Self and Personality

This is the second chapter of NCERT's Class 12 Psychology textbook. It begins with the self — identity, self-concept, self-esteem, self-efficacy, self-regulation and the influence of culture — then defines personality and surveys six ways of studying it (type, trait, psychodynamic, behavioural, cultural, humanistic), and ends with personality assessment. It has three activities, Figures 2.1–2.5, Boxes 2.1–2.3, eleven review questions and two project ideas.

• Builds on the live chapters Variations in Psychological Attributes (Chapter 1: individual differences, assessment methods and the promise that projective tests come here), What is Psychology? (the schools — psychoanalysis, behaviourism, humanism — that reappear as personality theories) and Methods of Enquiry in Psychology (interview, observation, case study, psychological tests).
• Leads into Chapter 3 (Meeting Life Challenges: stress, where Type A returns), Chapter 4 (Psychological Disorders), Chapter 5 (Therapeutic Approaches: psychoanalytic and client-centred therapy) and Chapter 6 (Attitude and Social Cognition).
• UPSC: mainly GS4 Ethics. The GS4 syllabus asks about the ‘determinants and consequences of ethics in human actions’, attitude, values and probity; this chapter supplies the psychology of self-regulation and self-control (anger, temptation), self-esteem and self-efficacy (a positive attitude under stress, GS4 2020), values and character (Box 2.1) and the superego as a psychological account of conscience. Essay topics on the self — ‘self-discovery … technologically outsourced’ (2021), ‘a tranquil self’ (2020) — draw on it, and Prelims has asked about Freud (2006) and the Charak Samhita (1988). Civil-service and defence selection themselves use personality tests and situational tests described here.

• Self = totality of conscious ideas and feelings about oneself; personal vs social identity; self as subject and object; personal vs social (relational) self.
• Self-esteem in 4 areas by age 6–7; self-efficacy from Bandura's social learning theory; self-regulation: self-observation, self-instruction, self-reinforcement; self-control = delay of gratification (vrata, roza, non-attachment).
• Culture: Western self–group boundary fixed (individualistic); Indian boundary shifting (collectivistic). Personality from Latin persona (mask).
• Types: Hippocrates (4 humours), Charak Samhita (vata, pitta, kapha → prakriti), trigunas (sattva, rajas, tamas), Sheldon, Jung, Types A–D. Traits: Allport (cardinal, central, secondary), Cattell (16PF), Eysenck (2 + 1 dimensions), Big Five (Costa and McCrae).
• Freud: conscious, preconscious, unconscious; id (pleasure), ego (reality), superego (moral); 5 defence mechanisms; 5 psychosexual stages. Post-Freudians: Jung, Horney, Adler, Fromm, Erikson.
• Behavioural (response, reinforcement), cultural (Birhor vs farmers), humanistic (Rogers: real vs ideal self, unconditional positive regard; Maslow: self-actualisation). Assessment: MMPI, EPQ, 16PF; Rorschach, TAT, P-F, sentence completion, Draw-a-Person; interview, observation, ratings, nomination, situational tests.

Self and personality are the characteristic ways in which we define our existence and in which our experiences are organised and show in behaviour. Different people hold different ideas about themselves — these ideas are the self; a person's behaviour stays fairly stable from one situation to another — that relatively stable pattern is personality. A newborn has no idea of self; it emerges as the child grows, shaped by parents, friends, teachers and other significant persons, by our experiences and the meanings we give them. The structure of self stays modifiable in the light of our own and others' experiences.

Personal identity refers to attributes that make a person different from others — a name (‘I am Sanjana’ or ‘Karim’), qualities (‘honest’, ‘hardworking’), capabilities (‘a singer’) or beliefs (‘a believer in God or destiny’). Social identity refers to aspects that link a person to, or derive from, a social or cultural group — being Hindu or Muslim, Brahmin or adivasi, North or South Indian. So NCERT defines the self as the totality of a person's conscious experiences, ideas, thoughts and feelings about herself or himself, defining existence at both personal and social levels.

Self as subject and as object. ‘I am a dancer’ describes the self as a subject that does something; ‘I am one who easily gets hurt’ describes it as an object that is affected. In ‘I know who I am’, the self is both the knower and the known; NCERT asks us always to keep this dual status in mind.

