Personality theories

There are several theoretical perspectives on personality in psychology, which involve different ideas about the relationship between personality and other psychological constructs, as well as different theories about the way personality develops.

Generally the opponents to personality theories claim that personality is "plastic" in time, places, moods and situations. Changing personality may in fact result from diet (or lack thereof), medical effects, historical or subsequent events, or learning. Stage managers (of many types) are especially skilled in changing a person's resulting "personality". Most personality theories will not cover such flexible people nor unusual situations. Therefore, although personality theories do not define personality as "plastic" over time, they do imply a drastic change in personality is highly unusual.

Most theories can be grouped into one of the following classes:

Trait theories

According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association, personality traits are "enduring patterns of perceiving, relating to, and thinking about the environment and oneself that are exhibited in a wide range of social and personal contexts."

In other words, persons have certain characteristics which partly determine their behaviour. According to the theory, a friendly person is likely to act in a friendly way in any situation because of the traits in his personality. One criticism of trait models of personality as a whole is that they lead professionals in clinical psychology and laypeople alike to accept classifications, or worse offer advice, based on superficial analysis of one's profile.

The most common models of traits incorporate four or five broad dimensions or factors. The least controversial dimension, observed as far back as the ancient Greeks, is simply extroversion vs. introversion (outgoing and physical-stimulation-oriented vs. quiet and physical-stimulation-averse).

Gordon Allport delineated different kinds of traits, which he also called dispositions. Central traits are basic to an individual's personality, while secondary traits are more peripheral. Common traits are those recognized within a culture and thus may vary from culture to culture. Cardinal traits are those by which an individual may be strongly recognized.

Raymond Cattell's research propagated a two-tiered personality structure with sixteen "primary factors" (16 Personality Factors) and five "secondary factors." A different model was proposed by Hans Eysenck, who believed that just three traits - extroversion, neuroticism and psychoticism - were sufficient to describe human personality. Differences between Cattell and Eysenck emerged due to preferences for different forms of factor analysis, with Cattell using oblique, Eysenck orthogonal, rotation to analyse the factors that emerged when personality questionnaires were subjected to statistical analysis. Today, the Big Five factors have the weight of a considerable amount of empirical research behind them. Building on the work of Cattell and others, Lewis Goldberg proposed a five-dimension personality model, nicknamed the "Big Five":

Extroversion (i.e., "extroversion vs. introversion" above; outgoing and physical-stimulation-oriented vs. quiet and physical-stimulation-averse)

Neuroticism (i.e., emotional stability; calm, imperturbable, optimistic vs. emotionally reactive, prone to negative emotions)

Agreeableness (i.e., affable, friendly, conciliatory vs. aggressive, dominant, disagreeable)

Conscientiousness (i.e., dutiful, planful, and orderly vs. spontaneous, flexible, and unreliable)

Openness to experience (i.e., open to new ideas and change vs. traditional and staid)

John L. Holland's RIASEC vocational model, commonly referred to as the Holland Codes, stipulates that there are six personality traits that lead people to choose their career paths. This model is widely used in vocational counseling and is a circumplex model where the six types are represented as a hexagon where adjacent types are more closely related than those more distant.

Building on the writings and observations of Carl Jung, during WWII Isabel Briggs Myers and her mother Katharine C. Briggs delineated personality types by constructing the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. This model was later elaborated further by David Keirsey. It is an older, more theoretically-motivated, but quite popular approach to personality traits and is also called the Big Four model, accepting Extroversion vs. Introversion as basic and further adding three more dimensions:

Extroversion vs. Introversion
Intuition vs. Sensing (trust in conceptual/abstract models of reality versus concrete sensory-oriented facts)

Thinking vs. Feeling (thinking as the prime-mover in decision-making vs. feelings as the prime-mover in decision-making)

Perceiving vs. Judging (desire to perceive events vs. desire to have things done so judgements can be made)

This personality typology has some aspects of a trait theory:

It explains people's behaviour in terms of opposite fixed characteristics. In these more traditional models, the intuition factor is considered the most basic, dividing people into "N" or "S" personality types. An "N" is further assumed to be guided by the thinking or objectication habit, or feelings, and be divided into "NT" (scientist, engineer) or "NF" (author, human-oriented leader) personality. An "S", by contrast, is assumed to be more guided by the perception axis, and thus divided into "SP" (performer, craftsman, artisan) and "SJ" (guardian, accountant, bureaucrat) personality. These four are considered basic, with the other two factors in each case (including always extraversion) less important. Critics of this traditional view have observed that the types are quite strongly stereotyped by professions, and thus may arise more from the need to categorize people for purposes of guiding their career choice. This among other objections led to the emergence of the five factor view, which is less concerned with behavior under work stress and more concerned with behavior in personal and emotional circumstances. Some critics have argued for more or fewer dimensions while others have proposed entirely different theories (often assuming different definitions of "personality").

Type A and Type B personalities

During the 1950s, Meyer Friedman and his co-workers defined what they called Type A and Type B behavior patterns. They theorized that intense, hard-driving Type A personalities had a higher risk of coronary disease because they are "stress junkies." Type B people, on the other hand, tend to be relaxed, less competitive, and lower in risk. There is also a Type AB mixed profile. Dr. Redford Williams, cardiologist at Duke University refuted Friedman’s theory that Type A personalities have a higher risk of coronary heart disease, however, current research indicates that the hostility component of Type A may have health implications. Type A/B theory has been extensively criticized by psychologists because it tends to oversimplify the many dimensions of an individual's personality.

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