Psychological characteristics such as attitudes (e.g., being for or against immigration restrictions), beliefs (e.g., whether or not God exists), tastes (e.g, preferring the Beastie Boys or Beethoven), and habits (e.g., going to bed early or late), unlike emotions and moods, are at least somewhat stable over time, and they clearly reflect non-intellectual differences between people. However, psychologists still do not usually consider them true components of personality. The reason is that attitudes, beliefs, tastes and habits are normally quite narrow and restricted in their psychological relevance. Attitudes and beliefs concern specific propositions, tastes concern specific experiences, and habits concern specific actions. Personality characteristics, in contrast, have relatively broad relevance: they refer to generalized patterns of psychological functioning. For instance, people might be said have "authoritarian' personalities if, in addition to their specifically anti-immigration sentiment, they hold a variety of prejudiced, repressive, and highly conventional attitudes. Similarly, people who go to bed late might be said to be ambitious if this habit is part of a larger pattern of hard work and competitive striving, or extraverted and sensation-seeking if it is part of a pattern of relentless partying.

We can distinguish between objective and subjective probability. Objective probability is where what will happen is genuinely indeterminate. Radioactive decay could be one example. For any given radioactive atom, the probability of it decaying over the period of its half-life is 50-50. This means that, if you were to take ten such atoms, it is likely that five will decay over the period of the element's half-life and five will not decay. On at least some interpretations, it is genuinely indeterminate which atoms will fall into which category. Subjective probability, on the other hand, refers to cases where there may be no actual indeterminacy, but some particular mind or set of minds makes a probability judgement about the likelihood of some event. These subjects do so because they lack complete information about the causes that will determine the event. Their ignorance requires them to make a probabilistic assessment, usually by assigning a probability based on the number of occurrences of each outcome over a long sequence in the past.