Kinds of self. The first elements appear when a hungry newborn cries for milk — a reflex that later becomes the awareness ‘I am hungry’, a biological self that the socio-cultural environment then modifies (you may feel hungry for chocolate; NCERT notes that an ‘Eskimo’ may not). The personal self is oriented to oneself — personal freedom, responsibility, achievement and comfort. The social self emerges in relation to others and stresses cooperation, unity, affiliation, sacrifice, support and sharing; because it values family and social relationships it is also called the familial or relational self.

Self-concept is the way we perceive ourselves and the ideas we hold about our competencies and attributes. At a general level it is broadly positive or negative; more specifically a person may think well of her athletic bravery but poorly of her academic talent; more specifically still, well of her reading but poorly of her mathematics. The most frequent way to find out someone's self-concept is to ask the person.

Self-esteem is the value judgement a person makes about her or his own worth; some people have high, others low self-esteem. It is assessed by asking how true statements such as ‘I am good at homework’ or ‘I am highly liked by my peers’ are for the person. Studies indicate that by 6 to 7 years children have formed self-esteem in at least four areas — academic competence, social competence, physical/athletic competence and physical appearance — which become more refined with age and combine into an overall self-esteem. It relates strongly to behaviour: high academic self-esteem goes with better school performance, high social self-esteem with being liked by peers; low self-esteem in all areas goes with anxiety, depression and increasing antisocial behaviour. Warm, positive parenting builds high self-esteem; parents who decide or help even when the child does not need it often leave the child with low self-esteem.

Self-efficacy: people differ in whether they believe they control their life outcomes or that luck, fate or circumstance does (passing an examination, for example). Someone who believes she has the ability or behaviour a situation requires shows high self-efficacy. The idea comes from Bandura's social learning theory: his early studies showed that children and adults learn by observing and imitating others, and that expectations of mastery and convictions about one's effectiveness decide which behaviours people attempt and how much risk they take. Strong self-efficacy lets people select, influence and even construct their circumstances, and makes them less fearful. It can be developed — people high in it have been found to stop smoking the moment they decide to — and society, parents and positive experiences help by presenting positive models in the formative years.

Self-regulation is the ability to organise and monitor one's own behaviour; people who can change their behaviour to suit the demands of the environment are high on self-monitoring. Many situations need resistance to pressure and control over oneself — commonly called will power. Learning to delay or defer the gratification of needs is self-control, which is key to long-term goals. NCERT notes that Indian cultural tradition offers effective mechanisms for developing self-control, such as fasting in vrata or roza and non-attachment to worldly things. Psychological techniques include:

Several aspects of self are linked to the culture a person lives in, and analysis in the Indian context shows features distinct from the Western context. The most important difference is how the boundary between self and other is drawn. In the Western view the boundary is relatively fixed; the Indian view is marked by a shifting boundary — at one moment the self expands to fuse with the cosmos or include others, at the next it withdraws to focus fully on personal needs or goals. The Western view holds clear dichotomies between self and other, man and nature, subjective and objective; the Indian view does not. In Western culture self and group are two entities with clear boundaries and members keep their individuality; in Indian culture the self is generally not separated from one's group, and both coexist in harmony. Hence many Western cultures are called individualistic and many Asian cultures collectivistic.

‘Personality’ comes from the Latin persona, the mask Roman actors used to change their appearance; the audience expected the masked actor to play a role in a set way, though the actor need not have those qualities. For a layperson personality often means appearance — the good-looking person is assumed to be charming — a superficial impression that may be wrong. In psychology, personality means our characteristic ways of responding to people and situations: unique, relatively stable qualities that characterise behaviour across situations and over time. People do vary — no one is always cautious or always shy — but consistency in behaviour, thought and emotion across situations and time marks a personality; an honest person is likely to stay honest. Situational variation helps people adapt.

Knowing someone's personality lets us predict behaviour and deal with people realistically: a child who dislikes orders responds better to a choice of acceptable alternatives; a child with feelings of inferiority needs different handling from a confident one.

Psychologists distinguish type from trait approaches. A type approach looks for broad patterns and places each person in the pattern she most resembles; a trait approach focuses on specific attributes along which people differ in degree (more or less shy, more or less friendly). The interactional approach adds that situations matter: people may act dependent or independent because of external rewards or threats, not inner traits; the cross-situational consistency of traits is found to be quite low; behaviour in a market, a court or a place of worship shows the pull of situations.

