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  • How would you describe your personality?

  • Maybe friendly, creative, quirky?

  • What about nervous, or timid, or outgoing?

  • But has anyone ever called you a sanguine?

  • What about a Kapha, or full of metal?

  • Ancient Greek physician Hippocrates believed personality manifested itself in four different

  • humors, and, basically, you are who you are because of your balance of phlegm, blood,

  • and yellow and black bile.

  • According to traditional Chinese medicine, our personalities depend on the balance of

  • five elements: Earth, Wind, Water, Metal and Fire.

  • Those who practice traditional Hindu Ayurvedic Medicine view each other as unique combinations

  • of three different mind-body principles called Doshas.

  • But Sigmund Freud thought our personalities depended in part on who was winning the battle

  • of urges between the Id, Ego, and Superego.

  • Meanwhile, humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow suggested that the key to self-actualization

  • was first successfully climbing a hierarchy of more basic needs.

  • And then, you've got your BuzzFeed quizzes to determine what kind of pirate, or font,

  • or sandwich, or Harry Potter character you are, but, that, I would never take one of

  • those seriously.

  • All this is to say that people have been characterizing one another for a long, long time, and whether

  • you're into blood, or bile, or ego, or id, or BLT, or PB&J, there are a lot of ways to

  • describe and measure a personality.

  • And all these theories, all the years of research, and cigar smoking, and inkblot gazing, and

  • the fans debating whether they're more of a Luke or a Leia, they're all funneling down

  • to one big central question.

  • Who, or what, is the self?

  • [Intro]

  • Last week we talked about how psychologists often study personality by examining the differences

  • between characteristics, and by looking at how these various characteristics combine

  • to create a whole thinking, feeling person.

  • The early psychoanalytic and humanistic theorists had a lot of ideas about personality, but

  • some psychologists question their lack of clearly measurable standards.

  • Like, there was no way to really quantify someone's inkblot response, or how orally

  • fixated they might be.

  • So this drive to find a more empirical approach spawned two more popular theories in the twentieth

  • century, known as the trait and social cognitive perspectives.

  • Instead of focusing on things like lingering unconscious influences or missed growth opportunities,

  • trait theory researchers look to define personality through stable and lasting behavior patterns

  • and conscious motivations.

  • Legend has it that it all began in 1919, when young American psychologist Gordon Allport

  • paid a visit to none other than Freud himself.

  • Allport was telling Freud about his journey there on the train, and how there was this

  • little boy who was obsessed with staying clean and didn't want to sit next to anyone or touch

  • anything.

  • Allport wondered if the boy's mother had a kind of dirt phobia that had rubbed off on

  • him.

  • So yadda yadda yadda, he's telling his tale, and at the end of it Freud looks at him and

  • says, "Mhmm..

  • Was that little boy you?"

  • Allport was basically like, "No, man, that was just some kid on the train.

  • Don't try to make this into some big unconscious episode from my repressed childhood".

  • Allport thought Freud was digging a little too deep, and that sometimes you just need

  • to look at motives in the present, not the past, to describe behavior.

  • So Allport started his own club, describing personality in terms of fundamental traits,

  • or characteristic behaviors and conscious motives.

  • He wasn't so much interested in explaining traits as he was in describing them.

  • Modern trait researchers like Robert McCrae and Paul Costa have since organized our fundamental

  • characteristics into what's casually known as The Big Five: openness, conscientiousness,

  • extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism, which you can remember using the mnemonic

  • OCEAN, or CANOE, whichever one you prefer.

  • Each of these traits exist on a spectrum, so, for example, your level of openness can

  • range, on one end, from being totally open to new things and variety, or wanting strict,

  • regular routine on the other end.

  • Your degree of conscientiousness can translate into being impulsive and careless, or careful

  • and disciplined.

  • Someone high on the extroversion end will be sociable, while those on the low end will

  • be shy and reserved.

  • A very agreeable person, meanwhile, is helpful and trusting, while someone at the opposite

  • end may be suspicious or uncooperative.

  • And finally, on the neuroticism spectrum, an emotionally stable person will be calm

  • and secure, while a less stable person is often anxious, insecure, and self-pitying.

  • The important idea here is that these traits are hypothesized to predict behavior and attitude.

  • Like an introvert might prefer communicating through e-mail more than an extrovert, and

  • an agreeable person is much more likely to help their neighbor move that couch than a

  • suspicious one who's just glaring through the window.

  • By adulthood, trait theorists will tell you these characteristics are pretty stable, but

  • it isn't to say that they can't flex a little in different situations.

  • Like that same shy person might end up singing Elvis karaoke in a room full of people under

  • the right conditions.

  • So our personality traits are better at predicting our average behavior that what we'd do in

  • any specific situation, and research indicates that some traits, like neuroticism, seem to

  • be better predictors of behavior than others.

  • This flexibility that we all seem to have leads to the fourth major theory on personality,

  • the social cognitive perspective.

  • Originally proposed by our Bobo-beating friend Alfred Bandura, the social cognitive school

  • emphasizes the interaction between our traits and their social context.

  • Bandura noted that we learn a lot of our behavior by watching and imitating others.

  • That's the social part of the equation.

  • But we also think a lot about how these social interactions affect our behavior, which is

  • the cognitive part.

  • So, in this way, people and their situations basically work together to create behavior.

  • Bandura referred to this sort of interplay as reciprocal determinism.

