Over the past few decades, social cognitive psychologists have been developing theories in an attempt to explain the complexities by careful observation of the human behaviors with the environment and their relations. They posit that each of the mechanisms, for examples, self-regulatory, goals mechanisms, self-reflective capabilities and cognitive constructs possesses a spectrum of possible inputs. These mechanisms are contextualized by these social-learning processes, which cause some inputs to become particularly salient to an individual or are grouped with other inputs into an equivalent class and are domain-specific.

1. Albert Bandura, (1977) Social Cognitive Theory

Bandura, a follower of behaviorism attempts to integrate the behavioral and cognitive perspectives to explain personality. He found the Stimulus- Response Theory that pleasure begets pleasure and pain begets pain too simplistic and can be mooted.
He creates a gap between stimulus and response. The gap is to allow the intellect to predict the motives of a stimulus generate alternatives and anticipate the outcomes of each alternative before choosing a response that makes the most sense in a situation.
Bandura perceives individual functioning as a continuous interaction among behavioral, cognitive and environmental factors. The three fundamental principles of the social cognitive approach are

• Personality is a complex system
• Reciprocal interactionism
• Personality variables

Furthermore, social cognitive theorists postulate that the intuitive and perceived sense of coherence and consistency in personality/self/character can arise from three sources:

• How people assign meanings to social stimuli
• How people establish causal linkage over their lives through self-reflective and self- knowledge processes; and
• How people organize disparate and multiple experiences and life events within a larger cognitive framework of goals, expectation and aspirations.

 

1. Mischel

Mischel created a paradigm crisis in personality psychology that changed the agenda of the field for decades. Mischel showed that researches failed to support the fundamental traditional assumption of personality theory, that an individual’s behavior with regard to a trait is highly consistent across diverse situations. Instead, Mischel’s analyses revealed that the individual’s behavior, when closely examined, was highly dependent upon situational cues, rather than expressed consistently across diverse situations that differed in meaning.

Mischel made the case that the field of personality psychology was searching for consistency in the wrong places. Mischel’s work proposed that by including the situation as it is perceived by the person and by analyzing behavior in its situational context, the consistencies that characterize the individual would be found. He argued that these individual differences would not be expressed in consistent cross-situational behavior, but instead, he suggested that consistency would be found in distinctive but stable patterns of if-then, situation-behavior relations that form contextualized, psychologically meaningful “personality signatures” (e.g., “she does A when X, but B when Y”).

These signatures of personality were in fact revealed in a large observational study of social behavior across multiple repeated situations over time (Mischel & Shoda, 1995). Contradicting the classic assumptions, the data showed that individuals who were similar in average levels of behavior, for example in their aggression, nevertheless differed predictably and dramatically in the types of situations in which they aggressed. As predicted by Mischel, they were characterized by highly psychologically informative if-then behavioral signatures. Collectively, this work has allowed a new way to conceptualize and assess both the stability and variability of behavior that is produced by the underlying personality system, and has opened a window into the dynamic processes within the system itself.

1. Julian Rotter

Julian Rotter defines personality as a function of the individual experiences and the environment. To understand behavior, he focused on the interaction of the individual with his or her environment. The environment provides the stimuli both painful and pleasurable. The individual response to the stimuli leads to either reinforce (positive outcome) or punishment (negative outcome). The whole process becomes an experience. The individual learns from experiences. One learns that both pleasurable and painful experiences can lead to positive and negative outcomes. Julian B. Rotter introduced the concept of generalized expectancies for control of reinforcement, more commonly known as locus of control.

Locus of control refers to people’s very general, cross-situational beliefs about what determines whether or not they get reinforced in life. People lie in the continuum of internal locus of control and external locus of control.

