Post on 24-Feb-2016
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Personality & Social Interactions
Mechanisms of Interaction
• Personality interacts with the situation in 3 ways:
– Selection: who we select to be around
– Evocation: the reactions that our personalities evoke in others
– Manipulation: how we manipulate other people to get what we want
Who do we choose for a mate?
• Study of 33 countries found that personality processes are the second biggest factor in mate selection (behind attraction/love)
• No support for the complementary needs theory
• Attraction similarity theory is supported.
• Assortative mating: the finding that people marry those who are similar to themselves.
Key to Marital happiness
• Having a partner who has the following characteristics (regardless of what you thought you were looking for):
– Agreeable– Emotionally stable– Open
– The difference scores between what you wanted in a partner and what you got does NOT predict marital satisfaction.
Ratings of spouses’ personalities
• After the first year (honeymoon effect), in which people rated their partners as high on all of the good traits, perceptions of personality traits became more negative.
• Those who maintain positive illusions about their partner’s personality maintain high levels of satisfaction.
Violation of Desire Theory
• Breakups occur more often when one’s desires are violated than when they’re fulfilled.
• People whose spouses lack desired characteristics will more frequently dissolve the marriage.
• Those dissimilar in personality will most often break up.
• Research finds that being married to someone who lacks the personality characteristics that most people desire (dependable, agreeable, stable) puts one at risk of breakup.
Shyness
• The tendency to feel tense, worried, or anxious during social interactions or even anticipating interactions
• Experienced by 90% at some point, but some are dispositionally shy.
• May be related to objective self-awareness. They’re too self-conscious.
• Kagan found that 20% of 4-month-olds show signs of shyness, but half are no longer shy in childhood.
• Parents who push their shy children into interactions can make their children less shy.
• Parents who give in to child’s shyness reinforce the shyness.
Causes of Shyness
• Seems to have both a genetic and learned component.• Shy people have an overreactive amygdala.• Learned component is that shy people learn to have
evaluation apprehension (fear of being negatively evaluated by others).
• Shy people ruminate over social interactions and wonder if they’ve said something wrong. They’re high in social anxiety.
• Others may interpret shyness as unfriendliness.
Tips for shyness
• Show up and force yourself to talk to people.
• Give yourself credit; stop being your own worst critic.
• Take baby steps and make small goals at first.
• Shift your attention to other people—ask them questions.
• Exude warmth. Smile, make eye contact, and look relaxed.
• Anticipate failure. It’s a learning curve.
• Realize that many people are shy, and no one is perfect all the time.
Evocation
• Reactions that we evoke from other people because of our personalities
• Hostile attributional bias: the tendency to infer hostile intent on the part of others in the face of ambiguous behaviors from them.
• Aggressive people are more likely to interpret behaviors from others as being hostile
• Expectancy confirmation: like self-fulfilling prophecy; beliefs about personality characteristics of others cause them to evoke in others actions that are consistent with the initial beliefs
How personality evokes conflicts in relationships
• Someone can behave in ways that make the partner upset.• Someone can elicit actions from another that in turn upset the
original elicitor. • Links between personality & conflict show up at least as early
as early adolescence.
• Strongest predictor of evoked anger and upset are two personality characteristics:
– Disagreeableness—the #1 predictor of wife’s being upset with husband
– Emotional instability
Gottman’s tips for a happy marriage
• Get to know your partner’s world. Be empathic.
• Remember what made you fall in love with your partner in the first place.
• Turn toward, not away from, each other in times of stress.
• Share power, even if you think you’re the expert.
• Start gently when arguing and back off when feelings get hurt.
• Agree to disagree when problems can’t be solved.
• Become a “we” instead of an “I.”
Manipulation: Social Influence
• Charm• Coercion• Silent treatment• Reason• Regression• Self-abasement
• Responsibility invocation
• Hardball• Pleasure induction• Social comparison• Monetary reward
Only gender difference in these is that women are more likely to use regression.
Personality Traits and Manipulation Tactics
• Dominance/extraversion: coercion and responsibility invocation
• Submission: self-abasement and (surprisingly), hardball• Agreeableness: pleasure induction and reason• Disagreeableness: silent treatment, coercion, revenge• Conscientiousness: reason• Intellect/openness: reason, pleasure induction, responsibility
invocation• Low on intellect/openness: social comparison• Neurosis: hardball, coercion, reason, monetary reward, and
especially regression
Dark Triad of Personality Traits
• Narcissism• Psychopathy• Machiavellianism• All of these types manipulate others through coercion,
hardball, reciprocity, social comparison, monetary reward, and charm.
• Hardball is particularly common.