14.1: Personality: What Is It and How Can We

• The video shows how genes influence our personality.
• The video shows that environmental factors can affect our genetic propensities in ways that are different between genetically identical individuals.

• In this chapter, we'll address a lot of fascinating questions about how our per sonalities develop over time.
• We'll soon learn that the answers to those questions aren't simple.
• We're wrong at least as often as we're right, even though most of us believe we can explain why people act the way they do.

• Few are more confident in their ability to explain behavior than radio and television "advice experts" and pop psychologists featured on television variety shows, many of whom liberally sprinkle their shows with off-the-cuff psychological accounts for people's behavior.

• Human behavior can be seen in radio and talk show personality.
• When trying to uncover the root causes of people's actions, we must keep in mind that personality is determined.
• There are hundreds or even thousands of reasons for complicated outcome of hundreds or even thousands of factors: genetic, prenatal, par complex, multiply determined psycho enting, peer influences, life stressors, and plain old luck, both good and bad.

• In the text, we learned how our social context can affect our behavior.

• We don't feel or behave like a product of the social factors that affect us at any given moment.
• Gordon Allport's definition of personality consists of relatively enduring predis relatively enduring predisposition positions that influence our behavior across many situations.

• Most modern personality research, including identifying general laws, is notthetic because it aims to derive govern the behavior of all individuals principles that explain the thinking, emotions, and behaviors of all people.
• This approach allows for generalization across individuals, but limited insight into the unique patterning of attributes within one person.

• The majority of case studies are idiographic.

• Jenny's attitudes toward her son were uncovered by Allport.
• When Jenny wrote about Ross in a positive way, there were themes of her early life that emerged; when she wrote about him in a negative way, there were themes of her unappreciated sacrifice for him.
• The idiographic approach reveals a richly detailed tapestry of one person's life, but allows for limited generalizability to other people.

• Falsifiability is difficult to fudge because the hypotheses are often post hoc.

• From the vantage point of behavior-genetic studies of personality, we'll first look at the question and then look at different theories of personality, including Freudian, behavioral, and humanistic models.
• They try to account for how we develop a conscience, as well as why some of us have a stronger conscience than others.

• If parents try to make all of their children more outgoing by reinforcing them with attention and succeeding in doing so, their parenting in this case is a shared environmental factor.

• If a child is treated more affectionately by a parent than another child, that child will end up with higher self-esteem, which is a nonshared environmental factor.

• Twin studies and adoption studies have been applied to personality to distinguish three sets of influences.
• If the environmental influences on both sets of twins are the same, a genetic influence could be inferred.
• In contrast, identical twin correlations that are equal to or less than fraternal twin correlations suggest the absence of a genetic component and point to nonshared environmental influences that make people within a family different.

• The data from Tellegen et al.
• shows that parents and teachers are influenced by genetic factors.

• Twins who were either male or female were examined in this study.
• A number of researchers have Replicability cated these findings in twin samples from intact families.

• Another lesson can be learned from The results in Table 14.1.

• Environmental influences that differ within families play an important role in personality.
• The identical twin correlations would be 1.0 if heritability was 1.0.

• Nonshared environmental influences must play a role in personality because they are less than 1.0.
• These findings don't tell us what the nonshared environmental influences are.

• It is possible that the similarities between identical twins are due to their upbringing rather than their genes.

• Twins raised apart have Falsifiability.

• Many had been separated almost immediately after birth, raised in different states and sometimes different countries, and finally found each other in the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport.

• Before psychologists conducted these studies, some prominent social scientists predicted that identical twins reared apart would barely resemble each other in personality Levey and Mark Newman.
• It came to be called in honor of the city's beloved base firefighters despite being unaware of each ball team.
• There were two identical twins in New Jersey and Queens, New York.

• They're similar to twins who are reared apart.
• It would be hard to come up with a convincing case for the genetics of personality.

• It's clear that identical twins reared apart are about the same as identical twins reared together.
• The finding suggests that shared environment, the sum total of environmental influences shared by members of the same family, does not play a role in the causes of adult personality.
• In other twin samples, behavior-genetic researchers have replicated this result.

• Although it's yet to exert a substantial impact on popular psychology, the 538 Chapter 14 may be the most stunning finding in recent personality psychology.
• Most psychologists put their money on shared environmental influences because they believed that the most important environmental influences are transmitted from parents to children.
• The results suggest that they were mistaken.

• As we grow older, the impact of shared environment on childhood personality fades.

• This finding suggests that if parents here with Lewis', left, adoptive mother, try to make all of their children outgoing, they should expose them to friendly chil separated at birth in the Minnesota Twins study.

• The finding that an adopted child's personality is similar to that of his or her identical twins in that study points to genetic influence; in contrast, the finding that an adopted female tried to conquer her child's personality is similar to that.

• These are anecdotes and could reflect in the chapter because they are measured by the California Psychological Inventory.

• Similar findings for other personality traits have been obtained by most researchers.
• Being raised together doesn't lead to much similarity in personality between parents and offspring.

• Based on Horn, J. M.

• Explain how each type of study contributes distinct and valuable information regarding the origins of personality, and describe the logic of twin studies.

• The nonshared environmental influences that Harbke, Papini, Jefferson, Herbst, and McCrae have shown are key to a family's identity.

• When psychologists searched for spe, popular claims about the importance of nonshared environmental influences received a boost from the work of science historian.
• The extent to which parents treat Frank.
• He looked at the association between birth their children differently or differences in the kinds of peers to order and attitudes toward revolutionary scientific theories such as which children don't interact at all.
• Historians were asked to evaluate Waldron.

• The search for non developers proposed them in the domain of psychopathology.
• He found that later-borns had more environmental influences than their parents.
• Firstborns are more likely to favor revolutionary ideas than investigators have examined monozygotic twin pairs.
• empster supported the status quo.
• Sulloway's findings raise the possibility of that.
• One twin has the disorder, but the other birth order is an important nonshared environmental influence.
• It's not clear how much we can generalize his findings to nonscien monozygotic twins, so this design cleverly controls for genetic factors.
• Critics have noted that the rating between them must be due to the nonshared environment.
• In the case of schizophrenia, Sulloway's panel of historians has found few if any who have been blind to their birth order.
• Sulloway's finding that later-borns are different from the twins hasn't been replicated by any of the differences in nonshared environment.
• Differences are more rebel than firstborns.

• Maybe the one who later developed the disorder.

• Some of us encounter positive events in our lives, while others encounter negative events, and these largely random events claim that firstborns tend toward achievement.
• If so, nomothetic approaches may be born, toward diplomacy and risk-taking.
• Most researchers have failed to uncover consistent associations between birth order and personality with idiographic approaches, which capture the full between birth order and personality.

• Researchers using twin and adoption studies have found that genes influence a variety of behaviors.
• These behaviors include divorce, religiosity, political views, and even the tendency to watch television.

• The death penalty and nudist colonies are among the social attitudes that are moderately heritable.
• Twin correlations are higher for each of these characteristics.

• The environment affects how certain personality traits play out in our lives.
• The pathways from genes to behavior are lengthy.
• We should be skeptical when we hear about a "gay gene," "alcoholism gene," "conservative gene," or "divorce gene" in the media.
• Although there are likely genetic influences on political views, homosexuality and even divorce, it's not likely that a single gene codes for them.