Question

Describe similarities amongst these personality theories: Freud and being-freudians, trait theory, learning theory, and humanistic theory

Answer 1

Sigmund Freud was of the view that a the personality of an individual is made up of three parts, the Id, Ego and the Superego. Id is the instinctual part that works on the pleasure principle by deriving instant pleasure. The ego operates on the Reality Principle by acting according to accepted norms and reality. The Super Ego is concerned with moral values and conscience.

According to Carl Jung, Ego is the conscious mind, and he agreed with concept of unconscious mind. He believed that there was a collective unconscious, this consisted of some common themes shared by all the people. He identified the archetypes as the contents of the unconscious, these archetypes were referred to as instincts by Freud. He also came up with personality constructs of Introversion and Extroversion

Adler School of Psychology was known as Individual Psychology. He focused on how individuals are born into the world with feelings of inferiority, to overcome this inferiority we strive for superiority. Adler believed that the order of birth has an effect on the personality, the first born is given attention and pampered, but when second one is born, the attention is shifted to the second born.

Trait Theory - The Five Factor Model

Robert McCrae and Paul Costa developed the Five-Factor Model, which is a theory that explains personality based on five broad factors . Each five factor has two traits on either extreme of that particular personality factor continuum. These five factors and their traits are used as a measure to analyze ones personality.

• Openness to experience - The openness to participate in new activities and have new ideas. Enjoying mixing with other cultures and entertaining unconventional ideas.
• Conscientiousness- People who are high on conscientiousness, give high importance to their duty and show a sense of responsibility.
• Extraversion- This is the trait which is characterized by being social with others and showing confidence in social interactions.
• Agreeableness- People who have high agreeableness are cooperative with others and easy to get along, they also may be trusting of other people.
• Neuroticism- This trait is characterized by excessive thinking and thinking in negative patterns, which can result in anxiety and stress.

Learning Theory

Learning plays an important role in the process of attitude formation. Attitudes are formed through the learning processes as follows:

Classical Conditioning: This involves associating a neutral stimulus with a conditioned stimulus to elicit a conditioned response. For Example. A political campaign promotes their candidate by associating him with helping the poor and underprivileged.. This makes people form a positive attitude about the candidate.

Social Learning theory - In this, the person vicariously learns others behavior through observation when the other person is rewarded. For Example - A child watches a documentary where a animal conservationist is saving animals. This makes the child develop a compassionate attitude towards animals.

Operant conditioning - Here, learning through reinforcement happens. For Example - A sports team does not give up in a match in spite of them almost losing, and they end up winning the match. This gives them the reinforcement to develop the "never say die" attitude in the subsequent matches.

Humanistic View

The humanistic school of psychology was in response to the other schools which preceded it such as psycho analysis and behaviorism. The humanistic school of psychology was in reaction to these earlier schools and proposed that human nature is not mechanical and negative rather it is positive and good. It stated that humans are basically good and are motivated towards achieving self actualization, that is, human aim at achieving their greatest potential. The humanistic view cannot be called naive and overly optimistic as it shed much need light on often ignored positive aspects of humans, which were ignored by earlier schools of psychology.

it focussed on the positive aspects of human behavior and the motivation of person to be his/her best self. Abraham Maslow had developed the hierarchy of needs, which describes several levels of needs which a human has. The highest level being self actualization and the lowest is physiological needs. According to this theory, a person strives to active the highest need, but has to cross several levels to active it, once a level has being reached and fulfilled, the person then proceeds to the next level.