Efforts to categorise people go back to ancient times. The Greek physician Hippocrates proposed a typology based on body fluids or humours: sanguine, phlegmatic, melancholic and choleric. In India the Charak Samhita, a famous treatise on Ayurveda, classifies people as vata, pitta and kapha on the basis of three humoural elements called tridosha; each refers to a type of temperament called prakriti (basic nature). There is also a typology based on the trigunas — sattva, rajas and tamas: sattva includes cleanliness, truthfulness, dutifulness, detachment and discipline; rajas includes intense activity, desire for sense gratification, dissatisfaction, envy and a materialistic mentality; tamas includes anger, arrogance, depression, laziness and helplessness. All three gunas are present in everyone in different degrees; the dominance of one leads to a particular type of behaviour.

Within psychology, Sheldon's body-build typology is well known: endomorphs (fat, soft, round; relaxed and sociable), mesomorphs (strong musculature, rectangular build; energetic and courageous) and ectomorphs (thin, long, fragile; brainy, artistic and introvert). NCERT warns these are simple, of limited use in predicting behaviour, and ‘more like stereotypes’. Jung grouped people as introverts (prefer to be alone, avoid others, withdraw in emotional conflict, shy) and extraverts (sociable, outgoing, drawn to people-facing jobs, cope with stress by losing themselves among people). More recently Friedman and Rosenman, looking for psychosocial risk factors, described Type A — high motivation, impatience, feeling short of time, always hurried and burdened with work, unable to relax — more susceptible to hypertension and coronary heart disease (CHD), sometimes at greater risk than from high blood pressure, high cholesterol or smoking; Type B is the absence of Type A traits. Morris suggested a cancer-prone Type C — cooperative, unassertive, patient, suppressing negative emotions and complying with authority — and a Type D, prone to depression, has been suggested more recently. NCERT's verdict: typologies are appealing but too simplistic; people do not fit neatly.

Trait theories describe the basic components — the ‘building blocks’ — of personality. The approach is close to everyday thinking: if a person is sociable we expect her to be cooperative, friendly and helping too. A trait is a relatively enduring attribute on which people differ; traits are (a) relatively stable over time, (b) generally consistent across situations, and (c) varied in strength and combination across people, producing individual differences.

Gordon Allport, the pioneer of the trait approach, held that traits are dynamic, lead a person to approach different situations with similar plans, and integrate dissimilar-looking stimuli and responses. Arguing that the words people use to describe themselves and others are a basis for understanding personality, he analysed the words of the English language and classified traits as cardinal (highly generalised dispositions around which a whole life revolves — Gandhi's non-violence, Hitler's Nazism, giving rise to ‘Gandhian’ or ‘Hitlerian’ traits), central (less pervasive but still general — warm, sincere, diligent, the words of a job testimonial) and secondary (least general — ‘likes mangoes’, ‘prefers ethnic clothes’). Allport accepted that situations matter but held that reactions depend on traits, which act as intervening variables between stimulus and response; people with the same traits may express them differently.

Raymond Cattell believed a common structure underlies how people differ and that it could be found empirically. Applying factor analysis to a huge array of descriptive adjectives, he found 16 primary or source traits — stable building blocks, described as opposing tendencies — and many surface traits resulting from their interaction. His Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire (16PF) is widely used. H.J. Eysenck reduced personality to two broad, biologically and genetically based dimensions: neuroticism vs emotional stability (control over feelings — anxious, moody, touchy, restless vs calm, even-tempered, reliable) and extraversion vs introversion (active, gregarious, impulsive, thrill-seeking vs passive, quiet, cautious, reserved). He later added psychoticism vs sociability, interacting with the other two; high scorers are hostile, egocentric and antisocial. The Eysenck Personality Questionnaire measures them.

