Personality Questions

Personality Questions

Achievement Motivation

Achievement Motivation can also be known as Competitiveness

McClelland - Atkinson Model (1976)

• Need to Achieve (Nach) - The desire of success far outweighs the fear of failure
• Nach are often linked with high achievers and seek challenging situations
• They strive for success without worrying about failure
• Need to avoid Failure (Naf) - The fear of failure far outweighs the desire to suceed
• They worry about failure more than striving for success

Situational Factors

Incentive Value of Success

Probability of Success

This theory from McClelland suggests the greater the probability of success the lower the incentive value of success. Similarly the lower the probability of success the greater the incentive value of success. 

E.g. Manchester United beating Darlington FC, they wont receive the incentive value of the win because they are expected to win. 

Attitudes

An attitude is an combination of beliefs and feelings about objects, people or situations which predispose us to behave in a certain way towards them.

Triadic Model

Cognitive - What we know about attitude object.
Affective - How we feel about attitude object.
Behavioural - How we behave or intend to behave.

Attitudes are entirely learned from socialisation.

Measuring attitudes

Interviews/observation
Questionnaires

Attitude influences behaviour.

Changing attitudes (2 methods)

Persuasive communication

Persuader - should be expert/role model
Message - should be clear and balanced between emotion and logic
Recipient - needs to be willing to listen
Situation - can affect the attitude

Cognitive dissonance

Dissonance occurs when there is a conflict between feelings - producing negative psychological tension and desire to erase the dissonance. To change an attitude we must create dissonance so the person may change their wider attitude and get back to consonance (high correlation between thoughts and feelings.) To do this one part of the triadic model must be changed.

Attributions

Attributions

'Process of ascribing reasons for, or causes to events and behaviour.'

Weiner's (1972) model

Internal - External
Stable - Unstable

Locus of Causality

	Internal	External
Stable	Ability – We were the better team.	Task Difficulty – Opponent was too good
Unstable	Effort – I gave everything	Luck – Referee was on their side

Can attributions affect our motivation / Success

Low achievers - Failure attributed to lack of ability (internal) - Lowers confidence - Leads to poor performance - More likely to fail again.


Learned Helplessness

Failure is inevitable
Even when success is possible
Leads to performer giving up easily

Attribution Retraining (2 Methods)

This means ascribing suitable attributions for success and failure in order to improve performance in the future.

Method 1 - Making controllable attributions (Internal/unstable) attributions. If reasons for success/failure can be controlled you can do something about it this will also improve performance.

Method 2 - Self serving bias, the use of attributions to protect self confidence.
Success attributed to - Internal factors
Failure attributed to - External factors

Personality

Personality
Personality consists of three different theories of how people behave and why they do so in different situations.
"Those Characteristics of a person that account for consistent patterns of behaviour" Pervin, 1993.

Trait Theory

• Personality is made up of gentically modified inherited traits
• Stable and Enduring
• There are three trait theories inside the whole trait theory they are: Girdanos Narrow Band Theory(Type A v Type B), Catells 16 personality facors and Eysencks trait theory
• Girdanos Narrow Band - Type A people are irritable, anxious and competitive. Strong desire to suceeed. Type B people are calm, relaxed, quiet and focused. Work slowly = Less stressed
• Catells 16 Personality Factors - 16 different and independent traits that make up personality such as Shy, Concete thinking, Bold and Abstract thinking
• Eysencks Trait Theory - Focuses on two dimensional traits...Extroversion and Introversion and Neurotic and Stable

Social Learning Theory

• This theory suggests people change their behaviour/personality dependant on the envrionment/situation.
• Bandura suggests that the behaviour can be predicted by the state of the environment
• 2 main principles:
•  Modelling which is copying the behaviour of somebody else,
• Reinforcement which means modelled behaviour is more likely to be repeated

Interactionist Theory

• It is a combination of trait and social learning theories
• Behaviour is predicted by the interaction of personality traits with environment situation.
• Behaviour will remain stable within the same envrionment