The Scientific Analysis of Personality

J. Peter Rothe, J. Peter Rothe

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351474573
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Psychology
• Categoria: History & Theory in Psychology

Written by one of the world's most eminent personality theorists, this book provides a simply written, comprehensive introduction to recent research about personality structure and the nature of individual differences. The Scientific Analysis of Personality offers the essence of Cattell's work on personality testing, reviewing the experimental, quantitative and statistical research which with the aid of the electronic computer is now producing remarkable new discoveries.After preliminary surveys of the methods by which personality can be studied and of hereditary influences on personality, the author expounds the core of his work on factor analysis and source traits of excitability, dominance, ego and super-ego strength. Chapters on the techniques of objective measurement, the motivation of personality, and the ways in which learning and growing up can be scientifically assessed conclude in a final overview of the wider social implications of personality measurement.Simplicity of presentation combined with a useful glossary of terms will encourage students and layman alike in the analysis of personality. The book will serve as a basic reference to current research methods for psychologists, sociologists, psychiatrists, educators and all engaged in mental testing.

CHAPTER ONE

By What Methods Can Personality Be Studied?

THE BOUNDARIES OF PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE

Personalities react differently even to the study of personality. To the scientifically minded it is the supreme scientific challenge, promising formulae of fantastic and intriguing complexity. To others the notion that we will measure and predict in the field of human personality is a sacrilege and a threat. Yet in an age when we are investigating everything, how can we shut our eyes to the possibilities of scientifically studying personality?

The man who objects on principle to studying, measuring, and using predictive laws about personality because it must be ‘for ever unpredictable’ is on shaky ground. For his own wife can probably predict with considerable accuracy what he will do when presented with various stimuli and situations. And, as usual, the ability to predict brings to her the ability to control! Psychology thrusts no new moral dilemmas upon us. At most, by increasing possibilities of prediction and control, it demands that we attend more seriously to the solution of old moral and philosophical dilemmas.

For example, the old philosophical debate on free will-vs-determinism rears afresh its enigmatic head. Is man a machine, albeit a very wonderful machine, which reacts completely according to causal laws, so that all our decisions are predetermined? Why should one object to making decisions like a chemical balance, which tells us faithfully which weight is heavier? Do we really like an unreliable man, whose erratic decisions spoil our plans? More likely, we call him a madman. Most of us basically prefer an orderliness in our own sensations and feelings, as well as a rationality, i.e. predictive dependability, in the behaviour of those about us. And yet we paradoxically hope that there is some final citadel in each of us in which the unpredictable may happen.

This hope may not be merely vanity, nor is it as unreasonable from the context of science as a Victorian physicist would have asserted. Modern scientists already are compelled to accept the Heisenberg indeterminacy principle which admits that in observing the smallest particles the usual predictive principles break down. Surely it is not altogether unlikely that the psychologist will similarly come to frontiers where laws which hold over large, familiar domains ultimately misfire. But the young science of psychology has scarcely reached such frontiers and, unless and until proof is given to the contrary, psychologists will continue to believe in orderly cause and effect in the mental as in the general physical realm.

The modest but indubitable increase in the power to understand and predict human behaviour which has occurred in the last half-century of psychological research thus really leaves the philosophical issue untouched. But it has aggravated moral issues in regard to legal responsibility for crime, the dangers of political brain-washing, some trespasses by the psychiatrist upon the grounds of the priest, and with questions as to how far advertising should use new and powerful psychological techniques of influence. Our concern in this book is with the science itself. Mostly we must leave these issues of valuation to the reader and his moral leaders.

