Why You Are Who You Are: Investigations into Human Personality

In this introductory lecture, ground your understanding of personality in the concept of “proportion-of-variability,” which tells us how strongly related a particular personality characteristic is to behaviors, emotions, or other characteristics. As an example, you’ll consider a case study of the causes of delinquent behavior in teenage boys.

There are five key traits that best help us understand a person's behavior. Here, explore the two traits that give you the broadest picture of what a person is like. The first: extraversion, or your level of sociability. The second: neuroticism, the degree to which you experience negative emotions.

Examine the three remaining building blocks of personality. You'll learn about agreeableness, the degree to which you have a positive or negative orientation toward others; conscientiousness, the degree to which you're responsible; and openness, or your receptivity to new experiences and idea. Plus, consider a sixth personality trait that's starting to get attention.

What motivates you to do the things you do each and every day? Professor Leary explores three motives that instigate and energize people's behavior: the motive to interact with other people, the motive to achieve and be successful, and the motive to influence other people.

There are other motives that underlie behavior—ones that don’t involve getting anything from the outside world. What are the benefits of these motives? After considering the Freudian roots of the subject, learn about three fascinating intrapersonal motives: for psychological consistency, for self-esteem, and for authenticity.

A large part of who you are as a person depends on the kinds of emotions you experience as you walk through life. In this lecture, look at our general tendencies to experience positive and negative emotions. What, exactly, are emotions? What leads some people to have more positive – or negative – emotions than others?

In addition to the general tendency to feel good and bad, we also differ in the degree to which we experience specific emotions such as anger, joy, guilt, and sadness. These tendencies, too, are an important part of your personality. As you'll learn, they help explain why different people respond to the same event in different ways.

When we talk about someone's character, we're referring to the degree to which that person tends to behave in ethical (or unethical) ways. In this illuminating lecture, take a look at moral aspects of personality from four critical angles: values, moral foundations, virtues, and character strengths.

Turn your attention to cognitive aspects of personality: characteristics related to people's styles of thinking. Here, Professor Leary focuses on four cognitive characteristics that involve differences in the degree to which people are curious, make decisions quickly, critically evaluate their beliefs, and enjoy thinking.

You are who you are partly because of the beliefs that you hold. Discover several big, broad beliefs that function like personality traits. These include people's beliefs about human nature, fairness, and the beliefs and attitudes that underlie authoritarianism.

Your beliefs about yourself have a dramatic impact on how you feel and behave. Take a closer look at four types of self-related beliefs: identity (who you think you are), self-efficacy (what you're capable of doing), self-esteem (your evaluation of yourself), and self-compassion (how you think about yourself when bad things happen).

Some of the most important differences among people involve their ways of relating to others. First, examine the differences in people's attachment styles. Then, consider the tactics people use to persuade and influence others (with a focus on Machiavellians). Finally, explore three aspects of empathy: cognitive empathy, emotional empathy, and empathic concern.

People obviously don't act the same way all the time, and personalities do change over the course of a life (at least within limits). Yet people do show stability in how they tend to think, feel, and behave. In this lecture, learn about the complexities that make personality both stable and changeable.

The fact that certain personality characteristics can be seen in almost everybody probably reflects evolutionary processes. Learn why some aspects of behavior became part of a shared human personality; how some personality features evolved differently for men and women; and why people who live in different environments may develop different personalities.

All differences we see in people's personalities are based on differences in what's happening somewhere in their brains. Unpack research being done on the neuroscience of personality, with a focus on four aspects of anatomy and physiology that involve brain regions, neurotransmitters, hormones, and bodily rhythms.

Take a closer look at the ways in which the genes you inherited from your parents have contributed to your personality. Topics in this lecture include heritability studies; the role genes play in people's attitudes; and how genes can change our environment in ways that then affect our personality.

Professor Leary explains four learning processes that influence how people's personalities turn out: classical conditioning, operant conditioning, observational learning, and personal experience. It's a lecture that'll change how you think about the ways learning has helped make you who you are.

How might your personality have turned out differently if you'd grown up in a culture different from the one you grew up in? Explore this question by looking at several dimensions on which cultures differ: individualism versus collectivism, power distance, agentic versus communal orientations, and uncertainty avoidance.

Freud believed that much of what influences our behaviors occurs outside our conscious awareness. To understand people’s personalities, we have to consider unconscious processes—the topic of this lecture. What is our nonconscious? How can we determine someone’s nonconscious motives? How does this idea relate to behaviors like procrastination?

People differ in self-control, so understanding how we self-regulate is critical to understanding personality. After learning about the nature of self-regulation, examine the characteristics and skills that affect how well people control themselves. Then, learn important findings from studies of self-regulation in childhood and explore the relationship between self-regulation and impulsivity.

In the first of two lectures on the three broad clusters of personality disorders, consider the dramatic-emotional-erratic cluster, which includes the antisocial, borderline, histrionic, and narcissistic personality disorders. As you'll learn, these disorders all involve problems with emotional regulation and impulse control.

First, learn about a cluster of three personality disorders that involve excessive anxiety: the avoidant, dependent, and obsessive-compulsive disorders. Then, explore a cluster that involves eccentric behaviors and distorted thinking: the paranoid personality disorder, the schizoid personality disorder, and the schizotypical personality disorder.

Should you try to always be yourself? Can you tell when you’re not being yourself? Professor Leary considers the possibility that authenticity has some serious problems as a psychological construct—that it’s either not what we assume it is, or that it’s not as important as we typically think.

Conclude the course by drawing on much of what you've learned in the preceding lectures to look at the relationship between personality and healthy psychological adjustment. You'll learn the five key ingredients of adjustment, traits that are associated with good adjustment, and more.