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Intuitively, it probably seems to you that you must have "a personality." Doesn't everyone? Psychologists test for it. When you go to a job interview, the people you speak with often ask about your personality "strong points" and your "weak points." We speak of someone having "a good personality" or a "bad personality." We think of each of us having a unique "personality," largely shaped by our personal history or experiences, such as our family, our schooling, and, more generally, our culture.

The concept of "personality" appears to consist of sets of personal characteristics, traits, or predispositions to respond, such as being honest, confident, adventurous, sensitive, or funny. The concept "personality" also conveys CONSISTENCY AND STABILITY, in our predispositions to respond across time and situations. Thus, we expect "honest people" to be honest across many tempting situations, "confident people" to have high self-efficacy across many situations that might make others insecure, adventurous people to take risks on a regular basis, and "funny people," well, to see the humor in almost any situation. Most modern social and behavioral scientists think of personality as  largely "nurture," shaped by your envirnoment and personal histories.

This may come as a shock: as defined above, which is a very common way for psychologists to use the term, there is remarkably little evidence that you "have a personality," or a bundle of consistent personal traits. And this knowledge is hardly new. In the late 1920s, psychologists Hartshorn and May studied children's honesty across different tempting situations. Instead of consistent tendencies to respond in a generally honest or dishonest manner, Hartshorn and May discovered instead that the situation was the primary determinant of "honest" behavior, and children were strikingly inconsistent instead.

In short, the notion of most "consistent personality traits" has received about as much research support as "the accurate perceiver" or "the accurate eyewitness," that is, very little.

How can this be? And what about all those personality tests circulating out there?

• When we look back over our lives, don't we perceive a consistent thread?
• Don't we have a picture of our personality that is so comparatively precise that we can excuse some of our behavior by explaining that we are "not ourselves?"
• Aren't we so recognizable that other people will notice if we act differently?
• Don't psychologists spout impressive reliability coefficients for their "personality tests," indicating that either we describe ourselves consistently when we retake such a test or our answers at a single sitting are internally consistent?

In more recent decades, social psychologists have come instead to embrace the concept of "self" more than "personality." The concept of self is probably a more fruitful line of inquiry and moves us away from "personality tests" that could be strongly influenced by format response set issues, social desirability, and even by the sheer number of items. "Personality traits" differ from the concept of "the self".

So why do we feel we have a "personality"? For all the reasons below:

• We DO have a self.
• We have relative consistency in temperament.
• Over the short term we have relative stability in roles and significant others.
• As adults we have stable responses and scripts.
• We have memories of our own personal history (although as we have seen, memories may be inaccurate; studies of "flashbulb memories," people's schema of where they were and what they were doing at historical or auspicious moments--President Kennedy's assassination; Pearl Harbor; September 11--often turn out to be erroneous.)
• We have CHOICES.

To borrow from the late, great George Herbert Mead, the self is a concept, an image or schema of our persona, and it is both subject and object.  That is, the subjective self acts, "the I" initiates action, it dreams, plans and thinks. At the same time, the self is reflexive or an object: a "me;" we think about our self, plan for our self, and view the self as we do another person. The self is an on-going social construction; it is never finished. We don't think of the self as "being complete" at any particular age.

It is because of the self, or our perception of a unified entity, that we believe that we "have a personality." But, although we view our self as having consistent tendencies to act, the self is not the same kind of construct as a set of personality traits.

What goes into the self?

• Temperament, or biologically-based predispositions
• Our physical image
• Feedback from others, especially significant others
• Experiences from playing social roles, such as daughter, father, boss or student
• Our values and beliefs

Body image, for example, changes enormously over time, from young children to the elderly. Abrupt changes in our physical state impinge on our sense of self. Recall the enormous literature on how physical appearance influences others' perception of us. Why would we be immune to our perceptions of our own attractiveness? What are your reactions upon watching yourself on video, listening to yourself on a tape recorder, or even catching an unexpected glimpse of yourself in a store window? For positive or negative, your response might very well be: "is that me?"

