One of the most fundamental tendencies of human beings is to size up other people.

We say that Bill is fun, that Marian

The tendency to perceive personality is a fundamental part of human nature, and a most adaptive one. If we can draw
accurate generalizations about what other people are normally like, we can predict how they will behave in the future,
and this can help us determine how they are likely to respond in different situations. Understanding personality can also
help us better understand psychological disorders and the negative behavioral outcomes they may produce. In short,
personality matters because it guides behavior.

We need to consider the wide variety of personality traits found in human beings. We’ll consider how and when
personality influences our behavior, and how well we perceive the personalities of others. We will also consider how
psychologists measure personality, and the extent to which personality is caused by nature versus nurture. The
fundamental goal of personality psychologists is to understand what makes people different from each other (the study
of individual differences), but they also find that people who share genes have a remarkable similarity in personality.

Personality refers to the long-standing traits and patterns that propel individuals to consistently think, feel, and behave in
specific ways. Our personality is what makes us unique individuals. Each person has an idiosyncratic pattern of enduring,
long-term characteristics and a manner in which he or she interacts with other individuals and the world around them.
Our personalities are thought to be long term, stable, and not easily changed. The word personality comes from the Latin
word persona. In the ancient world, a persona was a mask worn by an actor. While we tend to think of a mask as being
worn to conceal one’s identity, the theatrical mask was originally used to either represent or project a specific
personality trait of a character.

HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES

The concept of personality has been studied for at least 2,000 years, beginning with Hippocrates in 370 BCE (Fazeli,
2012). Hippocrates theorized that personality traits and human behaviors are based on four separate temperaments
associated with four fluids (“humors”) of the body: choleric temperament (yellow bile from the liver), melancholic
temperament (black bile from the kidneys), sanguine temperament (red blood from the heart), and phlegmatic
temperament (white phlegm from the lungs) (Clark & Watson, 2008; Eysenck & Eysenck, 1985; Lecci & Magnavita, 2013;
Noga, 2007). Centuries later, the influential Greek physician and philosopher Galen built on Hippocrates’s theory,
suggesting that both diseases and personality differences could be explained by imbalances in the humors and that each
person exhibits one of the four temperaments. For example, the choleric person is passionate, ambitious, and bold; the
melancholic person is reserved, anxious, and unhappy; the sanguine person is joyful, eager, and optimistic; and the
phlegmatic person is calm, reliable, and thoughtful (Clark & Watson, 2008; Stelmack & Stalikas, 1991). Galen’s theory
was prevalent for over 1,000 years and continued to be popular through the Middle Ages.

In 1780, Franz Gall, a German physician, proposed that the distances between bumps on the skull reveal a person’s
personality traits, character, and mental abilities (Figure 11.3). According to Gall, measuring these distances revealed the
sizes of the brain areas underneath, providing information that could be used to determine whether a person was
friendly, prideful, murderous, kind, good with languages, and so on. Initially, phrenology was very popular; however, it
was soon discredited for lack of empirical support and has long been relegated to the status of pseudoscience (Fancher,
1979).

In the centuries after Galen, other researchers contributed to the development of his four primary temperament types,
most prominently Immanuel Kant (in the 18th century) and psychologist Wilhelm Wundt (in the 19th century) (Eysenck,
2009; Stelmack & Stalikas, 1991; Wundt, 1874/1886) (Figure 11.4). Kant agreed with Galen that everyone could be sorted
into one of the four temperaments and that there was no overlap between the four categories (Eysenck, 2009). He
developed a list of traits that could be used to describe the personality of a person from each of the four temperaments.
However, Wundt suggested that a better description of personality could be achieved using two major axes:
emotional/nonemotional and changeable/unchangeable. The first axis separated strong from weak emotions (the
melancholic and choleric temperaments from the phlegmatic and sanguine). The second axis divided the changeable
temperaments (choleric and sanguine) from the unchangeable ones (melancholic and phlegmatic) (Eysenck, 2009).

Sigmund Freud’s psychodynamic perspective of personality was the first comprehensive theory of personality, explaining
a wide variety of both normal and abnormal behaviors. According to Freud, unconscious drives influenced by sex and
aggression, along with childhood sexuality, are the forces that influence our personality. Freud attracted many followers
who modified his ideas to create new theories about personality. These theorists, referred to as neo-Freudians, generally
agreed with Freud that childhood experiences matter, but they reduced the emphasis on sex and focused more on the
social environment and effects of culture on personality. The perspective of personality proposed by Freud and his
followers was the dominant theory of personality for the first half of the 20th century.

Other major theories then emerged, including the learning, humanistic, biological, evolutionary, trait, and cultural
perspectives. We will explore these various perspectives on personality in depth.