Personal Dispositions

• Common traits are general characteristics held in common by many people. They can be inferred from factor analytic studies.
• Personal disposition is “a generalized neuropsychic structure (peculiar to the individual), with the capacity to render many stimuli functionally equivalent, and to initiate and guide consistent (equivalent) forms of adaptive and stylistic behavior.
• Cardinal Dispositions - some people possess an eminent characteristic or ruling passion so outstanding that it dominates their lives
• Cardinals are so obvious that they cannot be hidden; nearly every action in a person’s life revolves around this one cardinal disposition.
• Some examples of these cardinal dispositions include quixotic, chauvinistic, narcissistic, sadistic, a Don Juan.
• Central Dispositions - few people have cardinal dispositions, but everyone has several central dispositions, which include the 5–10 most outstanding characteristics around which a person’s life focuses.
• Allport believed, have 5–10 central dispositions that their friends and close acquaintances would agree are descriptive of that person.
• Everyone has many secondary dispositions that are not central to the personality yet occur with some.
• Stylistic dispositions guide action, whereas motivational dispositions initiate action.
• Stylistic disposition might be neat and impeccable personal appearance. People are motivated to dress because of a basic need to stay warm, but the manner in which they attire themselves is determined by their stylistic personal dispositions. GYM
• Allport saw no distinct division between motivational and stylistic personal dispositions. Politeness, for example, is a stylistic disposition, whereas eating is more motivational.
• All characteristics that are “peculiarly mine” belong to the proprium.
• Proprium refers to those behaviors and characteristics that people regard as warm, central, and important in their lives. The proprium is not the whole personality, because many characteristics and behaviors of a person are not warm and central; rather, they exist on the periphery of personality
• These nonpropriate behaviors or opposite of ego (1) basic drives and needs that are ordinarily met and satisfied without much difficulty; (2) tribal customs such as wearing clothes, saying “hello” to people, and driving on the right side of the road; and (3) habitual behaviors.
• A generalized conscience—one shared by most people within a given culture—may be only peripheral to a person’s sense of personhood and thus outside that person’s proprium.
• Peripheral motives are those that reduce a need, whereas propriate strivings seek to maintain tension and disequilibrium.
• the concept of functional autonomy holds that some, but not all, human motives are functionally independent from the original motive responsible for the behavior.
• hoarding money is a functionally autonomous motive, then the miser’s behavior is not traceable to childhood experiences with toilet training or with rewards and punishments. Rather, the miser simply likes money, and this is the only explanation necessary
• Theory of Functional Motivation

  1. Whatever moves us must move now”
  2. No single goal
  3. Priorities aligned with goals
  4. Unique, concrete, autonomous motive
• Perseverative functional autonomy - a rat that has learned to run a maze in order to be fed but then continues to run the maze even after it has become satiated. Addiction, meds
• Propriate Functional Autonomy - a woman may originally take a job because she needs money. At first, the work is uninteresting, perhaps even distasteful. As the years pass, however, she develops a consuming passion for the job itself,