Taking a Look at Personality Theories

791 Words2 Pages

This course has taught me a lot about the different personality theories as well as the best known psychology theorists that have developed these theories. Personality consists of the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that make an individual unique. Numerous theories have been emerged to implicit the different features of personality. The main purpose of some theories is to focus on explaining how personality developed. Our book was divided into different chapters on various theorists and explained the major theories of personality that were proposed by the different psychologists. One of the theories that we learned about was the trait theories. Gordan Allport introduced the trait theory and his theory suggested that individual personalities are primarily composed of broad dispositions’. Eysenck’s three dimensions of Personality was also a part of the trait theory. Eysenck developed that model of personality upon three universal trails. And at last, the trait theory had the Big five dimensions which proposed that there are give basic dimensions of personality. One of the four conclusions in our textbook suggested that “until more unambiguous empirical research is available, the best one can do is to evaluate the various theories personally, and to accept concepts that make sense and reject those that do not”(531). I agree with this statement because while most agree that people can be described upon their personality traits; there still remains a debate on the number of traits that make up the human personality. For example, it could be concluded that the trait theory has some criticisms to it. Trait theory centers mainly on the fact that traits are usually poor predictors of behavior. This theory also doesn’t exactly explain wh... ... middle of paper ... ...heory. I believe the humanistic theory does a great job simplifying the positive nature of humankind as well as the association of free will with change. Humanistic theory also fits well with other approaches. This theory also is well incorporated into the different views on human change. If I were to evaluate a theory and choose the one that I had to accept then I would take away something from all of the theories that we learned about. Theories are created through existing data. However, a theory may not necessarily be correct but it does give us a better understanding of concepts in that it gives people to either prove them correct or wrong. All in all, understanding is being created. Plus, our book stated that “the best available explanation of personality comes from using the best of all the theories rather than attempting to use one or a few of them” (531).

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