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 cava 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's winning the battle of urges between the id, ego, and super-ego. 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 got your BuzzFeed quizzes to determine what kind of pirate, dervish, or sandwich.

Harry Potter character you are, but I would never take one of those seriously. All this is to say, people have been characterizing one another for a long, long time, and whether you're into blood or bile or ego or it, 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, in the fans debating whether they're more of a Luke or Leia, they're all funneling down to one big central question: who or what is the self? 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 questioned 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 20th century known as the trait and social cognitive
perspective. 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. Albert wondered if the boy's mother had
a kind of dirt phobia that had rubbed off on him. So yeah, yeah, yeah, he's
telling his tale and at the end of it Freud looks at him and says, Hmm, 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 characteristics and conscious motives. He wasn't so much interested in explaining traits as he was in describing them. Modern trait researchers like Robert McRae and Paul Costa have since organized our fundamental characteristics into what's casually known as the big five: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism, which you can remember using the mnemonic ocean or canoe, whichever one you prefer. Each of these traits exists 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 on the other end, your degree of

conscientiousness can translate into
being impulsive, and care lists are careful and disciplined.
someone high on the extraversion in 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 more 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 email more than an extroverted, and agreeable
person is much more likely to help their neighbor move that couch than a
suspicious one who's just glaring through the window. My adulthood trait
theorists will tell you these characteristics are pretty stable, but
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 predicting our average behavior than what we do in any specific situation. 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 Bovo beading friend, Alfred Bandura. The social cognitive school emphasizes the interaction between our traits and their social context. Ventura 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. 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 extraversion, calm versus anxious, or whatever. Each of these different personality perspectives have their own methods of testing and measuring personality. We talked before about how the psychoanalyst super hunk Hermann Rorschach used his ink blot test to infer information about a person's personality. We know that Freud used dream analysis, and both he and Young were fans of free association. The broader school of theorists now known as the psychodynamic camp that descended from Freud and pals also use other projective psychological tests, including the famous Thematic Apperception tests. 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 from a bee sting, or is

she a maid laughing because some royal
just passed out drunk in his bed. Or perhaps the object of her long-burning
affection has just confessed his love and a fever. Hazel 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 others 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 567 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. And that'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 she will do that
again next time. And if we conducted a controlled lab experiment where, say, we
looked at the effects of a 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.

well, as your most feared self, the one
who could end up unemployed and lonely and run down. 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, insofar as it has yet to be
universally answered. But you learned a lot anyway today, right? As we've 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. Ranjit 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.

Measuring Personality: Crash Course Psychology #22

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