Role discontinuity often occurs in a socially programmed or scripted way as people acquire or discard social roles. Consider the change from high school to college to work roles, from single person to spouse or parent. Often these role discontinuities occur at the same time as relocation to a new city, state or country. For example, an individual may, simultaneously, become divorced, take a new job and move to a new location. It is no wonder that high rates of depression and anxiety appear in the first year after divorce! At the same time, we experience an abrupt change in our sense of self. Others may tell us that we are "not ourselves." However, roles typically stay stable for long periods of time, and, as they remain stable, most of the time, so does our "self." Further, changes or role transitions, are often marked by some kind of ritual ceremony, such as graduation, or a wedding, or a briss or christening. These ceremonies help us to demarcate the changes between the old self and the new, and make the transition far less traumatic than it would be otherwise. We "expect" a "new self" during clearly demarcated periods of role transition.

Temperament probably has a strong biological base. Some folks "run at a higher speed" or are more energetic, some are shy, some are musical. John Watson was wrong in the 1920s: while we could probably make anyone a decent musician, we still don't know how to create a musical genius. Attributes such as excitability thresholds probably are influenced by our genetics.

We must be very careful how to interpret the concept of temperament (see below). Professionals in the field DO NOT mean biology is destiny. Far from it. It is unlikely that your predispositions create a major portion of your life (and some talented musicians become math teachers). However, temperament tends to be stable over time, although it can be altered by social trauma that, for example, raises cortisol levels and other stress hormones, or by pregnancy, or by disease (e.g., thyroid problems). Because you "feel" the same, this again lends stability to one's sense of self.

Feedback from others plays a major role in shaping the self-concept. It may be from significant others, such as parents, siblings, close friends, teachers, bosses, lovers, spouses, and our own children. Because most of us choose friends and social locations staffed with similar others, and because significant others tend to be in our lives for a long time, continuity in these "reflected appraisals" contributes to a feeling of self-stability. Our demographics such as sex, ethnicity, birth cohort, region, etc. expose people in different categories to different life experiences (that may be stable over time), and influence how others perceive and treat us.

Our response categories tend to be habitual, maybe even ritual. We drive to work or school the same way each day, watch our favorite TV program each week, visit the same church, synagogue, or mosque regularly, and see the same people in our neighborhood. No wonder it appears that we have a "stable personality!" After all, what is new?

And, of course, we have memories, that give the thread of continuity to our lives.

Thus, a combination of temperament, roles, feedback, memories, and response categories convince us that we have, further, that we are, a stable combination of "personality traits," conveying a sense of consistency that doesn't really objectively exist. When these factors change suddenly, through bodily changes, role or situation dislocations, or our environment changes dramatically, then we are "not ourselves." As the situation restabilizes and new responses become habitual, we once again become believers in "personality theory."

• an internal property
• a collection of stable predispositions to respond
• a product of largely one's personal history, and
• it is considered to be an objective entity.

The self, or more accurately, the collection of selves many social psychologists believe comprise most of us, is:

• an on-going
• life-long
• largely subjective construction
• heavily influenced by feedback from others and
• role and situational familiarity and/or changes.

By the way, this treatise on the self really shouldn't make anyone feel insecure. As individuals, each of us is a self with a high degree of choice. We forge our opinions, beliefs, and values, often choose our friends, our educations, and our careers. We create ourselves--our many selves.

The self is, to a large degree, created from the outside in, rather than from the inside out. Research indicates that even the perceptions of the emotions we feel, or our bodily sensations such as hunger, are influenced by cognitive labels from other people. For example, if an experimenter makes your religion or ethnicity salient ("oh, by the way, our studies find that Catholics just don't tolerate pain well..."), not only do you claim that you find electric shocks less painful, but you actually rate the shocks as less painful to yourself. Ways we may learn "ourselves"

• as children is through "private speech" (Vygotsky). By speaking aloud to ourselves as children, we may engage in dialogue with the self and internalize our parents' (and other significant others) rules and concepts.

• by role playing, and playing a large variety of roles, we learn empathy, or how people feel in diverse situations. A century ago, George Herbert Mead proposed that we first learn empathy with others, then we appy empathy to the self. Mead felt that children's games (baseball, house) were one way that children learned empathy and created a self, because complex children's games typically require individuals to play a wide variety of roles, and see the game from different perspectives.

