Lesson 02 Commentary: The Plan of the Textbook and This Course
Funder organizes the text into six major sections. The first section contains two chapters on research methods, and the next five cover the five major approaches to personality. The text ends with two chapters that wrap up and bring together our examination of personality psychology. Chapter 18 covers the extreme and problematic personality patterns that we call personality disorders. This is a topic that can be viewed from all five basic approaches to personality. Chapter 19 reviews the basic approaches, the questions each one addresses, and why we need all five approaches.
In psychology courses, instructors often have their own material that they teach in addition to the material in the textbook, and this course is no exception. Therefore, these commentaries both summarize the main points from assigned chapters and also provide additional examples, perspectives, and information from the instructor's own experience as a professional personality psychologist. Too make room for this additional material, two chapters from the text are not assigned: Chapter 8 (anatomy and physiology) and Chapter 16 (personality processes). Although these chapters are not formally assigned, they do contain interesting and important information, so you are encouraged to read them if you are inclined.
One topic that Funder intentionally avoids, except in his discussion of Freud, is the influence of a personality psychologist's own personality, upbringing, and culture on his or her theorizing. In contrast, the instructor believes that this is an important and interesting topic. It is a fact that all of us, without taking a single course on personality, are already amateur personality psychologists. We all use personality traits to describe people we know. We notice how certain personality traits run in families. We have ideas about what makes people tick, how their thinking affects their behavior, and how much people's behavior varies from situation to situation and how much it changes over time. We get these ideas about personality from our parents and the larger culture around us as we grow up. Many of our ideas about personality are accurate enough, or else we would not be able to get along with other people! But some of our ideas may be based on misinformation from our culture and some may reflect our own needs—what we would like to believe rather than what is true. Professional personality psychologists are in the same boat as all of us. They live in a particular culture with its own biases and have unique experiences and personal needs, all of which can affect their thinking about personality. Because personality is such a personal matter, it is difficult to be objective about the topic. We will therefore examine some of the biographical details of personality psychologists' lives to see how their unique experiences might have affected their thinking.
This course will talk about the five basic approaches to personality in terms of what has been called the root ideas of personality psychology. The root ideas of any field are topics that are so important that every theory has something to say about them. Psychologist Robert Hogan has suggested that the six root ideas of personality psychology are motivation, personality development, self-knowledge, unconscious processes, psychological adjustment, and the relationship between the individual and society. We will see that theories from the five different approaches tend to emphasize some root ideas and ignore others. We will of course get into the details of where the approaches stand on the root ideas when we get to them, but for now consider some questions on the root ideas that each approach must answer.
On the topic of motivation, how much are we driven by enduring, biological instincts shared by all human beings, and how much of our behavior is guided by our own unique plans and goals that we set for ourselves? For personality development, are early experiences more important than later ones, and is there a point at which personality is basically set for life? For self-knowledge, is there really a "true self" behind all the acts we put on for different people, and how would we know when we are being authentic or genuine? If we can't directly experience our unconscious, how can we tell what is in the unconscious and how much it is really affecting our personality? How important are the following to a definition of psychological health: adjusting to the environment, developing one's potentials, achieving moral maturity, maximizing personal happiness, and getting along with others? When people misbehave in society, is it because some people are born with anti-social impulses, because some people never learned to control an anti-social streak that we all share, or because certain living conditions corrupt some individuals into behaving criminally? Think about how you might answer these questions. We will eventually see how personality psychologists from the five basic approaches answer them.
One final comment on the five approaches worth emphasizing is that the theories within the approaches shape psychologists' perceptions of facts about personality. To see the way in which theories shape our perceptions about facts, consider a figure below called the Necker Cube.
When you stare at the Necker Cube long enough, it seems to flip back and forth between two different three-dimensional cubes. Try it.
This is actually a visual illusion because the Necker Cube is a two-dimensional drawing, not a three-dimensional cube. But the portion of our brain that creates our perceptions has a built-in expectation that the world is three-dimensional and therefore tries to interpret flat drawings with certain features as three-dimensional objects. It doesn't quite know what to do with the Necker Cube. It entertains two different theories about what kind of three-dimensional cube it could be, and as it flips back and forth between the two theories, you see two different cubes.
What happens with the Necker Cube is similar to what happened to the five blind men who encountered the elephant. Each jumped to a conclusion that the elephant was like something they were already familiar with. We tend to perceive the world in terms of theories that we already hold about the world. To an extent, the five basic approaches work this way. Each shapes our perceptions of what personality is like by having us focus on particular facts about personality that the approach says are important.
A final comment on the plan for this course concerns taking personality tests and engaging in other personality-related activities. Personality tests do not all look like the quizzes that you can find on the Internet. Personality psychologists have devised many different ways of measuring personality, and you will have a chance to complete various measures during the section on research methods and when certain kinds of personality measures are associated with the personality theories under discussion. Completing these measures and engaging in other kinds of activities may help give you insight into yourself as well as help you to learn the course material.