Engleski A - 2014./15. jesen - Task 3
Think of the last time you tried to describe someone, or attempted to explain your ownbehaviour to another person. Chances are you used words such as "shy" or "confident","friendly" or "reserved". When trying to understand our own, or other people's behaviour, wetend to fall back on these psychological categories without even thinking. . Of course,in reality none of us is so easily defined.
And yet the desire to define ourselves is undeniable. Personality, by which we generallymean the thoughts, feelings and behaviour that make each of us individual, fascinates andchallenges us. . Meanwhile, our identity and relation to the world is defined in thecategories psychologists and scientists have identified.
In reality, we are all made up of conflicting traits. . For example, we can be carefuland controlling in one area but spontaneous thrill-seekers in another. So can the contradictorynature of human behaviour ever be neatly classified into a set of universal traits? TheVictorians certainly thought so.
Towards the end of the nineteenth century, Sir Francis Galton pioneered an approachcalled lexical analysis, proposing that the most significant personality differences in people'slives were encoded in their language. This theory was debated and refined over thenext 100 years. In 1936, US psychologists Gordon Allport and H. S. Odbert extracted almost18,000 personality-describing words and reduced them to around 5,000 common traits.Soon after, psychologist Raymond Cattell took those terms and reduced them further to 171and then to 16 . He then identified five broad traits that came to be known as "the big five":openness, neuroticism, conscientiousness, extroversion and agreeableness. . If, say,you register high in openness, you are likely to be emotionally adventurous, willing to try newthings and intellectually curious.
But what, you may be wondering, was the point of focusing so intently on personalityresearch? What did researchers such as Galton and Cattell hope to gain? .
Personality is only of interest to psychologists if it can give them information about how we'relikely to behave - now and in the future.
Personality is only of interest to psychologists if it can give them information about how we'relikely to behave - now and in the future.
Rita Carter has recently published research which argues that people behave differentlydepending on context. . "Instead of saying we're one particular type," she says, "it ismore complex. You need to examine each of our individual personalities and then look at howthey fight each other."
Are we entirely predictable creatures that can be classified according to a finite number oftraits, or do we adapt according to our mood and situation? The debate continues.