• through reflected appraisals, or feedback with others. Charles Horton Cooley coined the idea of the looking glass self, that is, individuals learn who they are by having appraisals of the self reflected back to them from others. Self-schema, which has some similarities with the term self-concept, refers to how we perceive the self and is influenced by reflected appraisals, Reflected appraisals may explain why individuals who match their culture's ideals of beauty do, in fact, often do better than those "less attractive." Physically attractive individuals receive more positive feedback from others (and NOT just on their looks.) Receiving this feedback may create a self fulfilling prophecy. This feedback may create the very reality that it claims to observe. Because good-looking individuals receive more positive feedback, they may have a higher sense of self-efficacy, or confidence in their ability to perform well in particular situations. As a result, they will actually perform better because they will have longer endurance at a task.

• Conversely, if someone has a "spoiled identity," or is stigmatized in some way ("dumb," "criminal," "flightly," etc.), we will treat them in ways that indicate that we expect little from them. No surprise! Bereft of positive feedback, perhaps truncated in performance before the individual even has the chance to complete their performance, poorly rated on performance compared with similar work from others, the individual learns to give up early.

• through social comparison with others. In Leon Festinger's theory of social comparison, individuals learn who they are by comparing their responses with others. He believed that, when available, similar others provide the greatest basis for comparison. Of course, who is similar varies with the situation. In a foreign land, any American may immediately become a similar other, despite any other differences. After an exam, you may be particularly interested in how others in similar majors have performed.

The symbolic interactionist approach began about a century ago, largely at the University of Chicago. Philosopher George Herbert Mead was strongly impressed by the works of Ivan Pavlov and John Watson, and he styled himself a "social behaviorist." What did this mean?  Certainly the theoretical approach that Mead formulated was only surfacely related to stimuli and responses. But what Mead did do was to generally reject Freud's work on id, ego, superego and unconscious impulses and conflicts. For Mead, not only were people not bundles of unconscious impulses, we weren't even "created internally." Rather, people are symbolic creatures, consciously searching for meaning and the self is a  social creation. Language and symbol use is crucial. (The "social learning" approach cited in the Michener and DeLameter book chapter is basically a symbolic interactionist approach. Also check out chapter 17 on role identities.)

Symbolic interactionists are basically gestaltists, interested more in patterns and meaning than in molecular behaviors. Terms such as script and schema indicate the SI theorist's interest in interrelated sequences of behavior. Mead put great stock in the "generalized other" (basically society and society's dictates) as well as the significant others in our immediate environment who we love and on whom we rely.

We owe the SI theorists for the original concept of the self that is in use today. Additional terms include the looking-glass self and reflected appraisals, the "I" (self as active subjective) versus the "me" (the reflexive self as object), and how role-taking and empathy affect self-objectivity. We have a multiplicity of selves, and a hierarchy of selves and identities. Notice how this perspective neatly dovetails with Bem's self-perception theory approach and how Vygotsky's work may identify the mechanisms of internalization. Both the sociological symbolic interactionists and the "rabid behaviorist" take remarkably similar "outside-in" perspectives on self-knowledge.

Rather than being pathological or abnormal, we change among our different selves typically speedily and with ease. For example, consider the different role and situation "situated" identities that we assume (parent at a doctor's office; parent with a neighborhood parent) and the discrepancies among our actual,our "ideal,"and our "ought" selves. Health researchers call these multiple selves "buffers"--you are one person at work, another with your family, a third with your friends, a fourth at your house of religious worship. Since most of the time, at least some of these spheres function well, this multitude of selves helps keep us mentally and physically healthy.

We owe the SI theorists for emphasizing the impact of significant others and how these change over the life cycle. As you move from one life stage to another, as you acquire new roles and discard old ones, so you acquire new significant others. You may lose close friends as you change and you lose family members and other loved ones through death. All these gains and losses influence the self. At the least, your reflected appraisals will change.

Greater self-awareness can promote more honest or "civilized" behavior (it causes lots of impression management attempts). By the way, creating self-awareness is not terribly difficult, a mirror will do it.

