Implicit and Explicit Personality Essay

Psychologists have long suspected that people do not have good access to their own thoughts and feelings and that self-exploration is subject to introspective limits. Empirical evidence supports this view. What results is a compelling claim for measurement procedures suitable for the assessment of cognitive processes that remain obscured if people are simply asked to report them. In “Implicit and Explicit Personality: A Test of a Channeling Hypothesis for Aggressive Behavior” The authors proposed that self-beliefs about personality influence the channels through which people express their implicit motives.

On the basis of this hypothesis, the authors predicted that self-beliefs about aggressiveness would influence the channels through which people express their aggressive motive and the justification mechanisms they use to defend expression of this motive. For example, the authors predicted that people who were implicitly prepared to rationalize a desire to harm others would engage in overt aggression if they viewed themselves as aggressive or passive aggression if they viewed themselves as nonaggressive.

The implicit aspects of aggressiveness were measured via conditional reasoning. A common person-schema belief that certain personality traits are linked together and may help us make a quick impression of someone, but there is no guarantee that initial impression will be correct. We have different types of schemas for various social situations. We have different types of schemas for various social situations. We have self-schemas, which help us organize our knowledge about our own traits and personal qualities.

Person schemes help us organize people’s characteristics and store them in our memory. People often have a theory known as implicit personality which lets us know what kind of personality traits go together. The fact that obtaining self-reported data is so popular makes complete sense. If I want to learn more about somebody, why would I not go directly to that person? One would expect that the individual possessing the particular personality traits should be able to provide the most informative and accurate information about these constructs.

In accordance with the basic foundation of such models as the five-factor theory of personality, people can convey a vast amount of information about themselves through the expression of certain relatively enduring patterns of thoughts, feelings, and actions. In addition to being easy to interpret, self-reports are also used because they are an inexpensive and relatively quick way to collect a lot of data. Though there are many strengths of using self-reports to measure psychological constructs, there are also potentially a number of weaknesses.

First, the structure of the questions affects whether the reported information accurately measures the construct under consideration. Self-reports are a fallible source of data, and minor changes in question wording, question format, or question context can result in major changes in the obtained results. There are many potential problems with the errors made by the respondent. Self-Reports leave a lot of room for response biases, which involve a systematic tendency to respond to a range of questionnaire items on some basis other than the specific item content.

For example, people often respond in such a way that presents them in a more favorable light, even if these responses do not reflect how they actually think or behave. Lack of credibility due to biased responding is a major issue because it could impede the validity of the self-report as a measure. Implicit personality theory concerns the general expectations that we build about a person after we know something of their central traits.

For example, when one believes that a happy person is also friendly, or that quiet people are shy. Individuals hold a network of assumptions that are based around relationships among various traits, and behaviors. Individuals who identify that there is one particular trait associated with someone will also assume that the individual possesses other character traits, which may or may not be true. One example might be someone who is considered unpredictable is also dangerous or someone who speaks slowly is slow-witted.

Since we believe that by using self-report information we will receive the most accurate information about that person because one would expect that the individual possessing the particular personality traits should be able to provide the most informative and accurate information about these constructs, and by using implicit personality information we expect to find out information about that person by learning something about them, the we will begin building our own expectations about that person that we build about a person.

Now, if we get our information from a person’s self-report and we combine it with an implicit personality information we might or might not be able to get an accurate information about that person because if when that person lied/cheated on the self-report to satisfy his goal such as getting a job, then the implicit personality would not match the results. If the results from the self-report are done correctly the, the results from the implicit personality should be similar or close.

Personality is meaningful to management, because employees’ personalities may dictate how well they perform their jobs. Personalities may indicate how hard a person will work, how organized they are, how well they will interact with others, and how creative they are. In order to determine your personality traits, psychologists give you questions that may inquire about how you would react in a certain situation, or your comfort level in a given setting.

These questions can give you a pretty good idea of the personality of the person. Depending on the results one probably would assume that they like to try new things and meet new people, that they are emotionally stable, and that they don’t really like to work that hard or vice versa. Although they may have many other personality traits, this description is a pretty comprehensive one