Provide a Workable Definition of Personality

1. Provide a workable definition of Personality.

Personality can be described as a set of characteristics, behaviors and manners in which a person acts or expresses. They are a volume of guidelines that dictate how one lives their life; their thought patterns, their goals and achievements, their determination and resilience are all defined by their personality. Personalities are distinct and unique to the individual; they make up the core of each sentient being. Public expressions of personality in the way people act in everyday life are what draw humans together in society. For example, relationships are formed on the basis of personality and careers are chosen that pertain specifically to our personality. There are many complex theories about how ones personality is developed and maintained, but we can only speculate, as personality is impossible to measure accurately, although some personality tests and theories developed by psychologists in the twentieth century claim to measure or categorize ones personality fairly accurately. Some definitions of personality that I found useful in my studies are as follows:

“[Personality is a set of] dispositions, tendencies, appetites and instincts…” - Morton Prince.

“Personality refers both to people’s inner personalities and to their public personas; it consists of aspects such as motives, goals, beliefs and values. Both perspectives are enduring and affect the ways people think, feel and act.”- Jonathan M. Creek, Patricia L. Waters, from �Social Psychology’.

“Personality is the characteristic and distinctive behavior, emotions and thoughts that comprise an individual’s response to his or her circumstances and environment.” - Jonathan M. Creek, Patricia L. Waters, from �Social Psychology’.

2. Make brief notes on all the psychologists mentioned in the introduction.

TYPE THEORISTS

Carl Gustav Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist. He researched many complex theories, one of which was the three components of personality: The ego, personal unconscious and the collective unconscious. The collective unconscious contains archetypes. An archetype is an unlearned tendency to experience things in a certain way. His most famous types were introverts and extroverts. This then broke off into four functions; Sensing, thinking, intuiting and feeling. Every individual has these functions, but on different levels. We all have a superior function, a secondary function, a tertiary function and an inferior function. This idea is the bases of the Briggs-Myer Type Indicator, and the Keirsey Temperament Sorter. See below for more information.

Katherine Briggs

Isabel Briggs-Myer created the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) during World War Two, with an aim of predicting the jobs that women would be suited to upon entering the workforce. They had an extensive knowledge of personality traits, but had also taken a lot of work from Jung’s book of Psychological Types (1921). They believed that one is born with their personality type, or either develop it from the basis of genes. They pioneered the idea of sixteen personality types, each created from four characteristics. There are four pairs of �dichotomies’ that are more or less opposites, people are scaled at one end or the other.

Extraversion _________ Introversion

Sensation _________ Intuition

Thinking _________ Feeling

Judging _________ Perceiving

For example, one may be ESTJ, meaning they relate to: Extraverted, Sensation, Thinking, Judging.

Or, INFP, meaning they relate to: Introverted, iNtuition, Feeling, Perceiving.

This theory is that of 2D, and is based on the assumption that the four pairs of introverts are alike, and the four pairs of extraverts are alike, etc. This is tested through a series of questions, and one chooses the answer that they feel is best pertaining to them. The result is a personality type of four letters, which has since been categorized into career preferences. For example, after I took the test I resulted in ISFJ, which is �the protector’ and jobs suiting it are Lawyer, Judge, Policeman, among others.

David Keirsey invented the Keirsey Temperament Sorter, after working extensively in the fields of counseling and conflict management. The theory is one of four temperaments and sixteen character types, much like the MBTI.