Prior to the nineteenth century and even early into the twentieth century, the behavioral and social sciences were dominated by "biology is destiny" theories of "personality." The ancient Greek philosophers discussed personal tendencies in terms of "bodily humours." Western and Asian astrologers cited the influence of time of the year--or even the very year--of one's birth as bestowing personality traits. Freud's theories of unconscious clashes among ego, id and superego, the physical, the rational, and societal demands, quickly spread worldwide.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, three important streams of thought challenged each other. The first, Social Darwinism, was a somewhat misstated version of Darwin's theories of evolution. The "most fit" were seen as the most likely to surviveand dominate society. Each human behavior was viewed in terms of how it contributed to the "fittest" of the "human race." These streams of thought led some to conclusions that we now find ludicrous. For example, the disease cholera, an infection spread through poor sanitation, was recharacterized as "proof" that the lower classes were less fit (no surprise: sanitation facilities were far better in wealthier neighborhoods, and the disease less prevalent.) Educated women were characterized as thin and pale, leached by their studies, and contrasted with the supposedly sturdier and more fertile peasant girls. Indeed, arguments were made to keep women from studying math, which was supposed to render us infertile. (Forget your contraceptives, just take calculus...)

Of course, these important themes emerged in theories of personality and behavior. Ross and McDougal, early social psychologists viewed human social behavior as dominated by instincts--they categorized dozens of them, including humor. Even philosophers such as George Herbert Mead, or early sociologists such as Emile Durkheim believed that biology determined a man's occupation, or differentiated social classes.

Yet a second important paradigm was emerging that came to dominate twentieth century thought on personality: Pavlov in Russia and Watson in the U.S. felt that in the stimulus-response linkage, they had discovered the equivalent of the cell in biology or the atom in physics. From the stimulus-response or behaviorist perspective, the person was a tabula rosa or blank slate. S-R connections were all. Radical in its perspective, behaviorists proposed that occupational destination was a matter of conditioning; the social class differences that exist occurred because of childhood and adult socialization. Cultural differences, often previously defined as biologically based, were redefined as a matter of learning. It was not too much of a hop or skip to define any sex differences as determined by learning experiences and reinforcement contingencies.

Both biological and behavioral views of humanity remained determinist, influenced on the one hand by biological inheritance or hormones and on the other by reinforcement schema. Concepts such as originality, creativity, or "free will" appeared delegated to philosophers, or even non-existent.

The third, or developmental paradigm, grew out of Freud's work, as well as research by Jean Piaget in Switzerland and Erickson in the United States. Biology was still present, grounding the individual in biological stages of development. Biology determined what was possible at particular ages. For example, one developmental joke has it that you can toilet-train an infant starting at age one, but that the process takes a year and a half. On the other hand, if you begin toilet-training at age two, you are done in six months. Their point was that the child had to have physical control over excretory bodily functions in order for toilet training to succeed.

Developmentalists accept the influence of culture factors and personal socialization histories.Most propose an interaction type of approach: stage of development interacts with environment to not only produce behavior, but wishes, motivations, and internal conflicts. For example, suppose one's parents have a lackadaisical attitude toward feeding and meals. The family snacks constantly and meals appear at unscheduled, irregular intervals. This situation might prove disasterous for young infants, who wail and worry as they wait to be fed. On the other, this "sloppy" family might have next to no effect on a school age child, who faces a whole new set of challenges in mastering the academic and social material of school.

By the mid-1970s, the dominant paradigm was clearly behaviorist. Behavior (perhaps with a bit of developmental modification) was seen as totally shaped by environmental circumstances. Any hint of biological differences was viewed as racist, sexist--and inaccurate.

What happened?

DNA happened. Gigantic steps forward in genetic research happened. Pharmaceutical advances in the treatment of depression and mania happened. We could actually begin to locate genes for alcoholism. Emotional dysfunction, such as obsessive-compulsive disorder or agoraphobia, or psychosis, such as bipolar depression, came to some extent under pharmaceutical control. Prozac became a household word. So did premenstrual dysfunction.

What happened to social psychology textbooks?

What happened to most was that chapters on socialization totally vanished from social psychology textbooks. Rather than trying to confront or integrate information from these surges in understanding with the older learning theory paradigms, textbooks sidestepped the issues entirely. Thus, while most continued to incorporate chapters on social learning, and some of the research on development, a generation of research on our own biochemistry and behavior was largely ignored except for some "sociobiologists" who adapted these findings for their own political agendas.

