 Hey everyone, it's Professor Howard. I wanna talk a little bit about personality, but specifically personality from the perspective of a behavior analyst or a behaviorist. It's not uncommon for intro psych textbooks to get behavior analysis completely wrong. And I think that this has a lot to do with the history between psychology, psychologists, behaviorists and some of the political interpersonal history between different fields or different philosophical approaches to understanding people. Now, many intro psych textbooks will say things like, behaviorists don't believe in personality or they'll say things like, to a behaviorist, personality is just a series of habits. Now these statements are neither entirely true nor are they entirely false. So let's go back for a moment to discuss what we mean by personality. There's lots of different definitions, but the one that we use in my course, general psychology is that personality are these long standing traits and patterns that cause an individual to consistently think, feel and behave in certain ways. Right now, you can say that what that's doing is saying that there's something about the individual that causes them to do things a certain way. You can tell immediately that a behaviorist is probably not likely to buy into ideas of thoughts and feelings because those tend to be private events and a behaviorist tends to focus on publicly observable phenomena or relations between the environment and behavior. So does that extend? Yes, you could argue that a behaviorist would immediately say, well, thoughts and feelings aren't really a thing, but thoughts and feelings are private events. No behaviorist would argue that you don't occasionally think to yourself or that you don't have feelings about things. Those are simply private events and we don't use them to explain public events. The other place where you would see that a behaviorist would have some trouble with this definition is this idea of a trait, a personal trait. And when you start discussing ideas of traits, we're talking about internal causal variables. There's something about your personality inside you that then manifests as a pattern of behavior and a behaviorist simply wouldn't ascribe to that notion. Now, does that mean that there's stuff inside you or stuff that you're biologically preprogrammed to do that a behaviorist wouldn't believe in? Of course not. Behaviorists believe that there's a combination of your biological endowment and your environment and those two factors work together to make who you are. So let me give you an example. We know that children who experience significant abuse or bullying in their teenage years will actually see changes in their neuro-structural. So you might find that a person who's experienced significant trauma at a critical period when their brain is developing could be more sensitive to punishment. That means that for that person, punishment is gonna be more effective or it's gonna drive their behavior more. They're gonna be very sensitive to it. Now, that's a biological difference but it developed out of experience. It developed out of that interaction between your biology and the environment. What does that mean for personalities? Now, a behaviorist is going to absolutely agree that people do things for reasons but a behaviorist is likely to say that that interaction between your predispositions, your biological endowment, your prior learning history and your current situation is the best description or the best predictor of what you're gonna do in the future. Let me give you another example. Imagine that you see me get a cup of coffee Monday morning. You see me get a cup of coffee Tuesday morning. You see me get a cup of coffee Wednesday morning. You'll probably predict that on Thursday morning I'll get a cup of coffee and the chances are very good that I will get a cup of coffee. Now, if I'm attempting to explain this with a trait, then I'm going to say that I might have a caffeine seeking personality but a behaviorist is gonna look at this pattern of behavior over time and say, well, based on prior experience we should predict that in the future this person will do this and that's what behaviorists think about personality that when we're trying to describe people what we're really describing are temporally extended patterns of behavior over time. When we see you do it again and again and again and again it increases the likelihood that you'll do that particular behavior or behaviors that serve the same function again in the future. What do I mean by function? So why do I drink coffee? It could be that I like the taste of coffee or it could be that there's something very specific about coffee, especially coffee in the morning that does something for me that meets a need for me. So imagine coffee Monday, coffee Tuesday, coffee Wednesday but Thursday, my favorite coffee shop is closed. Instead, I stop at a gas station I buy a Red Bull, right? Functionally, that Red Bull is going to contain caffeine which could serve the same purpose or meet the same need as my coffee did. So it doesn't necessarily mean that you're gonna see the same precise behavior again and again and again and again and again over time but rather you could have a cluster of behaviors that all mean the same thing. When you're nervous, if you bite your nails but you're in a setting where you can't do that maybe instead you thoughtfully chew on a pen because that looks better or it's perceived differently than nail biting, right? They're functionally similar behaviors. So it's not that behaviors think that personality doesn't exist or that people don't have personality. Rather, we look at personality as being this description of temporally extended patterns of behavior over time. I'm curious what you think. Let me know and I look forward to your questions.