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Mid-20th-  century personality psychologists 
had a broad view of what comprises person -
ality and how one might assess it. Measures 
of perception, reaction time, and task per -
formance coexisted with the more familiar 
methods of self-  report and peer-  report (Cat -
tell, 1946; Eysenck, 1952). As psychology 
became more specialized, the experimental 
and personality branches parted ways and 
started to focus on different questions. Ex -
perimental psychology focused on norma -
tive phenomena within particular para -
digms (Posner, 1973), whereas personality 
psychology concerned itself with structural 
questions (Goldberg, 1993). Now that the 
structure of personality is fairly clear (see 
John, Chapter 2, this volume), we can return 
to integrating trait- and process-  based views 
of the individual (Cattell, 1946; Eysenck, 
1952).
One reason for doing so is that there will 
always be questions about self-  report. There 
are limitations to what people know about 
themselves, such as what sorts of informa -
tion they attend to or how their self-  concepts 
are structured (Greenwald & Banaji, 1995). 
Motivational factors almost certainly influ -
ence what people say about themselves, such 
that systematic distortions can be expected 
(Robins & John, 1997). And there is a level 
of abstraction to trait self-  reports, which es -
sentially means that people are reporting on long-  standing beliefs about the self rather 
than their recent behavioral or emotional 
tendencies (Klein, Loftus, & Kihlstrom, 
1996). In this context, more objective probes 
of personality, using cognitive methods, can 
be viewed as helpful supplements. This is 
particularly true because they capture ten -
dencies that are more online or in vivo than 
do self-  reports of personality (Robinson & 
Wilkowski, 2015).
Cognitive approaches are also valuable in 
testing theories of personality. As an exam -
ple, Gray suggested that the trait of extraver -
sion could be aligned with the behavioral ac -
tivation system and the trait of neuroticism 
could be aligned with the behavioral inhi -
bition system (Corr, 2004). These process- 
oriented ideas lend themselves to specific hy -
potheses about how reward and punishment 
should affect performance in cognitive- 
experimental tasks (Leue &  Beauducel, 
2008). Similarly, we might propose that 
agreeable people are nicer to others because 
they have learned how to self-  regulate, or 
control, their hostile thoughts. Theories of 
this type can be tested by priming hostile 
thoughts to see how they affect subsequent 
performance as a function of agreeableness 
(Wilkowski & Robinson, 2008a). Cognitive 
approaches, in other words, can be used to 
test and refine our thinking about how par -
ticular personality traits operate.CHAPTER 17
Cognitive Approaches to  Personality
Michael  D. Robinson