Personality Theories and Assessments Though

Personality Theories and Assessments

Though there are almost as many ways of looking at psychology and personality as there are psychologists, there are currently four main branches in the psychological study of personality. These four branches are the psychodynamic, humanistic, trait, and social-learning explanations for why individuals function the way they do. Each system also has its own methods of assessing personality, which is necessary given the wide range of thoughts and theories that these different branches cover. What might be seen as an effective and reliable test for some would, for practitioners of another theory, be useless or -- what's worse -- incorrect and misleading.

A prime example of this comes from psychodynamics. Psychodynamic theory maintains that much of the human experience and decision-making process takes place below or outside of conscious thought. For this reason, psychodynamic theorists believe that tests that attempt to objectively probe the conscious mind for personality assessment and other psychological answers -- known as "objective tests" -- cannot provide any sort of useful information. Instead, these psychologists rely on personal interviews and projective tests. In the interview, psychodynamic psychologists will focus much on how the patient is talking and things they seem unconsciously drawn towards, rather than merely their responses to questions. Projective tests take this seeming-subterfuge even further, where ambiguous or nearly ambiguous stimuli -- such as ink blots or words -- are used to elicit responses from the patient in order to reveal their subconscious personality.

Humanists take a very different approach to personality assessment and psychology in general. They believe that the basic human struggle is one of ever-growing achievement in the external world, rather than an ongoing attempt at liberation from the inner psyche. For this reason, they are much more likely to trust a patient's conscious responses, and to use their interactions with the external world as a likely predictor of their personality. Personal interviews -- especially what the respondent actually says in them -- can be extremely useful to humanist practitioners. They also share a reliance on objective tests -- where the respondent attempts, in a guided way, to assess their own behavior and/or personality, with the two remaining branches of personality assessment.

Trait-based and social-learning psychology have vastly different approaches to assessing personality, but there are also some commonalities insofar as how they assess personality. Trait-based theorists believe that people exhibit specific behavioral traits, and that these can be analyzed to determine personality. Tests like the Big Five indicator are trait-based assessors. Social-learning theorists, on the other hand, believe that certain cognitive patterns are set early on, and that behavior (and personality) is determined by these unique cognitive processes working with the sum experience as well as the current environment and interactions. For this reason, social-learning theorists do not see behavior as consistent, but rather see the underlying cognitive rules that determine an individual's behavior in a given situation as consistent. Both use objective tests to asses personality, however, with social-learning theorists also using simple observation as a measure.