Title: Personality - Trait theories | Britannica
Headings: Trait theories
Trait theories
Stability of traits
Deviation from trait theory

Content: The psychoanalytic view, however, seriously challenges this common sense psychology. Psychoanalysis has no problem explaining that those who put to death countless people in the Nazi death chambers, for example, could also be devoted parents, whereas common sense psychology would have difficulty with this. For the psychoanalyst, a personality may be integrated, but it is rarely seamless and regular. People generally make two types of errors in judging personality: they impute more personality consistency to others than the actors themselves would allow, and they often ignore the operation of unconscious psychological processes that can explain at least some of the inconsistencies. Much work on trait structure and impression formation has concerned adjectival words that describe traits, and the fact that these studies have been carried out principally in the United States and western Europe has led some anthropologists, such as the American Robert LeVine, to remark that modern personality trait theory is ethnocentric. For example, the folk-psychological concepts and the trait matrices derived from factor analyses include culture-specific assumptions about personal experiences, such as the distinctions between mind and body, natural and supernatural, and intellect and morality, which do not exist in the folk traditions of many non-Western peoples. Unlike most other cultures, Western thought assumes that a high degree of personal autonomy is desirable and that the most important emotional and personal relations are with a marital partner. For some psychologists these cultural differences point to the need for a less culture-bound approach to personality trait theory. Load Next Page