What is the difference between personality and traits

In personality psychology, psychologists have been fascinated by the differences and uniqueness of human personality and traits that can be seen in people. Not only psychologists, even the lay person engages in assessing the personalities of others in various social situations. First, let us define the word personality. Personality refers to the various characteristics that contribute towards making an individual unique. This influences the thoughts, behavior, and emotions of the individual.

Simply, personality can be understood as who we are. A personality is made up of a number of elements. These can be viewed as traits. Traits refer to various characteristics of an individual that assist in creating a personality. This is the basic difference between a personality and a trait.

This article attempts to clarify this difference. Critics of the trait concept argue that people do not act consistently from one situation to the next and that people are very influenced by situational forces.

When we observe people around us, one of the first things that strikes us is how different people are from one another. Some people are very talkative while others are very quiet. Some are active whereas others are couch potatoes. Some worry a lot, others almost never seem anxious. Personality psychologists try to describe and understand these differences. According to trait psychologists, there are a limited number of these dimensions dimensions like Extraversion, Conscientiousness, or Agreeableness , and each individual falls somewhere on each dimension, meaning that they could be low, medium, or high on any specific trait.

An important feature of personality traits is that they reflect continuous distributions rather than distinct personality types. This means that when personality psychologists talk about Introverts and Extraverts, they are not really talking about two distinct types of people who are completely and qualitatively different from one another. Instead, they are talking about people who score relatively low or relatively high along a continuous distribution.

In fact, when personality psychologists measure traits like Extraversion , they typically find that most people score somewhere in the middle, with smaller numbers showing more extreme levels. The figure below shows the distribution of Extraversion scores from a survey of thousands of people. As you can see, most people report being moderately, but not extremely, extraverted, with fewer people reporting very high or very low scores.

There are three criteria that are characterize personality traits: 1 consistency, 2 stability, and 3 individual differences. A challenge of the trait approach was to discover the major traits on which all people differ.

Scientists for many decades generated hundreds of new traits, so that it was soon difficult to keep track and make sense of them.

Their approach was guided by the lexical hypothesis , which states that all important personality characteristics should be reflected in the language that we use to describe other people. Therefore, if we want to understand the fundamental ways in which people differ from one another, we can turn to the words that people use to describe one another. So if we want to know what words people use to describe one another, where should we look? Allport and Odbert looked in the most obvious place—the dictionary.

Statistical techniques were used to determine whether a small number of dimensions might underlie all of the thousands of words we use to describe people. Research that used the lexical approach showed that many of the personality descriptors found in the dictionary do indeed overlap.

In other words, many of the words that we use to describe people are synonyms. Thus, if we want to know what a person is like, we do not necessarily need to ask how sociable they are, how friendly they are, and how gregarious they are. Instead, because sociable people tend to be friendly and gregarious, we can summarize this personality dimension with a single term. Statistical methods specifically, a technique called factor analysis helped to determine whether a small number of dimensions underlie the diversity of words that people like Allport and Odbert identified.

The Big Five comprises five major traits shown in the Figure 2 below. Figure 3 provides descriptions of people who would score high and low on each of these traits. Represents Who we seem to be? Who we actually are? Traits Personal and physical Mental and moral What is it? It is the identity It is a learned behavior Nature Subjective Objective Expression Outer appearance and behavior of a person.

Traits of a person that are abstract. Change May change over time. Remains same. Validation of Society Not required Required. Personality can be defined as a combination of mental behaviour and traits or qualities like thinking pattern, feeling and acting. It is a range of enduring tendencies of an individual to think, feel and behave in a specific manner in diverse situations.

It refers to the systematic arrangement of all your dispositions like attitude, thoughts, feelings, emotions, etc. By the term character, we mean an enduring and distinguishing mental and moral characteristics in an individual.

The character of a person emerges under specific circumstances, whereas your personality comes through constantly in the form of your mental and behavioral patterns. We even have a tendency to attribute good character to pleasant personalities, but this is not a reliable way to judge this quality.

The short answer is no, they are not. But there are times when your character is revealed in your personality and your personality shines through in your character. One reveals much more about who you really are. Character determines how you react or respond to situations that require employing your morals. The nature of your character either establishes lines that you will not cross or lets you act without restraint, depending on your inner beliefs.

Consider the example of finding a wallet on the ground that has money in it. Regardless of your personality, your character will control what your next step is. Someone with an honest character will choose to find the owner of the wallet even knowing that he or she could keep the money without getting in trouble.

The decision is not based on the threat of punishment. The person chooses to return the wallet with money because it is the kind and considerate thing to do. Society will typically frown upon such a choice, but some social groups might validate keeping the wallet because of the belief that keeping what you find is acceptable.

But this is a rare development for most people. You might regard your character as a very precious aspect of yourself.