Personality

An individual's predisposition to behave in a certain way.

Personality is what tends to make you behave in a certain way.

Inner Core:

• Holds beliefs, values and attitudes
• Fairly permanent, unlikely to change
• Affects the next layer

Typical responses:

• Typical response to a situation
• Good indicator of inner core (same situation but different responses from different people)

Role Related behaviours

• Shows our actual responses to situations
• Most challenging aspect
• Behaviour varies depending on how we feel and the situation we are in 

Innate enduring personality characteristic that allows behaviour to be predicted.

• Personality does not change. Environment and situation does not affect
• Cant help the way they act
• Stable and unchanging over time
• Tendency to think and behvave in certain ways is consistent in many different situations
• Each person has a unique combination of these dispositions

Evaluation

• Cannot explain why we may change our behaviour in different scenarios.

 An explanation of behaviour that assumes our personality depends on our traits and the environment

• Came after trait theory
• Recognises the part played by traits 
• Suggests that our behaviour depends on what traits we have inherited and how these are influenced by our environment (Lewin 1935)
• Our behaviour (B) us a function (f) of our personal traits (P) and the environment (E) in which we find ourselves.
• B = f (P.E)
• Causes of behaviour can be seperated into two classes of variables:
• Personality and Environment and
• Internal and External
• Suggests that our personality will tend to be predictable in a particular environment, but also our behvaiour may be different in different environments.

There are three main ways to measure personality. These are:

Observation

• Responses and actions recorded and analysed. Similarities are noted down. 
• Aim for a real life setting. Can see how they operate naturally
• It is expensive and time consuming. Can have low validity as person may be affected by being watched

Interviews

• Greater validity. Can uncover things that are not possible by saying yes or no. 
• Lower reliability of interviewer. Time consuming and expensive

Questionnaires

• Most common
• They are cheap and easy. Can be conducted anywhere. 
• Gives lots of data
• Requires self assessment

• Seek approach behaviours
• Seeks out challenges
• Concerned with standards
• Enjoys performing
• Is not afraid to fail
• Internal attributes performance
• Persistent at tasks
• Values feedback from others
• Approach behaviour

• Shows avoidance behaviours
• Avoid challenging tasks
• Avoids situations
• Hates performing
• Afraid to fail
• External attributes performance
• Lacks task persistence
• Hates feedback
• Avoidance behaviour

The theory that an individuals behaviour is determined by their interaction with the environment and their desires to succeed.

A way of measuring the moods of those who participate in sport.

• Tension
• Depression
• Confusion
• Anger
• Vigour 
• Fatigue

The Dog Called A Vampire Fat

• Successful athletes show high vigour and anger and low on everything else.
• Unsuccessful athletes show low vigour and relative equal across all other mood states.
• Research has confirmed this
• Findings are not applicable to all performers

Iceberg profile:

• The POMS profile that is associated with successful athletes

Research has outlined that there is no such thing as a sport personality

Reliability

• Difficulty repeating tests as everyone is unique

Validity

• No clear definition of personality

Ethics

• Idea of probing into sensitive areas.

Ego Orientated:

• Interpreting success as a sign of superiority over others

Task Orientated:

• Interpreting success as playing well.