  • Meaning, that for example, the kind of books you read or music you listen to or friends

  • you hang out with say something about your personality, because different people choose

  • to be in different environments, and then those environments in turn continue to reinforce

  • our personalities.

  • So if Bernice has a kind of anxious-suspicious personality, and she has a serious, titanic

  • crush on Sherlock Holmes, she might be extra attuned to potentially dangerous or fishy

  • situations.

  • But the more she sees the world in that way, the more anxious and suspicious she gets.

  • In this way, we're both the creators and the products of the situations we surround ourselves

  • with.

  • That's why one of the key indicators of personality in this school of thought has to do with our

  • sense of personal control -- that is, the extent to which you perceive that you have

  • control over your environment.

  • Someone who believes that they control their own fate, or make their own luck, is said

  • to have an internal locus of control, while those who feel like they're just guided by

  • forces beyond their control are said to have an external locus.

  • Now whether we're talking about control versus helplessness, introversion versus extroversion,

  • calm versus anxious, or whatever, each of these different personality perspectives have

  • their own methods of testing and measuring personality.

  • We've talked before about how the psychoanalyst super-hunk Hermann Rorschach used his inkblot

  • test to infer information about a person's personality; we know that Freud used dream

  • analysis, and both he and Young were both fans of free association, but the broader

  • school of theorists, now known as the psycho-dynamic camp that descended from Freud and pals, also

  • use other projective psychological tests, including the famous thematic apperception

  • test.

  • In this kind of test, you'd be presented with evocative but ambiguous pictures, and then

  • asked to provide information about them.

  • You might be asked to tell a story about the scenes, considering things like how are the

  • characters feeling, or what's going on, or what happened before this event and what will

  • happen after.

  • Like check it out, is the woman crying because her brother just died, or from a bee sting?

  • Or is she a maid laughing because some royal just passed out drunk on his bed, or perhaps

  • the object of her long-burning affection has just confessed his love in a fever haze all

  • Jane Austen-style and she's having a mini-breakdown in the hall?!

  • The idea is that your responses will reveal something about your concerns and motivations

  • in real life, or how you see the world, or about your unconscious processes that drive

  • you.

  • By contrast with that approach, though, modern trait personality researchers believe that

  • you can assess personality traits by having people answer a series of test questions.

  • There are lots of so-called personality trait inventories out there.

  • Some provide a quick reading on a particular enduring trait, like anxiety or self-esteem,

  • while other gauge a wide range of traits, like our friends The Big Five.

  • These tests, like the Myers-Briggs, which you might have heard of, involve long questionnaires

  • of true-false or agree-disagree questions like, "Do you enjoy being the center of attention?",

  • "Do you find it easy to empathize with others?", or "Do you value justice over mercy?"

  • But the classic Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory is probably the most widely used

  • personality test.

  • The most recent version asks a series of five hundred and sixty-seven true-false questions,

  • varying from "No one seems to understand me" to "I like mechanics magazines" to "I loved

  • my father", and is often used to identify emotional disorders.

  • Then there's how Bandura's social cognitive camp sizes you up.

  • Because this school of thought emphasizes the interaction of environment and behavior

  • rather than just traits alone, they aren't solely into questions and answers.

  • Instead, they might measure personality in different contexts, understanding behavior

  • in one situation is best predicted by how you acted in a similar situation.

  • Like, if Bernice freaked out and tried to hide under the bed during the last five thunderstorms,

  • we can predict that she will do that again next time.

  • And if we conducted a controlled lab experiment where we, say, we looked at the effects of

  • thunderstorm noises on people's behavior, we might get an even better sense of what

  • baseline psychological factors could best predict storm-induced freak-outs.

  • And finally, there are the Humanistic theorists like Maslow.

  • They often reject standardized assessments altogether.

  • Instead, they tend to measure your self-concept through therapy, interviews, and questionnaires

  • that ask subjects to describe both how they would ideally like to be and how they actually

  • are.

  • The idea is that the closer the actual and ideal are, the more positive the subject's

  • sense of self.

  • Which brings us back to that biggest motherlode question of them all: Who, or what, is the

  • self?

  • All the books out there about self-esteem, self-help, self-awareness, self-control, and

  • so on are built upon one assumption: that the self is the organizer of our thoughts

  • and feelings and actions: essentially the center of a personality.

  • But of course, it's a sticky issue.

  • One way to think about self is through the concept of possible selves, like your ideal

  • self, perhaps devastatingly attractive and intelligent, successful, and well-loved, as

  • well as your most feared self, the one who could end up unemployed and lonely and rundown.

  • This balance of potential best and worst selves motivates us through life.

  • In the end, once you factor in environment and childhood experiences, culture and all

  • that mess, not to mention biology which we haven't even touched on today, can we really

  • firmly define self?

  • Or answer certainly that we even have one?

  • That, my friend, is one of life's biggest questions, and so far it has yet to be universally

  • answered.

  • But you learned a lot anyway today, right?

  • As we talked about the trait and social cognitive perspectives, and also about different ways

  • these schools and others measure and test personality.

  • We also talked about what self is, and how our self-esteem works.

  • Thanks for watching, especially to our Subbable subscribers who make Crash Course possible.

  • To find out how you can become a supporter, just go to subbable.com/crashcourse.

  • This episode was written by Kathleen Yale, edited by Blake de Pastino, and our consultant

  • is Dr. Ranji Bhagwat.

  • Our director and editor is Nicholas Jenkins, and the script supervisor is Michael Aranda,

  • who is also our sound designer, and the graphics team is Thought Cafe.

How would you describe your personality?

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