People with a strong internal locus of control believe that the responsibility for whether or not they get reinforced ultimately lies with themselves. Internalizers believe that success or failure is due to their own efforts. They are master of their own destiny. On the contrary, externalizer believe that their reinforcements are controlled by luck, chance, or powerful others. They are the victims of fate.
Therefore, they see little impact of their own efforts on the amount of reinforcement they receive. Rotter provides an agent for personality change. Change the mindset of a person, or change the environment the person is responding to, and behavior will change.

Rotter describes personality as a relatively stable set of potentials for responding to situations in a particular way.

Rotter categorizes his theory into four main components. These are as follow:

1. Behavior Potential

Behavior potential is the likelihood of engaging in a particular behavior in a specific situation. In other words, what is the probability that the person will exhibit a particular behavior in a situation? In any given situation, there are multiple behaviors one can engage in. For each possible behavior, there is a behavior potential. The individual will exhibit whichever behavior has the highest potential.

1. Expectancy

Expectancy is the subjective probability that a given behavior will lead to a particular outcome, or reinforcer.
How likely is it that the behavior will lead to the outcome?
Having “high” or “strong” expectancies means the individual is confident the behavior will result in the outcome. Having low expectancies means the individual believes it is unlikely that his or her behavior will result in reinforcement. If the outcomes are equally desirable, we will engage in the behavior that has the greatest likelihood of paying off (i.e., has the highest expectancy).
Expectancies are formed based on past experience. The more often a behavior has led to reinforcement in the past, the stronger the person’s expectancy that the behavior will achieve that outcome now.

1. Reinforcement Value

Reinforcement is another name for the outcomes of our behavior. Reinforcement value refers to the desirability of these outcomes. Things we want to happen, that we are attracted to, have a high reinforcement value. Things we don’t want to happen, that we wish to avoid, have a low reinforcement value. If the likelihood of achieving reinforcement is the same, we will exhibit the behavior with the greatest reinforcement value (i.e., the one directed toward the outcome we prefer most).

1. Psychological Situation

Rotter believes that different people interpret the same situation differently. Again, it is people’s subjective interpretation of the environment, rather than an objective array of stimuli, that is meaningful to them and that determines how they behave.

Contributions

1. The theory has been demonstrated to make powerful predictions and has generated useful applications in a large number of areas of human behavior.

Probably the most significant contribution of social cognitive theory is its applied value.

1. It enables us to understand complex behavior

Limitations
it cannot predict the specific behavior of an individual whose behavior varies with the situations.

Evolutionary and Genetic Perspectives

The study of genes and its contributions on the understanding of human personality can be traced back to Darwin’s theory of evolution that the behavior of all life forms including human is related and has descended from the family tree of a common ancestor. Darwin posits that complex creatures evolve from more simplistic ancestors through the process of natural selection over time. As a theory, the origin of instinct by means of natural selection was one of Darwin’s most significant contributions to examine human behavior. These instincts include many reflexes impervious to the influence of learning and experience. At birth, every individual starts from scratch, with a unique genotype, some innate instincts and inbuilt capacity to learn certain kinds of behaviors. The evolutionary perspective views personality as the product of a long history during which it was beneficial for humans to adopt adaptive behavior for their survival.

Evolutionary personality theory emphasizes on the why of behavior. It provides the link between the processes that govern all forms of life and the central human goals and the psychological and behavioral strategic means deployed to obtain these goals.

The extension of the evolution theory leads to the study the hereditary factors of behavior. Humans vary in the expression of certain behaviors because of variations in their genes. The science of behavior genetics is an extension of these ideas and seeks to determine the extent of individual differences due to genetic processes.

With advances in genetic technology, it is possible to observe genetic variation more directly by locating, identifying, and characterizing genes themselves and the effects of each single gene on behavior.

Contributions
Behavior is a function of the genes. A significant part of our behavioral traits are inherited from the family of our ancestors,

Limitations
it is not supported by any empirical scientific evidence.

Conclusion:

In view of the limitation of above theories, there is an urgent need to develop a model of personality incorporating the concepts of the six personality perspectives to predict human differences.