Compare theories of personality and how personality is measured.

What this dot point is asking

Personality is the enduring, characteristic pattern of thinking, feeling and behaving that makes a person distinctive across situations and time. This dot point sits in the individual-differences strand of the course and asks you to contrast the frameworks that explain those patterns.

Psychoanalytic theory: Freud

Sigmund Freud argued that personality is largely driven by the unconscious. He proposed three structures: the id (the pleasure-seeking, instinctive drives present from birth), the superego (the internalised moral conscience), and the ego (the realistic mediator balancing the two). A healthy personality has a strong ego managing the conflict; imbalance produces anxiety, which the ego controls through defence mechanisms such as repression and denial. Freud also claimed personality forms through psychosexual stages in early childhood.

Humanist theory: Maslow and Rogers

The humanist approach rejects determinism and stresses free will, growth and the drive toward self-actualisation, realising one's full potential. Abraham Maslow placed self-actualisation at the top of a hierarchy of needs, reachable only after physiological, safety, belonging and esteem needs are met. Carl Rogers emphasised the self-concept and argued that a healthy personality develops when a person receives unconditional positive regard and the self-concept matches the ideal self (congruence). Conditions of worth and incongruence, by contrast, undermine wellbeing.

Trait theory: Eysenck and the Big Five

Trait theories describe personality as a set of stable dimensions on which people differ. Hans Eysenck proposed a small set of biologically based dimensions, extraversion and neuroticism (later adding psychoticism), and linked extraversion to differences in cortical arousal. The widely used Big Five (or OCEAN) model identifies five broad traits: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. Trait theories are good at describing and measuring personality but are often criticised for describing rather than explaining how traits arise.

Social-cognitive theory: Bandura

Albert Bandura's social-cognitive theory bridges behaviourism and cognition. Personality emerges from the interaction of the person, their behaviour and the environment, a process he called reciprocal determinism. Central to it is self-efficacy, a person's belief in their ability to succeed at a task, which shapes the challenges they attempt and how they respond to setbacks. This approach stresses that thinking and the situation, not just traits or unconscious drives, shape consistent behaviour.

Measuring personality

• Self-report inventories (questionnaires such as the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire or Big Five measures) are standardised and easy to score, but are vulnerable to social desirability bias.
• Projective tests (such as the Rorschach inkblot test) ask people to interpret ambiguous stimuli, aiming to reveal unconscious content, but they have low reliability and validity.
• Behavioural observation and interviews provide rich data but can be subjective.

Putting it together

When comparing theories, organise by the cause each proposes: unconscious drives (Freud), the drive to self-actualise (Maslow and Rogers), stable inherited dimensions (Eysenck and the Big Five), or the interaction of thought, behaviour and environment (Bandura). Then weigh testability and usefulness, and match the assessment method to the theory (projective tests for the psychodynamic view, inventories for trait theory). This comparison and evaluation is exactly what the personality dot point requires.