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Dispositional domains/approach
The dispositional domain concerns those aspects of personality that are stable over time, are relatively consistent over situations, and make people different from each other l or example, some people are outgoing and talkative: others are introverted and shy. The introverted and shy person tends to be that way most of the time (is stable over time) and tends to be introverted and shy at work, at play, and al school (is consistent over situations). The study of traits makes up the dispositional domain. The term disposition is used because it refers to an inherent tendency to behave in a specific way. The term trail is used interchangeably with the term disposition. The study of traits makes up the dispositional domain. The term disposition is used because it refers to an inherent tendency to behave in a specific way. The term trail is used interchangeably with the term disposition. In personality,a trait is a prominent psychological aspect of a person that is stable across situations. Such a behaviour, emotion, or pattern of thinking may have been learnt and this becomes part of character. Some traits may be biological in origin and are said to be traits of temperament. Both sets of traits go to define personality.
In genetics, traits are also used to describe the characteristics of a person or thing. They usually refer to the
dominant and recessive traits which are found in each being. The certain traits in which one can inherit are found by using a Punnett Squares, a table which shows the traits of parents
and the possible outcomes that could occur. Every one of the beings outcomes/traits are different from the parents, siblings, etc. This is why no two beings are the same.
Traits are presumed to be internal in the sense that individuals carry their desires, needs, and wants from one situation to the next (e.g., Alston, 1975). Furthermore, these
desires and needs are presumed to be causal in the sense that they explain the behavior of the individuals who possess
them. Psychologists who view traits as internal dispositions do not equate traits with the external behavior they believe that traits can lie dormant in the sense that the capacities remain present even when particular behaviors are not actually expressed. Traits—in the sense of internal needs, drives, desires, and so on—are presumed to exist, even in the absence of observable expressions.
Dispositional approach to personality.
Three fundamental approaches have been used to identify important traits.
- The Lexical approach.
- Statistical approach.
- Theoretical approach.
- The Lexical aaproach : The lexical approach to identifying important personality traits starts with the lexical hypothesis: all important individual differences have become encoded within the natural language. Over time, the differences among people that are important are noticed, and words are invented to talk about those differences. People invent words such as dominant, creative, reliable, cooperative, hot-tempered, or self-centered to describe these differences. People find these trait terms helpful in describing people and for communicating information about them.
Gordon Allport and H.S Odbert hypothesized that: "Those individual differences that are most salient and socially relevant in people's lives will eventually become encoded into their language; the more important such a differences, the more likely is it to become expressed in a single word."
The lexical approach yields two clear criteria for identifying important traits— synonym frequency and cross-cultural universality. The criterion of synonym frequency means that, if an attribute has not merely one or two trait adjectives to describe it but, rather, six, eight, or nine words, then it is a
advantage of identifying clusters of personality items that covary is that it provides a means for determining which personality variables have some common property. Factor analysis can also be useful in reducing the large array of diverse personality traits into a smaller and more useful set of underlying factors. It provides a means for organizing the thousands of personality traits.
- Theoretical approach : The theoretical approach to identifying important dimensions of individual differences
starts with a theory, which then determines which variables are important. The theoretical strategy dictates in a specific manner which variables are important to measure.To a
Freudian, for example, it is critical to measure "the oral personality" and "the anal personality" because these represent important, theory-driven constructs. Or, to a self-
actualization theorist such as Maslow (1968), it is critical to measure individual differences in the degree to which people
are motivated to self-actualize (see Williams & Page, 1989, for one such measure). The theory, in short, strictly determines which variables are important.
Evaluating the approaches for identifying important traits:
Like all approaches, the theoretical approach has strengths and limitations. Its strengths coincide with the strengths of the theory. If we have a powerful theory that tells us which variables are important, then it saves us from wandering aimlessly, and its weaknesses coincide with the weaknesses of the theory. To the extent that the theory contains gaps and imprecision, the subsequent identification of important individual differences will reflect omissions and distortions. many personality researchers use a combination of the three strategies. Norman (1963) and Goldberg (1990), for example, started with the lexical strategy to identify their first set of variables for inclusion. They then applied factor analysis to this initial selection of traits to reduce the set to a smaller, more manageable number, the lexical strategy can be used to sample trait terms, and then factor analysis supplies a powerful statistical approach to providing structure and order to those trait terms.