The psychodynamic approach owes largely to Sigmund Freud, a physician who developed it in clinical practice. Early on he used hypnosis; he noticed that patients felt better after talking about their problems, and used free association (saying openly whatever thoughts, feelings and ideas come to mind), dream analysis and analysis of errors to understand the mind. He pictured three levels of consciousness: the conscious (what we are aware of), the preconscious (what we can become aware of if we attend closely) and the unconscious (what we are unaware of) — a reservoir of instinctive drives and of wishes concealed because they cause conflict, most arising from sexual desires that cannot be openly expressed and are repressed. Unsuccessful resolution of conflict leads to abnormal behaviour. Forgetting, slips of the tongue, jokes and dreams are routes into the unconscious; psychoanalysis, his therapy, aims to bring repressed material into consciousness so that people live in a more self-aware and integrated way.

Structure of personality. The id is the source of instinctual energy; it seeks immediate gratification of primitive needs, sexual desires and aggressive impulses on the pleasure principle, and ignores morality, society and others. The ego grows out of the id and satisfies its needs in line with reality on the reality principle — patient and reasonable. The superego is the moral branch: it tells id and ego whether gratification is ethical, controlling the id by internalising parental authority through socialisation. The three are concepts, not physical structures, residing largely in the unconscious as forces; their relative strength determines a person's stability. The id is energised by a life instinct and a death instinct; Freud focused on the life (sexual) instinct, whose energy is libido.

Ego defence mechanisms. For Freud, much behaviour is an attempt to deal with or escape anxiety, and the ego avoids anxiety through defence mechanisms — ways of reducing anxiety by distorting reality. Some defence is normal, but heavy use distorts reality and leads to maladjustment; people are often unaware of using them.

NCERT notes that Freud's ideas on defences have been questioned — for example, studies have not supported his claim that projection reduces anxiety and stress. Stages of development. Freud held that the core of personality is set early, stays stable and changes only with great difficulty, and proposed five psychosexual stages: oral (infancy; the mouth — feeding, sucking, biting, babbling; basic feelings about the world form here, so an adult who finds the world bitter may have had oral-stage difficulty), anal (about 2–3; toilet training; conflict between id and ego, babyish pleasure and adult control), phallic (about 4–5; the genitals; the Oedipus complex in boys — love for the mother, hostility to the father, fear of punishment — resolved by identifying with the father; for girls the Electra complex, resolved by identifying with the mother), latency (about 7 to puberty; urges inactive, energy into social and achievement activity) and genital (maturity; earlier feelings resurface; mature relationships). Failure at a stage causes fixation; inadequate resolution can also bring regression to an earlier stage's behaviour.

Post-Freudian (neo-analytic) approaches gave less weight to the sexual and aggressive id and more to the ego, and stressed creativity, competence and problem solving.

Criticisms NCERT lists: the theories rest largely on case studies and lack a rigorous scientific basis; they generalise from small, atypical samples; concepts are poorly defined and hard to test; and Freud used males as the prototype, overlooking women's experiences.

Behavioural approach. Behaviourists ignore internal dynamics and trust data that are definable, observable and measurable; they study stimulus–response connections and reinforcement. Personality is the individual's response to the environment, and development is a change in response characteristics. For most behaviourists the structural unit of personality is the response, emitted to satisfy a specific need. Children who dislike vegetables such as spinach, pumpkin or gourds may first eat them for parents' appreciation (reinforcement) and later because they acquire the taste. The core tendency is reduction of biological or social needs through reinforced responses. Learning theories — classical conditioning (Pavlov), instrumental conditioning (Skinner) and observational learning (Bandura) — have all fed personality theory; observational learning alone gives thought processes, social learning by imitation and self-regulation a central place.

Cultural approach. Personality is understood in relation to the ecological and cultural environment. A group's ‘economic maintenance system’ — set by climate, terrain and the available plants and animals — shapes its economic activities, settlements, social structure, division of labour and child-rearing, which together form the child's learning environment; rituals, religion, arts, games and play project the resulting personality. Personality is thus an adaptation to ecology and culture.

Humanistic approach. Humanistic theories developed largely in response to Freud, chiefly through Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow. Rogers's central idea is the fully functioning person: fulfilment is the motive force, and an inborn tendency directs people to actualise their nature. He assumed that behaviour is goal-directed and worthwhile, and that people — innately good — will almost always choose adaptive, self-actualising behaviour. From listening to clients he built his theory around the self: people constantly try to actualise their true self, and each also has an ideal self — the self one would like to be. When the real and ideal selves correspond, a person is generally happy; a gap brings unhappiness and dissatisfaction. Social conditions matter: positive conditions raise self-concept and self-esteem, making people flexible and open to experience; negative ones lower them. Hence the need for unconditional positive regard, which Rogers's client-centred therapy tries to create.

