PSYC 221 Personality Theory Essay Quiz

This quiz covers Chapters 5 and 6 of the course textbook:  

Friedman, H. S. & Schustack, M. W. (2016).  Personality: Classic theories and modern research, 6th  Ed.  Pearson: Boston.  

Essay answers must be more than 3 or 4 brief sentences, but kept within the bounds of a short-answer essay exam (i.e., 2-3 paragraphs). All your writing must be in your own words. Paraphrase (restate what you read) rather than copying material from the course textbook or the Internet.  No copying is permitted in this course and doing so will result in zero points on the exam. Answers must be written in narrative, paragraph form.  Lists and/or sentence fragments also will not receive points.

1.  Think about what you have learned about toxins, hormones, and brain chemistry. To what extent do these naturally occurring chemicals alter someone's basic personality? How can that happen?

2.  What, if anything, does Darwin's concept of survival of the fittest have to say about the evolution of an individual's personality?

3.  Recall what you learned about self-report questionnaires and reports gathered from other when you learned about types of assessments. Watson and other similar theorists rejected introspection as not being sufficiently objective to be scientifically valid. What do you think?

4. Based on your reading about "Let's Make A Deal" experiments with pigeons, could pigeons be smarter than people when the contingencies of reinforcement are more important than reflective thought? What does that tell us about human judgment and decision-making?