4.1 Introducing Personality Psychology

The scenario may sound familiar to you, perhaps not in the setting of an emergency department, but in any other work context. Reading the descriptions of Sam and Tracey, you may have noticed that both of them deal with work and conflict in very different ways. Personality psychology can help understand why people may behave differently, including in their daily lives and when it comes to handling conflict. Let’s have a brief look at what personality psychology is about.

Personality psychology is the scientific study of the whole person (McAdams, 2009, p. 3). It “addresses the most general and the most fundamental questions in the field: What is human nature? What is a person? How do we understand persons?” (McAdams, 2009, p. 24). Distinguishing personality psychology from social psychology helps to further clarify the essence of personality psychology. While social psychology focuses on human sociality and may address a question like “Why are people more likely to engage in violent behaviour when in a group than when they are on their own?”, personality psychology focuses on human individuality and would rather address the question why group member A might act more violently than group member B in the same situation. Personality psychology would also address the question of why the two nurses Tracey and Sam differ in so many ways.

Or, another example, personality psychology explores a question like why Fernanda is more likely than Javier to eat a marshmallow. If you find this last question a little bit peculiar and trivial, please note that extensive research has been done on this question about marshmallow eating, producing far-reaching findings on personality. Please watch the following entertaining video [7:15] to learn more about this research:

There are many approaches or theories that explain individual differences among people. Some of these theories will tell us that people are different from each other because of influences that we are unconscious of while other theories will tell us that people are different from each other because of their environment. We will touch on some of these theories/approaches in this eBook and will consider how they relate to conflict. For example, we will explore the “trait approach” and how it relates to conflict behaviours. The trait approach views personality as a unique combination of traits that shape a person’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviours (McAdams, 2009). People are rated along continuums that describe the degree to which an individual displays a specific trait (Burger, 2019). Have a look at the case scenario with Sam and Tracey above and try to place them on the continuum of extraversion-introversion (we will learn more about this trait later in this chapter).

Please watch the following video [15:16], and start thinking about how personality psychology may help understand conflict and how it may help you as a conflict practitioner to support parties in conflict.

Then please read the following short reading on personality and conflict:

As you have just learned, personality psychology is distinct from other branches of psychology by focusing more on the person than on the situation. This is not to say though, that personality psychology neglects the situation. But rather than exploring how most people would act under certain circumstances, personality psychology tries to explain or predict how a specific type of person would most react in each situation.
Let’s have a closer look at how people’s personalities may be described and distinguished. Please watch the following video [11:08] to get some initial ideas:

In the above video, Hank Green introduced some of the major approaches that have been used to study personality. In this eBook, we will consider some more approaches (personality is complex and complicated and the more angles of personality we consider, the richer our understanding of personality can get). As an introduction to the approaches that we consider in this chapter, please watch the following summary provided by Dr Klaire Somoray, who teaches Personality Psychology and who has contributed to the development of this chapter. The video [19:10] was recorded during a workshop on Neuroscience, Psychology and Conflict Management and is shown here with Dr Somoray’s permission.

We will now look in more detail at the various approaches that Dr Somoray noted in the video, and that personality psychology uses to explain and predict personality. Six of them are introduced in the following reading: