How would you describe your personality? Maybe friendly, creative, quirky? What about nervous, or timid, or outgoing? But has anyone ever called you a sanguine? What about a Kapha, or full of metal? Ancient Greek physician Hippocrates believed
personality manifested itself in four different humors, and, basically, you are who you are
because of your balance of phlegm, blood, and yellow and black bile. According to traditional Chinese medicine,
our personalities depend on the balance of five elements: Earth, Wind, Water, Metal and
Fire. Those who practice traditional Hindu Ayurvedic
Medicine view each other as unique combinations of three different mind-body principles called
Doshas. But Sigmund Freud thought our personalities
depended in part on who was winning the battle of urges between the Id, Ego, and Superego. Meanwhile, humanistic psychologist Abraham
Maslow suggested that the key to self-actualization was first successfully climbing a hierarchy
of more basic needs. And then, you've got your BuzzFeed quizzes
to determine what kind of pirate, or font, or sandwich, or Harry Potter character you
are, but, that, I would never take one of those seriously. All this is to say that people have been characterizing
one another for a long, long time, and whether you're into blood, or bile, or ego, or id,
or BLT, or PB&J, there are a lot of ways to describe and measure a personality. And all these theories, all the years of research,
and cigar smoking, and inkblot gazing, and the fans debating whether they're more of
a Luke or a Leia, they're all funneling down to one big central question. Who, or what, is the self? [Intro] Last week we talked about how psychologists
often study personality by examining the differences between characteristics, and by looking at
how these various characteristics combine to create a whole thinking, feeling person. The early psychoanalytic and humanistic theorists
had a lot of ideas about personality, but some psychologists question their lack of
clearly measurable standards. Like, there was no way to really quantify
someone's inkblot response, or how orally fixated they might be. So this drive to find a more empirical approach
spawned two more popular theories in the twentieth century, known as the trait and social cognitive
perspectives. Instead of focusing on things like lingering
unconscious influences or missed growth opportunities, trait theory researchers look to define personality
through stable and lasting behavior patterns and conscious motivations. Legend has it that it all began in 1919, when
young American psychologist Gordon Allport paid a visit to none other than Freud himself. Allport was telling Freud about his journey
there on the train, and how there was this little boy who was obsessed with staying clean
and didn't want to sit next to anyone or touch anything. Allport wondered if the boy's mother had a
kind of dirt phobia that had rubbed off on him. So yadda yadda yadda, he's telling his tale,
and at the end of it Freud looks at him and says, "Mhmm.. Was that little boy you?" Allport was basically like, "No, man, that
was just some kid on the train. Don't try to make this into some big unconscious
episode from my repressed childhood". Allport thought Freud was digging a little
too deep, and that sometimes you just need to look at motives in the present, not the
past, to describe behavior. So Allport started his own club, describing
personality in terms of fundamental traits, or characteristic behaviors and conscious
motives. He wasn't so much interested in explaining
traits as he was in describing them. Modern trait researchers like Robert McCrae
and Paul Costa have since organized our fundamental characteristics into what's casually known
as The Big Five: openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism,
which you can remember using the mnemonic OCEAN, or CANOE, whichever one you prefer. Each of these traits exist on a spectrum,
so, for example, your level of openness can range, on one end, from being totally open
to new things and variety, or wanting strict, regular routine on the other end. Your degree of conscientiousness can translate
into being impulsive and careless, or careful and disciplined. Someone high on the extroversion end will
be sociable, while those on the low end will be shy and reserved. A very agreeable person, meanwhile, is helpful
and trusting, while someone at the opposite end may be suspicious or uncooperative. And finally, on the neuroticism spectrum,
an emotionally stable person will be calm and secure, while a less stable person is
often anxious, insecure, and self-pitying. The important idea here is that these traits
are hypothesized to predict behavior and attitude. Like an introvert might prefer communicating
through e-mail more than an extrovert, and an agreeable person is much more likely to
help their neighbor move that couch than a suspicious one who's just glaring through
the window. By adulthood, trait theorists will tell you
these characteristics are pretty stable, but it isn't to say that they can't flex a little
in different situations. Like that same shy person might end up singing
Elvis karaoke in a room full of people under the right conditions. So our personality traits are better at predicting
our average behavior that what we'd do in any specific situation, and research indicates
that some traits, like neuroticism, seem to be better predictors of behavior than others. This flexibility that we all seem to have
leads to the fourth major theory on personality, the social cognitive perspective. Originally proposed by our Bobo-beating friend
Alfred Bandura, the social cognitive school emphasizes the interaction between our traits
and their social context. Bandura noted that we learn a lot of our behavior
by watching and imitating others. That's the social part of the equation. But we also think a lot about how these social
interactions affect our behavior, which is the cognitive part. So, in this way, people and their situations
basically work together to create behavior. Bandura referred to this sort of interplay
as reciprocal determinism. Meaning, that for example, the kind of books
you read or music you listen to or friends you hang out with say something about your
personality, because different people choose to be in different environments, and then