Maslow described psychologically healthy people in terms of self-actualisation — reaching one's fullest potential. He held an optimistic view of human beings as capable of love, joy and creative work, and free to shape their lives. Biological, security and belongingness needs — survival needs — are shared with animals, and sole concern with them reduces a person to the animal level; the ‘real journey’ of human life begins with the pursuit of self-esteem and self-actualisation.

Everyday judgements of people are coloured by many factors and lack objectivity, so a formal effort — personality assessment — is needed. Assessment means procedures to evaluate or differentiate people on certain characteristics, aiming to understand and predict behaviour with minimum error and maximum accuracy; it also serves diagnosis, training, placement and counselling. The common techniques are psychometric tests (Chapter 1), self-report measures, projective techniques and behavioural analysis, each rooted in a different theory.

Self-report measures. Allport suggested that the best way to assess a person is to ask about herself. Self-report measures are fairly structured, often theory-based, with verbal responses on a rating scale, taken at face value, scored quantitatively and interpreted against norms. The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), developed by Hathaway and McKinley as an aid to psychiatric diagnosis, is effective in identifying psychopathology; its revision MMPI-2 has 567 true/false statements and 10 subscales (hypochondriasis, depression, hysteria, psychopathic deviate, masculinity-femininity, paranoia, psychasthenia, schizophrenia, mania, social introversion). In India, Mallick and Joshi developed the Jodhpur Multiphasic Personality Inventory (JMPI) along MMPI lines. The Eysenck Personality Questionnaire (EPQ) first measured introversion–extraversion and emotional stability–instability (characterised by 32 traits), later adding psychoticism. Cattell's 16PF, built by factor analysis, gives declarative statements with response options, suits high-school students and adults, and is very useful in career guidance and occupational testing. Other self-reports measure authoritarianism, locus of control or optimism. Problems: social desirability (answering in a socially approved way) and acquiescence (agreeing regardless of content, saying ‘yes’), which make assessment less reliable. NCERT adds a caution: do not test and interpret friends' personalities without expert training.

Projective techniques. Direct methods rely on a person who knows she is being assessed and may become self-conscious or answer in a socially desirable way; and, psychoanalytic theory says, they cannot reach unconscious motives. Projective (indirect) techniques assume that a less structured stimulus lets a person project feelings, desires and needs, which experts interpret. They use word or inkblot associations, stories about pictures, sentence completions, drawings, or choices among many stimuli. All share five features: stimuli relatively or fully unstructured; the person is not told the purpose or scoring; there are no right or wrong answers; every response is taken to reveal personality; and scoring and interpretation are lengthy and sometimes subjective. They cannot be scored objectively and need rigorous training for qualitative analysis.

Projective methods help understand unconscious motives, deep conflicts and emotional complexes, but interpretation needs sophisticated skill, and there are problems with the reliability of scoring and validity of interpretation; practitioners nonetheless find them useful.

Behavioural analysis draws on behaviour in a variety of situations, using five procedures. Interview: diagnostic interviews go beyond the replies given; unstructured interviews build an impression, structured ones ask set questions in a set order for objective comparison, helped by rating scales. Observation: a sophisticated, trained procedure — e.g. a clinical psychologist watching a client with family and visitors. Both share limits: demanding, time-consuming training; the psychologist's maturity is a precondition; and the observer's presence may alter behaviour. Behavioural ratings, common in schools and industry, come from people who know the person well; traits should be defined by clear behavioural anchors; biases include the halo effect (one striking trait colours the whole judgement), middle-category bias and extreme response bias, reduced by training and better scales. Nomination asks members of a long-standing group whom they would choose to work, study or play with, and why — highly dependable, though open to personal bias. Situational tests, especially the situational stress test, observe a person performing a task with others told to be uncooperative and interfering — a kind of role play, realistic or by video, with a verbal report afterwards.

The chapter has three activities, questions put to the reader in the text, and two project ideas. Short outlines follow.

The eleven review questions at the end of the chapter (pages 48–49). Try each first, then open the outline.

