Personality and the Five Factor Theory

PSYC Essay To understand personality there are three main aspects that must be looked at: LArsen and Buss Definition of personality, The Six Domains of knowledge of personality, and Costa and McCrae's Five Factor Theory. In this essay I will first break down larsen and Buss definition and connect it to the domains, then connect the domains to the five factor thoery (FFT). Larsen and Buss define personality as "the set of psychological traits and mechanisms within the individual that are organized and relitivly enduring and that influence his or her interactions with, and adaptations to, the environment (including the intrapsychic, physical and social environment)." To fully understand this defintion, it is best to break it down into its individual parts, starting with the traits. The concept of psychological traits looks at what makes individuals similar as well as different, and this is the core of the dispositional domain. Although I will get more into the specific traits when talking about the FFT, here I will look at how traits make us similar and different from each other at the same time. Kluckhohn and Murray (1948) theorized that there are three main levels to personality analysis. The first is like all others, or human nature, traits that are shared by all humans, such as language skills. The second is like some others, or group differences. These are traits that cluster us into large groups, such as age or sex. Finall is the Like no others, or individual uniquness level. These traitsl look at how everyone is different, even indentical twins are going to have some differences. This shows that we are all alike, yet different at the same time. It is our various combination of traits that make our personalities this way, making traits the core of personality. The second part of the definitoin looks at the mechanisms or the processes of personality or information processing procedures. The key ingredients to these mechanisms are inputs, decision