Temperament is a concept with a long history, but it was reintroduced by Jerome Kagan and other developmental behavioral scientists in the late 1980s. Temperament describes consistent propensities to respond that probably have a biological basis. For example, for several years, psychologists have suspected that characteristics such as introversion or extroversion reflect biological tendencies concerning the person's comfort with different levels of social stimulation (and informational input more generally), extroverts desiring more and introverts less of it. Students of sex and gender find that on the average boys "run at a slightly higher speed" than girls, and have higher basal metabolism rates or rates of physical activity. Our DNA probably influences whether we are visual, aural, or tactal learners.

For a very beginning mapping attempt, for example, to see why people speak and use language the way we do, click HERE.

It's only a start on a small group of people, but...

What are we to make of all this?

• First, temperament does NOT mean that "biology is destiny." Temperament will almost certainly not be the determining factor in how much money you make or whether you will be a good parent.

• In short, temperament is NOT a stratification tool. For example, some folks become doctors, others lawyers, others accountants, others sports agents. While each occupation draws upon different skills, generally most people in these upper middle class occupations do well financially. Similarly, someone with good mechanical ability from a working class family may work at a garage as an auto mechanic; their middle class cousin manages the garage, and their upper middle class cousin becomes an engineer. The differences in self-concept created by differential treatments and societal opportunities probably affect sex differences in marketplace achievement far more than basal metabolism.

• Temperament, along with your personal history, is part of what makes you a unique human being, and may shape your hobbies or what you like in other people. The introvert may crave a "restful mate." The extrovert may prefer team sports.

• Temperament is probably consistent for most of your life. It may contribute to whether you (and others)  think of you as fairly moody, an optimist, a "fast talker," or phlegmatic. In other words, temperament helps make you recognizable to yourself and to others. It contributes to a stable sense of self.

In its place, temperament contributes to how we and others view others and particular talents we may have. But it is a very different construct from those used by Social Darwinists a century ago to explain social differences in stratification or group differences, such as gender roles.
 

These themes will re-emerge at we look more at socialization in Guide Six. This section introduces you to learning theories and developmental theories and does a quick comparison between them.

LEARNING THEORIES

Learning or reinforcement theories center around observable stimuli and responses. All learning theories incorporate some form of association or contiguity (events that happen together are linked together; events with similar meaning are linked together) and motivation or drive state. Unlike the active organism seeking meaning, older learning theory versions tended to view people as passive or reactors. Newer learning theories are much more cognitive and see individuals as integrating and using information. Guide Six will explore learning theories in more detail.

DEVELOPMENTAL THEORIES

Developmentalists believe stages of development are often keyed to some type of biological maturity (reinforcement theorists don't believe this). Stages influence how your "personality" and sense of self develop. For example, according to this view, children neglected as infants would have considerable difficulties trusting others later. We must resolve conflicts at earlier stages or they continue into adulthood. Freud was a developmentalist. Kohlberg was a developmentalist who described moral judgments: he believed we progress through six stages (but a symbolic interactionist would say we learn moral rules). Other developmentalists include Vygotsky, Piaget, and Kagan.

More recent developmentalists (Eriksen; Levinson; Katz) describe the entire life-course, including aging. The "midlife crisis" popularizes part of some recent developmental theories. [Alas, the "midlife crisis" looks like many whining baby-boomers (birth cohort effect) who turned 40 just when social scientists studied them so it is a very culturally specific, not universal life stage]. The general principle of lifetime socialization and self-development appears valid. High divorce rates in the 1960s and 1970s showed us that "old dogs" do learn "new tricks": housewives assumed new roles as students and workers that changed them forever. Ex-husbands learned domestic skills and often started mid-life families.

For a symbolic interactionist, the self is a social construction process that evolves as our lives change. SI theorists have a very easy time with the idea of lifetime socialization. As roles and situations change, so do you. Terms coined include: professional socialization, anticipatory socialization or adult socialization. We acquire and discard roles during the life course.

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Susan Carol Losh October 12 2002