Numbers

One-liners

• Self is the totality of one's conscious ideas and feelings about oneself; it lies at the core of personality.
• Personal identity distinguishes; social identity connects to a group.
• Self-esteem is self-worth; self-efficacy is ‘I can’ (Bandura); self-regulation is organising and monitoring one's behaviour.
• Self-control means delaying gratification.
• Western self–group boundary is fixed; the Indian boundary shifts.
• Personality comes from persona, the actor's mask.
• Types put people in categories; traits rate them by degree.
• All three gunas exist in everyone; the dominant one shapes behaviour.
• Type A is linked to coronary heart disease.
• Id: pleasure principle; ego: reality principle; superego: morality.
• Defence mechanisms reduce anxiety by distorting reality.
• Rogers: congruence of real and ideal self; unconditional positive regard.
• Maslow: the real journey begins with self-esteem and self-actualisation needs.
• Self-report is direct; projective techniques are indirect.
• Halo effect: one trait colours the whole rating.

Traps to avoid

• Tridosha (vata, pitta, kapha) and trigunas (sattva, rajas, tamas) are separate typologies.
• ‘I am a believer in God’ is NCERT's example of personal, not social, identity.
• Self-efficacy is Bandura's (social learning), not Rogers's.
• Over-helping parents produce low self-esteem.
• Type C is cancer-prone; Type D (NCERT) depression-prone — Beyond NCERT, Type D means ‘distressed’.
• Allport's cardinal trait example is Gandhi's non-violence.
• Cattell found 16 source traits; Eysenck two (later three) dimensions.
• Freud's middle level is the preconscious.
• Stages: oral, anal, phallic, latency, genital — in that order.
• Jung: analytical psychology; Adler: individual psychology (inferiority complex).
• The term ‘Electra complex’ was Jung's, not Freud's.
• TAT is by Morgan and Murray; the P-F Study is Rosenzweig's.
• Halo effect belongs to ratings; acquiescence to self-report.

Prelims — what UPSC asks

• Two Prelims questions in the bank touch this chapter. Prelims 2006 asked which pair was wrongly matched among Sigmund Freud–psychoanalysis, Anna Freud, Milton Friedman and Eric Kandel; the Freud pair is taught here (the key, Kandel–literature, stands; see the trap note on the Anna Freud pair in the Class 11 chapter). Prelims 1988 asked what the Charakasamhita is a work on — medicine, as NCERT's ‘famous treatise on Ayurveda’ states. Likely future items: theorist ↔ concept matches (Allport–cardinal traits, Cattell–16PF, Eysenck–EPQ, Costa and McCrae–Big Five, Bandura–self-efficacy, Rogers–unconditional positive regard, Adler–inferiority complex, Erikson–identity crisis, Jung–collective unconscious) and test ↔ developer matches (MMPI, TAT, P-F Study).

Mains — where it appears and how to answer

• GS4 — self-regulation: 2016 asked how anger leads to undesirable behaviour and how it can be managed — use NCERT's self-control techniques (self-observation, self-instruction, self-reinforcement), delay of gratification, Type A hostility, and the Indian practices NCERT names.
• GS4 — attitude under stress: 2020 asked what contributes to a positive attitude in a civil servant under extreme stress — self-esteem (and its sources: warm support, competence), self-efficacy (mastery, positive models), self-regulation, and Rogers's growth through positive regard.
• GS4 — conscience and character (not linked as PYQs, but useful): ‘voice of conscience’ (2013), ‘crisis of conscience’ (2013, 2019) and conscience vs rules (2023) can cite Freud's superego as one attributed account of conscience; questions on character can use Box 2.1's definitions.
• Essay: 2021 ‘The process of self-discovery has now been technologically outsourced’ — self-concept built through significant others, self as subject and object, Indian and Western selves, the risk of an externally defined ideal self (Rogers). 2020 ‘Mindful manifesto is the catalyst to a tranquil self’ — self-regulation, values as chosen ideals, Box 2.3's here-and-now and self-acceptance, the Indian self-control traditions.
• Answer frame for a GS4 theory question: define with the psychological term → name the theorist (attributed) → an administrative example → a rival or limiting view → a one-line practical conclusion.

Tap an option. NCERT's own exercise questions come first; the rest test the figures and common confusions.

Open any question to attempt it in the Question bank — your attempt is saved to your progress.