Whatever university you attend, if you study psychology, you’ll have a discipline called “personality psychology. “This certainly seems to be a very interesting subject. However, we dare to say that it is not easy.
But you don’t have to worry about how complicated it can be. The point is that there are many models, with their associated updates, patches, and patches, that you need to learn. It’s like you’ve started studying chemistry and there are several different periodic tables. You can imagine the extent of the confusion we’re talking about.
- There is another confusion that goes beyond all the models and definitions involved and that cannot be ignored: we are talking about the existence of personality.
- Believe it or not.
- The question: does personality really exist? It is still latent for many people.
- Think about it.
- Can we say that a person is nice in the same way that we say that they are tall or short?.
Eysenck, McCrae and Costa would probably say yes. These two individuals are the creators of the most famous and reproduced periodic personality table. Even when you study personality psychology, you’ll still see their names mentioned in the books. In addition, fans of factor analysis, key components and other techniques should also be synthesized through statistical processes.
However, surely you know someone who is extroverted in one context and introverted in another, sometimes you don’t even need to change context, as a general rule, we can oscillate in this dimension even in the same social encounter.
As you can see, talking about personality is complex and can be a little confusing. Wouldn’t it be much easier if we could categorize people the way we do things?They would all be much more predictable. Unfortunately, this is quite implausible, given the individuality of each person.
What if our belief in personality traits was an illusion, like Santa Claus?After all, many people are not consistent in different situations. This possibility shook the foundations of personality psychology in the late 1960s, when Walter Mischel published a book entitled Personality and Evaluation. .
What was this psychologist proposing? Well, maybe he considered the possibility, but he didn’t stop at personality psychology, at least not because of the way 8 Edo killed Abel or Nietzsche beheaded God, in this case Mischel opted for a contextual personality assessment. focus on different people’s reactions to specific situations.
This author stated that a person in himself is not honest, but that it is possible to identify a tendency in him to be honest in certain circumstances. Let’s look at an example. Carlos can be honest when he doesn’t make a profit lying, but he may not be when he does. With this information, what can we say about Carlos’ honesty?
By broadening this thinking, Carlos may not be honest in protecting his loved ones, but he can be if he makes a lot of money for it. Carlos is a whole world. Every person is a universe.
According to him, there are five variables to which a person’s behavior is sensitive:
When a person talks about the difficulty of taking other subjects, he does not understand that psychology encompasses the most complex object of study: the human being himself, which explains the difference between popular knowledge and scientific knowledge. of the difficulty of its purpose.
Mischel believed that any behavior was the product of an interaction, the one that occurs during the situation, how to perceive this situation and the resources to negotiate with it, the consistency that we would find when we talked about traits would then be or be limited to specific situations in which the most prominent characteristics are identical or similar.
To this day, personality psychology remains the subject of much criticism, especially with regard to its theories about personality traits. There seems to be some consensus that there is a general trend.
If, for example, we put John in front of 100 situations that test his honesty, we could get a percentage in which he is honest and give him a score on the scoreboard: 65% honesty.
But would it be possible to predict John’s behavior in a particular situation with this information?Someone can offer John a lot of money for lying about something; However, John may choose to reject the offer and be honest, as he has no economic problems. and there are no great aspirations in this regard.
The problem is that we actually have very little information about the people in front of us, for example, we can know your current account balance, but not your brother’s, who needs money.
In the methodology, there is a cruel certainty: a population can measure on average so many centimeters, but there may be no one in that population exactly at that point. Thus, to a large extent, the psychology of personality struggles to transcend theoretical models and apply them to reality.
The young Foucault was aware that “the dialectical nature of the individual’s relationship with his environment forces psychopathology to assume a necessarily ecological perspective, nullified by the possibility of considering the sick individual in isolation” (Novella, 2009).
As for the didactic part, it can be said that the models mentioned in the introduction look great in Power Point presentations. However, there are still many different problems around you. At this point, the theory seems exhausted; survived mainly thanks to the rise of positive psychology.
Sooner or later it will be the data, which takes precedence over reflection, that will begin to guide us towards a solution.