Having
outlined the idea of trait theory and why it does not seem to work,
we will look to Personal
Construct Theory (PCT), which
suggests that we construct peoples personalities. To explain
this we might look towards one of the common paradoxes that arises in
assigning traits.
For
example, Fred may perceive upon meeting Gerald that he is loud and
obnoxious. However, Harry may may meet Gerald and perceive him as
outgoing and fun. In this sense, we look to the way Fred and Harry
attribute these traits and construct Gerald's personality. In
this sense we are looking towards our personal construction of
meaning.
In
theorising about personalities, we need to consider the extent to
which we construct our own versions of individual differences. This
PCT suggests that personality attribution is based on our own
theories about ourselves and others, which are directly influenced by
our preferences and meanings.
In
this sense, PCT is a form of phenomenological description extracted
from individuals and makes it a qualitative methodology that steps
out of the experimental paradigm, and focuses on understanding
individuals rather than categorising them (Butt, 2012).
In
our above example it is plain to see that Gerald is constructed
differently by Fred and Harry, so which, if either of them, is
correct? If we are talking about objectively true traits, then a
trait theorist would maintain one of them has to be wrong. It may be
that Harry is correctly being objective and Fred has taken a
disliking to Gerald.
How
could we be sure who was correct though?
How
each person makes sense of the world, influences how they perceive
things. The only way to be sure would be to go through an objective
assessment in a psychology lab. We will show this is problematic as
our next task, but an alternative to trait theory might be to listen
to Fred and Harry's construction of meaning through their own
phenomenological accounts.
We would discover the meanings they bring to bear on the
world and in this sense, PCT would seek to understand rather than try
to carve up the domain in to categories. PCT would take account of
the fact that we all have different likes and dislikes, which a trait
theory would fail to capture.
This leaves trait theory stuck trying to capture the objective
qualities of a person, independent of our experience of them.
Implicit in the assumption of trait theory is that people have
objective and measurable qualities, that are distinct and enduring.
The
reality shows us that we actually bring our own presuppositions and
preferences to the table when deciding what opinion we make of
people. Trait theory does not take account of this fact, and tries to
claim that people have objective qualities regardless of our view of
them.
However,
what we see is that this so called objective view cannot be separated
from our opinion. For example, even if we are told Gerald is fun and
outgoing, we may simply dislike him. It is not irrational to dislike
somebody, even if we find no good logical reason. We may be
questioned about why we dislike someone, but it is somewhat absurd to
claim that really he is an objectively outgoing person, when we find
him annoying and rude.
This
is because we may never experience this 'fact'. We might assent that
we have made an error of judgement, however, this can have no bearing
upon the validity of our intuition towards people, or influence our
viewpoint.
Here we are looking towards the fact that trait theory is
faced with the absurdity of trying to say that the multiple ways of
constructing people are incorrect, and there is one true objective
account of an individual. However, in real life people do not show up
in such a manner and this should point us to the error in this chain
of reasoning.
Having
outlined the basics of PCT,
we can start to make use of the criticisms its
advocates have made towards Trait theory, and show how a trait
theorists objective analysis and laboratory work is fraught with
problems.
Firstly,
the very foundations of Eysenck's research is challenged, since it
made use of statistical analyses to derive his personality index.
Remember, he used a factor analysis in order to group descriptions
together to form his list of 32 traits. To achieve this, he used a
psychometric questionnaire of the type where a mark is placed on a
numbered scale.
Such
surveys are characterised by 'strongly agree' or 'strongly disagree'
being placed at either end of this scale, and the respondent simply
circles a number to state the degree to which they agree or disagree
with a statement.
The
methodology of Eyesenck's work was to have subjects with these style questionnaires sat behind a one way window, where they observed
people in a room.
The idea was that the observers rated the
personality of those being observed. After a significant number of
repetitions with different observers, Eyesenck collected the results
together and conducted his factor analysis. In this sense he had the
significance of mathematics and empirically valid results to work
from.
However, it is at this stage where multiple problems emerge.
Posts
0 comments:
Post a Comment