Concept
Personality
Overview
Personality describes the behavioral, cognitive, and emotional patterns that make up a person’s unique time-dependent adjustment to life. Personality is relatively stable, but can change over time due to experiences and developmental processes. Although there is no consensus on the definition of personality, most theories in personality focus on traits, motivation, skills, and identity.
Research in personality psychology generally attempts to explain the characteristics of a person that underlie differences in behavior. Personality characteristics are related to many life outcomes, such as work and relationship success, mental health, well-being, and longevity. For example, an individual can develop anger during their life, or they could fall into a state of depression. Over time, psychologists have taken many different approaches to study personality, which can be organized across dispositional, biological, intrapsychic (psychodynamic), cognitive-experiential, social and cultural, and adjustment domains. The various approaches used to study personality today reflect the influence of the first theorists in the field, a group that includes Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler, Gordon Allport, Hans Eysenck, Abraham Maslow, and Carl Rogers.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
In the original texts
Passages from public-domain books where Personality is discussed.
The theory which at one time seemed plausible that two persons in one body corresponded to the two halves of the brain will, I take it, now be universally acknowledged to be insufficient. But that which these cases make quite manifest is that personality is some kind of co-ordination or connection of ideas. Not much to say, this, perhaps.
Charles S. Peirce, Chance, Love, and Logic
names the idea; a chapter is titled for it; states what it is; opens on it
Now, what are these essential features? First, it is essential that God be conceived as the deepest power in the universe; and, second, he must be conceived under the form of a mental personality. The personality need not be determined intrinsically any further than is involved in the holding of certain things dear, and in the recognition of our dispositions toward those things, the things themselves being all good…
William James, The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy
names the idea; states what it is; author linked in the graph
Consideration of the abstract concepts of mechanism and personality is important. Too much preoccupation with them in a general fashion, however, without translation into relevant imagery of actual conditions, is likely to give rise to unreal difficulties.
John Dewey, Psychology and Social Practice
names the idea; states what it is; opens on it
It could only be a blunder if the notion of personality meant something essentially different from anything to be found in the mental procession. But if that procession be itself the very 'original' of the notion of personality, to personify it cannot possibly be wrong. It is already personified. There are no marks of personality to be gathered _aliunde_, and then found lacking in the train of thought.
William James, The Principles of Psychology, Volume 1
states what it is; names the idea; author linked in the graph
For reason is not my reason; it is human reason in general. It is the power which the mind has of rising above the particular, the contingent and the individual, to think in universal forms. So from this point of view, we may say that what makes a man a personality is that by which he is confounded with other men, that which makes him a man, not a certain man. The senses, the body and, in a word, all that…
Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life
names the idea; states what it is
Philosophers who discussed Personality
Related ideas
- Empiricism
- Emotion
- Cognition
- John Locke
- Modernity
- Motivation
- Psychoanalysis
- René Descartes
- Renaissance
- Sigmund Freud
- De rerum natura
- Abraham Maslow
- Lucretius
- Self
- Rationalism
- Carl Rogers
- David Hume
- Definition
- Alfred Adler
- Identity (social science)
- William James
- Pragmatism
Place in the tradition
Part of Holism.