What are the theories of personality?

Personality theories are a set of academic constructs raised in psychology to explain variations in behavior between some individuals and others.

In Psychology, personality is understood as the set of subjective characteristics that make an individual unique and that determine their behavior in the face of their vital circumstances.

The pioneer of personality theories was Gordon Allport, an American psychologist who published the first book on this subject in 1936, and in which he suggested two ways of studying personality:

• Nomothetic psychology: studies universal behaviors.
• Ideographic psychology: studies the psychological traits that differentiate people.

Since then, the study of personality has been approached from different areas: genetic, social, environmental, etc.

In this sense, there are theories of personality that, in turn, can have multiple variants, according to changes or updates suggested by new authors or studies.

Freud’s psychoanalytic theory

Psychoanalytic theory was created by the Viennese psychologist Sigmund Freud at the beginning of the 20th century and essentially proposes the interaction of three parts of the personality:

• It: is the part of the personality that seeks immediate satisfaction.
• Me: is the part that realistically tries to satisfy the demands of the self.
• Super-ego: includes the moral and social aspects, in turn influenced by parental patterns.

Similarly, Freud claimed that the early childhood stage was essential for the development of the adult personality, and that the latter included 5 phases of psychosexual development:

1. Oral stage: it is expressed in the first 18 months of life and the baby tries to explore the world through the mouth.
2. Anal stage: lasts up to 3 years and is the phase in which the boy controls his sphincters.
3. Phallic stage: lasts up to 6 years and sexual differences begin to be explored.
4. Latency stage: lasts until adolescence and is characterized by the development of the sense of modesty.
5. Genital stage: refers to the physical and psychological changes of adolescence that end in adulthood.

German psychologist and psychoanalyst Erich Fromm also added his own assessments to create the theory of humanistic psychoanalysis. In this sense, Fromm distanced himself from Freud’s postulates about libido and dedicated himself to delving into the transcendental motivations of the human being, such as freedom and love.

For Fromm, the psychoanalyst’s objective should be to help the individual to know himself and guide him to find his personal freedom.

Jung’s psychoanalytic theory

One of Freud’s most prominent disciples and his psychoanalytic theory was Carl Jung. However, Jung made his own contribution to psychoanalysis by posing the concept of the collective unconscious. According to the researcher, all individuals share a series of common mental structures and these structures are stored in our dreams.

Furthermore, Jung proposed personality profiles based on the combination of two main categories (introversion and extroversion) and four functions (sensations, thought, intuition, feeling). The result is eight personality types.

Thought-outgoing

They create their own constructs from their experiences with the outside world and from the explanations they get from their interactions with others.

Intuition-extrovert

They have natural leadership skills as they have deep confidence in themselves and in what they can bring to the world.

Sentimental-extrovert

They are people with high socialization skills. His approach to reality is more emotional than rational.

Sensation-extrovert

They are adventurous people, their connection to the world is through new experiences. They are explorers of places and ideas by nature.

Introverted-thinking

They are characterized by the development of a deep self-awareness. They tend to self-reflection and consequently have an easy time identifying their strengths and weaknesses.

Intuition-introvert

They are people who tend to self-absorption and are dreamy and fantasy by nature. Because of that, they find it difficult to fit into the real world.

Sentimental-introvert

Although they are emotional people, their introversion prevents them from expressing what they feel, which can generate certain difficulties to express affection.

Feeling-introvert

They are people who experience the world from the stimuli they perceive from it. However, their insights and discoveries are part of their inner world, as they do not usually share their findings with others.

Pavlov and Skinner’s behavioral theories

Behaviorism is a theory of personality created by Ivan Pavlov and Frederick Skinner, based on the idea that external stimuli influence the formation and reinforcement of personality.

Pavlov and Skinner used the scientific method to explain how an organism’s interaction with its environment generated a “reward” for its behavior. This positive reinforcement promoted the repetition of the response to the stimulus.

This process had three essential elements:

• Stimulus: the signal from the environment that generates a response (the baby cries because they have left him alone).
• Answer: it is the action caused by the stimulus (the mother returns and carries it in her arms).
• Consequence: it is the association between the stimulus and the response (the baby learns that if the mother leaves him alone, he must cry for her to return).

