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Cognitive Psychology: Definitions, Theories, and Personality Development
Psychology of Personality · Chapter 9: Cognitive Theories of PersonalitySection 9.1 · lesson 53 of 83video coming soon
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In this lesson
Thought is what sits between a situation and a response.
- Describe cognitive psychology and the processes it studies
- Explain the cognitive revolution and what it changed
- Trace how perception, interpretation and response feed back on each other
- Preview the four cognitive approaches this chapter examines
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Cognitive Theories of Personality
Cognitive Psychology and Personality Development
Two people can walk into the same meeting. Same room, same news, same person delivering it. One leaves annoyed, and shakes it off by lunch. The other leaves certain that something has gone wrong for good. Nothing about the event explains that difference. Something about the two people does. Cognitive theories of personality locate that difference in thinking itself. In this first section, we build the foundation. What cognitive psychology is, and what it studies. Where it came from, and why it changed the field. And how thought ends up shaping a personality.
The Problem
Same Event, Different Person
Start with the thing a theory of personality has to explain. Personality is not only what a person does. It is also how a person habitually sees things. How they interpret situations, other people, and themselves. Take a meeting that gets canceled at short notice. One person reads it as a slight. Another reads it as a free hour, and moves on. Or a blunt comment from a colleague. Hostility, or simply the way that person talks. Or an unexpected setback, arriving out of nowhere. Proof of a pattern, or a one-off with no meaning. In each case the event is fixed, and the reading is not.
Definition
What Cognitive Psychology Studies
So let us be precise about the field. Cognitive psychology is the branch concerned with mental processes. Attention, perception, memory, thinking, problem-solving, and language. These let people take in information, and make sense of it. And then use it to guide behavior. Notice how much work sits in that middle phrase. Making sense of it. Attention decides what gets registered at all. Memory decides what is stored, and what comes back later. Thinking and problem-solving decide how information gets worked on. And language carries meaning, and lets it be shared. A cognitive process is any mental activity of that kind.
The Central Move
Inside the Box, Not Around It
Here is the move that defines the whole approach. The older picture treated the mind as a closed box. A stimulus goes in, and a response comes out. What happened in between was not the subject. Cognitive psychologists study exactly that in-between. Information is noticed, and most of what arrives is not. What is noticed gets encoded, into a usable form. It is stored, and reshaped by whatever is already there. Later it is retrieved, when something calls for it. And only then is it turned into meaning. A person does not respond to a stimulus. They respond to the meaning they have made of it. That whole sequence is called information processing.
How It Began
The Cognitive Revolution
This way of thinking is newer than you might expect. The field took shape in the mid-twentieth century. Before that, psychology had held itself to a strict rule. Study what can be observed. Stimuli going in, responses coming out, and nothing else. Psychologists began to move away from that. They grew interested in the mental activity lying between the two. This shift is called the cognitive revolution. Its claim was bolder than it first sounds. Beliefs, expectations, memories, and interpretations are real, and measurable. Not private events, sitting beyond the reach of science. That is what made a science of the inner life possible. Section nine point four returns to this, through Albert Bandura.
The Cycle
Perceive, Interpret, Respond, Update
It helps to see the whole thing as a loop. A situation arrives, and it is perceived. Perception is already selective, before any thinking happens. Then it is interpreted, and given a meaning. That meaning is where two people most often part company. Then comes the response, emotional and behavioral. And then the step that is easy to skip over. The outcome is stored. It updates what the person expects next time. Which changes what they perceive next time. And the loop closes, and runs again.
Why It Loops
The Loop Is What Makes It Stable
That closing arrow is worth dwelling on. Without it, you have a description of one episode. With it, you have something that can become a pattern. Each pass through the loop shapes the next pass a little. Over years, a way of thinking hardens into a habit. There is a harder consequence too. The loop can confirm itself. Suppose someone expects hostility from other people. They read an ambiguous remark as hostile. They respond guardedly, a little cool themselves. And they get a cool reply back. The expectation now looks confirmed. But part of that evidence was produced by the expectation.
The Shared Assumption
Thought Mediates the Response
All the theories in this chapter share one assumption. Thought mediates between a situation and a response. Both the emotional response, and the behavioral one. Put the claim as sharply as possible. A person does not react to a situation. They react to their construction of it. Now, if constructions were random, this would explain nothing. Personality would look different every day. But they are not random. People build them using relatively stable habits. Habits of attention, of interpretation, and of expectation. Those habits make a personality recognizable, and consistent over time. So understanding personality means understanding patterns of thinking.
Worked Example
Two Readings of One Review
A concrete case makes the point faster than a definition. Two employees receive the same critical feedback. Same performance review, same words, same manager. The first perceives it as evidence of incompetence. Not about this piece of work, but about them. So the expectation that follows is future failure. Effort starts to look pointless, and effort drops. The second perceives the same feedback as specific, and fixable. About the work, rather than about the person. The expectation that follows is improvement with effort. So the natural next question is what to change. The event was identical, and the processing of it was not. That difference alone produced two very different responses.
The Road Ahead
Four Approaches, One Chapter
The rest of this chapter takes up four approaches. Each takes a different piece of the same question. How thought shapes who a person is, and how they act. Section nine point two covers personal construct theory. People read events through personal, bipolar constructs. And they test their predictions, rather as scientists do. Section nine point three covers two ideas. First, explanatory style. The habitual way a person explains good and bad events. That shapes mood, motivation, and resilience. Second, locus of control. Whether outcomes depend on your own actions, or on outside forces. Section nine point four covers social-cognitive theory. Personality emerging from behavior, cognition, and environment together.
Why It Matters
Look for the Interpretation, Not Just the Event
Step back, and hold on to the central claim. Personality differences often live in how people process a situation. Not just in the situation itself. That claim has a practical edge worth keeping. Sometimes a reaction looks out of proportion to the event. When it does, the event is the wrong place to look. The interpretation sitting behind it is the thing to find. That is true of other people, and of yourself. So, to gather this section up. In personality, thought acts as a filter. A filter between a situation, and the response to it. Recognizable habits of thought are what make personality consistent.
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