The Personality Puzzle by David C. Funder.

You will prepare and submit a term paper on The Personality Puzzle by David C. Funder. Your paper should be a minimum of 1500 words in length. In this regard, this essay is a personal reflection describing how I understood and interpreted the course material.

To start with, I learned the basic goals of personality psychology and how it is organized based on the approaches used to study human beings. In a real sense, personality psychology is concerned with understanding the nature of human beings by analyzing various behavioural traits of human beings. According to Funder, personality psychology aims to address three major human psychological factors including thoughts, feelings, and behaviour (2012). The three psychological factors underlie human characteristics that define help to explain differences between several people. Of more importance, I learned five effective approaches used to study human psychology from different perspectives. These approaches include “trait, biological, psychoanalytic, phenomenological, and learning and cognitive processes” (Funder, 2012 p. 15). These approaches are effective because they not only analyze the physical characteristics of people under study but also recognize the role of biological aspects in determining personality psychology among people.

Additionally, I learned several research methods used to collect informational data about personality psychology. Collection of accurate data relating to people understudy is vital for making a correct interpretation of personality psychology. Therefore, approved approaches that can lead to accurate data collection are relied upon to construct the true personality of the individuals in question. On this basis, Funder’s Second Law, which states that “There are no perfect indicators of personality. there are only clues, and clues are always ambiguous”, proved to be a useful approach in identifying the correct data for use in the analysis of personality (Funder, 2012 p. 21). This is because the law proposes that personality can be identified by analyzing several outcomes related to the person in question.