Personality: Enduring characteristic patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving.
Personality Theory tries to answer the question, “What makes us who we are?”
Personality is complex. Our familiar patterns of thinking and behaving develop very early in life and run deep.
Personality Theorists tend to take the Nature side of the “Nature vs Nurture” debate (Or more professionally, the Nativist vs Empiricist debate). Personality Theorists argue that most of what makes us who we are, our characteristic patterns of thinking and behaving, were “baked in” and developed before or shortly after we were born. The idea that we are born with a “genetic predisposition” to some behavior patterns and not to others. The concept of “genetic predisposition” will see again in the next chapter on Abnormal Psych.
We will start the lecture by looking at the history of studying individual personality, and like most things in psychology, that begins with our friend Sigmund Freud. Next we will look other ways to study and measure personality and we will end with the modern “The Big Five” model of personality and you will do your own personality test using the classic Meyers-Briggs Indicator Test.
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