those environments in turn continue to reinforce our personalities. So if Bernice has a kind of anxious-suspicious
personality, and she has a serious, titanic crush on Sherlock Holmes, she might be extra
attuned to potentially dangerous or fishy situations. But the more she sees the world in that way,
the more anxious and suspicious she gets. In this way, we're both the creators and the
products of the situations we surround ourselves with. That's why one of the key indicators of personality
in this school of thought has to do with our sense of personal control -- that is, the
extent to which you perceive that you have control over your environment. Someone who believes that they control their
own fate, or make their own luck, is said to have an internal locus of control, while
those who feel like they're just guided by forces beyond their control are said to have
an external locus. Now whether we're talking about control versus
helplessness, introversion versus extroversion, calm versus anxious, or whatever, each of
these different personality perspectives have their own methods of testing and measuring
personality. We've talked before about how the psychoanalyst
super-hunk Hermann Rorschach used his inkblot test to infer information about a person's
personality; we know that Freud used dream analysis, and both he and Young were both
fans of free association, but the broader school of theorists, now known as the psycho-dynamic
camp that descended from Freud and pals, also use other projective psychological tests,
including the famous thematic apperception test. In this kind of test, you'd be presented with
evocative but ambiguous pictures, and then asked to provide information about them. You might be asked to tell a story about the
scenes, considering things like how are the characters feeling, or what's going on, or
what happened before this event and what will happen after. Like check it out, is the woman crying because
her brother just died, or from a bee sting? Or is she a maid laughing because some royal
just passed out drunk on his bed, or perhaps the object of her long-burning affection has
just confessed his love in a fever haze all Jane Austen-style and she's having a mini-breakdown
in the hall?! The idea is that your responses will reveal
something about your concerns and motivations in real life, or how you see the world, or
about your unconscious processes that drive you. By contrast with that approach, though, modern
trait personality researchers believe that you can assess personality traits by having
people answer a series of test questions. There are lots of so-called personality trait
inventories out there. Some provide a quick reading on a particular
enduring trait, like anxiety or self-esteem, while other gauge a wide range of traits,
like our friends The Big Five. These tests, like the Myers-Briggs, which
you might have heard of, involve long questionnaires of true-false or agree-disagree questions
like, "Do you enjoy being the center of attention?", "Do you find it easy to empathize with others?",
or "Do you value justice over mercy?" But the classic Minnesota Multiphasic Personality
Inventory is probably the most widely used personality test. The most recent version asks a series of five
hundred and sixty-seven true-false questions, varying from "No one seems to understand me"
to "I like mechanics magazines" to "I loved my father", and is often used to identify
emotional disorders. Then there's how Bandura's social cognitive
camp sizes you up. Because this school of thought emphasizes
the interaction of environment and behavior rather than just traits alone, they aren't
solely into questions and answers. Instead, they might measure personality in
different contexts, understanding behavior in one situation is best predicted by how
you acted in a similar situation. Like, if Bernice freaked out and tried to
hide under the bed during the last five thunderstorms, we can predict that she will do that again
next time. And if we conducted a controlled lab experiment
where we, say, we looked at the effects of thunderstorm noises on people's behavior,
we might get an even better sense of what baseline psychological factors could best
predict storm-induced freak-outs. And finally, there are the Humanistic theorists
like Maslow. They often reject standardized assessments
altogether. Instead, they tend to measure your self-concept
through therapy, interviews, and questionnaires that ask subjects to describe both how they
would ideally like to be and how they actually are. The idea is that the closer the actual and
ideal are, the more positive the subject's sense of self. Which brings us back to that biggest motherlode
question of them all: Who, or what, is the self? All the books out there about self-esteem,
self-help, self-awareness, self-control, and so on are built upon one assumption: that
the self is the organizer of our thoughts and feelings and actions: essentially the
center of a personality. But of course, it's a sticky issue. One way to think about self is through the
concept of possible selves, like your ideal self, perhaps devastatingly attractive and
intelligent, successful, and well-loved, as well as your most feared self, the one who
could end up unemployed and lonely and rundown. This balance of potential best and worst selves
motivates us through life. In the end, once you factor in environment
and childhood experiences, culture and all that mess, not to mention biology which we
haven't even touched on today, can we really firmly define self? Or answer certainly that we even have one? That, my friend, is one of life's biggest
questions, and so far it has yet to be universally answered. But you learned a lot anyway today, right? As we talked about the trait and social cognitive
perspectives, and also about different ways these schools and others measure and test
personality. We also talked about what self is, and how
our self-esteem works. Thanks for watching, especially to our Subbable
subscribers who make Crash Course possible. To find out how you can become a supporter,
just go to subbable.com/crashcourse. This episode was written by Kathleen Yale,
edited by Blake de Pastino, and our consultant is Dr. Ranji Bhagwat. Our director and editor is Nicholas Jenkins,
and the script supervisor is Michael Aranda, who is also our sound designer, and the graphics
team is Thought Cafe.