PSY 236 Lecture Notes - Lecture 10: Circular Reasoning, Psy, Lexical Hypothesis
Document Summary
Traits: consistent, stable, individual differences, decontextualized, non-conditional indicators of general trends. General, internal, and comparative dispositions that account for consistencies in behavior over time (relatively regular, not unchangeable) Traits are dimensional - not categorical - not personality traits . Dimensions: you can have a little or a lot (e. g. blood pressure) Categories: you either have it or you don"t (e. g. pregnancy) Traits explain the behavior of people who possess them. Assumed to be capacities that are present in the absence of overt expressions. Semantically useful - rule out other causes of behavior. Description of expressed behavior with no assumption about internality or causality. High frequency acts become viewed as traits. Circular reasoning about traits and how to avoid it: Trait used to explain behavior that is an indicator of trait. All important individual differences have become encoded in natural language. 18,000 personality terms in the english language used to distinguish the behavior of 1 human being from another.
