Week 7 - Personality

Compare and contrast the differences between the nature and nurture approaches to personality? Include the nomothetic and idiographic approaches. Provide links to any articles which review this topic. Summarise with your views – do you feel nature or nurture is the dominant influence.

Hall and Lindzey (1957) explained that personality is the main frame of being a human. There are two different traits that exist in all people which are either nomothetic or idiographic (McLeod, 2007).

Nomothetic approaches are based on nature, which means that the person inherited their personality from their family DNA, for example, their family culture, their backgrounds. Also nomothetic is related to ‘nomos’ which means ‘law’ in Greek (McLeod, 2007).
Well known psychologists like Hans Eysenck and Raymond Cattel, believe that human personality is made up from a number of traits that come from sharing with others but the theory stills points out that they are still individuals with their own uniqueness of combination of traits.

Idiographic approaches believe nurture, which means that the person studies and adapt their personality to the environments, for example, the cultural and social groups or situations and they live in (Abbott, 2001).


Include a summary of your findings about your own personality in your portfolio

I did two questionnaires one from Mind Frame and the other BBC. Both the questionnaire were fairly accurate.

The questionnaires results from Mind Frame were quite accurate because it points out that my comfort zones are: control, socialise, proactive, order and sensitive. Initforlife (2009) stated that my pattern is quite special because it mentioned that I may never encounter another individual who has a similar pattern.
Also in the questionnaire recommended how I can develop my success, for example, when working in one of my comfortable zone try to push myself to higher levels of performance.



The second questionnaire that I did was from the BBC (2009), “What Am I Like?" personality questionnaire. The questionnaire is based on five different traits which are: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism. On the questionnaire I score high on Neuroticism which means that I am most of the time tense, self-conscious and concerned a lot.
The rest of the traits I score medium which suggested that I am self motivated, get things done and at the same time I think about am I good enough. It also suggested that I want everything to be right.



Compare the findings of both tests; do you agree with the findings of the tests?

The two questionnaire result was quite similar, which indicated to me that there were some accurate points, for example, I get worried and stress over small things. There are some areas that I agree with, for example, how I can improve myself and skills.

Would you be happy for such a test to be used as a selection tool, explain your answer.

I would say it depends on the situation, for example, in a job group interview I would be happily to use it as a selection tool. The reason why I said job interview is because the interviewers would like to know as much as possible about the interviewee. But these tests cannot determine how a person reacts in a certain situation, for example, in an emergency situation or when they are nervous and their behaviour.
Also in personality there is more than one area of aspects so it is complex to judge people’s abilities and qualities.


Conclusion

Personality test can be important to a certain extent although these questionnaires are not 100% accurate because personality changes over times.
However test can still give the candidate a better view of them self and point out areas that they may need to be improve on.


References:

Abbott, T (2001) Social and personality development [online] Available from: http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=taN4WVfh_-oC&pg=RA1-PA10&dq=Hans+Eysenck+and+Raymond+Cattell+personality+nomothetic&cd=1#v=onepage&q=Hans%20Eysenck%20and%20Raymond%20Cattell%20personality%20nomothetic&f=false [Accessed 18 November 2009].


BBC Science (2009) What Am I Like [online]. Available from: http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/humanbody/mind/surveys/whatamilike/index.shtml [Accessed 16 November 2009].

Hall, S and Lindzey, G (1957) Theories of personality. New York: John Wiley & Sons

Initforlife (2009) MindFrames [online]. Available from: http://www.initforlife.com/home/tm.asp [Accessed 16 November 2009].

McLeod, A (2007) Simply Psychology [online]. Available from: http://www.simplypsychology.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/ [Accessed 16 November 2009].