Introduction to Personality : Toward An Integration

Rating:
Summary: Poorly organized and written "introductory" personality book
Review: I adopted this book for one of my classes, based on Mischel being one of the authors (a respected personality researcher), and the format of the book. Unfortunately, I did not read it thoroughly before adopting it. All I can say, is that I pity my poor students who are trying to get a grasp of personality theories based on this book, fortunately they have lectures to help understand this material and also correct mistakes within this material. For example, when describing the personality trait of "Intuitive," the authors define this as "quick guesses." What a grossly misleading and absolutely incorrect definition. Further, the authors use a lot of "psychobable" specific to personality researchers, which may be useful for someone who is a personality researcher, but is rather confusing for undergraduate students where this is their first exposure to such theories. I thought this would be a nice, empirically-based personality theories book. Unfortunately, it is confusing and poorly organized. This book turns material that should be fun for students to learn into a dry and boring read.