Subsequently, behaviorism would develop two aspects: the classical conditioning (defended by Pavlov) that states, among other things, that the response to a stimulus is always involuntary.

For his part, Skinner would be the creator of the theory of operant conditioning, which suggests that the response to the stimulus is voluntary, at least most of the time.

See also:

• Clinical psychology.

Bandura’s cognitive theory

Albert Bandura developed a theory of personality based on the beliefs or expectations that an individual has about the world around him. These beliefs are called cognitions, so his theory was called cognitive theory.

Furthermore, Bandura argues that cognitive processes have a fundamental role in personality. Therefore, thoughts, memory, emotions and value judgments also influence people’s behavior.

Carl Rogers Humanist Theory

Carl Rogers proposes the development of personality as a product of the individual’s choices, based on his free will and his subjective vision of the world. This construct is known as the humanistic theory of personality.

Unlike psychoanalytic theory that is based on the pathologies of the individual, humanistic theory focuses on the study of a supposed human need to achieve meaningful goals.

In this sense, for humanistic psychologists there are four dimensions of personality, which are expressed to a greater or lesser degree in each individual:

• Unanimous sense of humor: it is a dimension typical of people who are very friendly, transparent and political.
• Reality and centered problem: it is a dimension that is expressed in people focused on the conflicts in their environment.
• Consciousness: it is the dimension that manifests itself in people who live life’s events in an intense and transcendental way.
• Acceptance: it is the dimension expressed in people who naturally flow with life events.

Allport’s ideographic theory

The American psychologist Gordon Allport raised the existence of psychological structures called traits. These traits can be central or secondary and their function is to decant the stimuli in such a way that they can be assimilated in a similar way in different situations.

This response system makes individuals better able to adapt to the environment and has an essential influence on people’s self-perception and self-esteem processes.

On the other hand, for Allport all individuals are oriented to the fulfillment of vital objectives, therefore, they are active beings with full participation in their personal development process. All his approaches were framed in his ideographic theory of personality.

Kelly’s theory of personal constructs

It is also known as theory of personal constructs, and although it has cognitive influences, it is considered rather a contribution more aligned with the postulates of constructivist theory.

This theory of personality developed by the psychologist George Kelly, starts from the assumption that people understand the world from dichotomous concepts, such as love-hate, joy-sadness, peace-war, etc.

In this sense, the personality of an individual can be defined from a series of qualifiers. However, what is interesting is the meaning that the person assigns to these qualifiers, since it is determined by their beliefs and experiences, that is, by their personal constructs.

Eysenck PEN model

The American psychologist Hans Eysenck proposed the PEN model, which is based on the existence of three essential factors that define an individual’s personality: psychotism, extraversion and neuroticism.

Eysenck’s PEN model emerged after evaluating more than 700 soldiers who had participated in World War II. From this study, he obtained a series of data that revealed the existence of three common factors that were related to biological aspects, as described below.

Psychoticism

It is a characteristic factor in antisocial people, with little sense of empathy and with a tendency to criminal behavior or suffering from mental disorders. For Eysenck, psychotism was related to neurotransmitters like serotonin and dopamine.

Extraversion

Extraversion is linked with vitality, sociability and optimism, so people with opposite traits (passivity, little sociability and pessimism) would be considered introverts. For Eysenck, this duality is associated with levels of cortical arousal.

Neuroticism

This factor is associated with anxiety, exaggerated emotional reactions, and a propensity for irritability. This is related, according to Eysenck’s PEN model, to the excitation levels of the limbic system. The lower the activation threshold of this system, the greater the propensity for neuroticism.

Conversely, people with a higher threshold for activating the limbic system have greater emotional control and their response to different situations is much more even.

Darwinism-based personality theory

This theory explains the development of personality based on Darwin’s studies on the origin of species and their subsequent evolution.

According to this approach, personality is the result of processes of natural selection. This involves the expression of traits that will help a subject to survive in a given environment, such as solidarity, sociability and leadership.