Personality and Social Behavior

Definitions

Personality is an individual's typical way of feeling, thinking, and acting. Given that personality is typical, it is fairly stable over time. Social behavior refers to a person's feelings, thoughts, or actions as he or she relates to other people. These two definitions have a very close relationship. Knowing something about an individual's personality should allow psychologists to predict his or her social behavior. Similarly, knowing about a person's social behavior should give clues to aspects of his or her personality. In other words, an individual's personality and social behavior influence each other, and knowledge of one allows the inference of information about the other.

History and Background

People tend to describe others in terms of personality characteristics. Almost 20,000 English words can be used to describe a person. For example, people can be described as outgoing or shy, dominant or submissive, conscientious or careless, and so forth. People possess [Page 656]different personality characteristics; therefore, it is possible to group people based on these characteristics. The history of psychologists' study of personality has involved several attempts at developing systems that would be helpful in classifying people by their personalities. The ancient Greeks first attempted to broadly describe personality with types. There were four types of personalities (based on which of their body fluids was predominant): cheerful, irritable, depressed, and unemotional. In the past century, personality has also been classified based on three different body types: The endomorph was plump, jolly, and relaxed; the ectomorph was thin, anxious, and unsocial; and the mesomorph was muscular, confident, and active.

More recently, Raymond Cattell's 16 Personality Factors (16 PF) offered a way to classify people based on 16 personality dimensions. The 16 PF includes measures of warmth, reasoning (intelligence), emotional stability, dominance, liveliness, rule-consciousness, social boldness, sensitivity, vigilance (suspiciousness), abstractedness (imaginativeness), privateness, apprehension, openness to change, self-reliance, perfectionism, and tension. To fully describe an individual's personality, the person would be given a rating on how much of each personality factor he or she possesses. However, the most common way of thinking about personality is in terms of the Big Five personality traits. These personality traits are similar to the 16 PF, but they are combined into fewer categories. These traits include Extraversion, Neuroticism (emotional instability), Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, and Openness to Experience (open-mindedness). Describing a person on each of these five dimensions is thought to be enough to give another person a good understanding about what type of person he or she is. Personality traits influence people's behavior. Therefore, if people are described as extraverted, they would be expected to be sociable in groups. If people are conscientious, they would be expected to be hard workers. If people are neurotic, they have the tendency to be anxious.

Identifying Personality Variables

Contemporary personality classification systems (e.g., Big Five, 16 PF) were created by first identifying all the words that people use to describe each other. Next, the researchers created categories by sorting the individual words based on common characteristics. The categories that resulted from this process were called personality traits or factors. For example, the category of Extraversion would have related words like outgoing, sociable, loud, confident, talkative, friendly, and so forth. The category of Neuroticism would contain words like anxious, tense, insecure, paranoid, unstable, and so on. The Extraversion category would also contain words such as quiet, shy, unconfident, and so on because someone can be low on Extraversion. Similarly, the Neuroticism category would also contain descriptive words like stable, calm, and secure because people can also rate low on Neuroticism.

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