PSYA02H3 Chapter 14: ch.14 detailed textbook notes

• School: UTSC
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYA02H3
• Professor: John Bassili

Document Summary

striking cases of identical twins reunited in adulthood suggest that heredity plays an important role in shaping personality. needs to be backed up by scientific evidence; can"t just rely on anecdotes. people differ so much - have different styles of thinking, of relating to others, of working, which relfect differences in personality. differences crucial to defining us as individuals. to psychologists, the definition of personality is narrow - a particular pattern of behaviour and thinking that prevails across time and situations and differentiates one person from another. psychologists assess personality from results of special tests designed to identify particular personality characteristics. goal is to discover the causes of individual differences in behaviour. research on human personality requires two kinds of effort - identifying personality characteristics and determining the variables that produce and control them. identifying and describing a personality characteristic is not the same as explaining it.