All science rests upon and begins with accurate description and measurement. Mental phenomena may seem too intangible for measurement. But the faith of the psychologist was simply and cogently stated a generation ago by E. L. Thorndike (1874–1949), at Columbia University, New York, in the dictum that: ‘Whatever exists, exists in some quantity and can (in principle) be measured.’ Note, however, that he and other psychologists are talking about behaviour, not consciousness. Earlier psychologists and philosophers, e.g. Bertrand Russell, Titchener, and Ward (whose article in the 11th Edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica is considered a classic) considered that psychology should be a science of consciousness. But there we cannot measure because no two people can check the same observation. Consequently, the exact connexion of consciousness with behaviour, as talked about in ‘the riddle of mind and matter’, remains an issue, like free wifi-vs-determinism, which our present methods are incapable of encompassing. In our behaviouristic psychology we may sometimes, for economy of language, use a term dealing apparently with consciousness, like ‘pleasure’, or ‘anger’, but to the strictly behaviouristic psychologist this has to be defined by changes in behaviour, physiology, or other measurable manifestations.

Incidentally, one should avoid confusing ‘behaviourism’ with ‘reflexology’, which is a special ‘model’ within psychology, and not a very adequate one at that. Behaviouristic psychology is simply a science based on observing behaviour, and claiming no short-cuts through personal consciousness.

THE THREE HISTORICAL STAGES IN PERSONALITY STUDY

Personality study is only one of several sections into which psychology is sub-divided. Others are perception, comparative (animal) psychology, learning, abnormal psychology, physiological psychology, social psychology, and so on. But it is a very central speciality in that most of the others may be considered abstracted facets of the total, unitary personality (or organism) in action. Pursued too narrowly, they easily degenerate into the play without Hamlet.

The systematizing of human knowledge about personality has fallen broadly into three historical phases:

1. The literary and philosophical phase, a game of personal insight and conventional beliefs extending from the first thoughtful caveman to the most recent novelist and playwright.

2. The stage of organized observation and theorizing, which we may call the proto-clinical phase. This grew up through the attempts of medicine to cope with abnormal, ‘sick’ behaviour. It had its centre in the psychiatric generalizations of men like Kraepelin, the father of medical psychology in Germany, Janet, his counterpart in France, and Freud, whom everyone knows. But it also included philosophers or academic men specializing in personality, like William James in America, Ward, and Klages. All this theory flowered not only in the work of Freud, but also of Kretschmer, McDougall, Jung, Adler, and others who wrote of fascinating, if not always soundly-based notions concerning personality, from late in the last century until well into this one.

3. The quantitative and experimental phase, which did not begin (as far as personality, rather than other aspects of psychology, is concerned) until just before the turn of this century, and is only beginning to show its fruits in the last decade.

As to the first, the literary or prescientific phase, doubtless it contains insights which still surpass in refinement those depended upon by many psychiatrists or experimental psychologists today. But who knows, among the many brilliant ideas offered, which are true ones? Some will claim that the statements about human nature by Dostoyevsky or Shakespeare constitute the zenith of human understanding of the subject. But if others favour the views of Goethe, or Dumas, or Conrad, or Somerset Maugham, the literary ‘method’ offers no objective way of sorting out the truth. It is certain, from psychological observations of readers’ reactions, that most are quite ready to accept with conviction, as marvels of literary insight, manikins and plots deliberately put together with psychologically false mechanisms. Conversely, literary critics are also ready to reject, as too strange for fiction, a playwright’s character who, though unusual, exhibits known psychological mechanisms. Undoubtedly there are gems of scientific truth about personality, lying available in this literary approach, but there is no way – except through the fresh start of scientific research – to separate the living truths from the pasteboard shams. Probably we do best to enjoy literature as an aesthetic product, in which scientific hypotheses of some vitality may exist, but not proven scientific discoveries.

Although both of the two following historical phases may, by contrast, be called ‘scientific in intention’ and general method, their differences today strike us as greater than their similarities. The first defect of the middle, ‘clinical’ development, relative to the final scientific phase, is that, as the name indicates, it began with the study of the insane and the neurotic. When science still lacks fine instruments, it is good – and, indeed, necessary – strategy to try to understand the normal by looking at the gross exaggerations of its mechanisms in the abnormal magnification. Physiology went through the same phase, as an adjunct of medicine, before it became an experimental science. Most ideas up to the Renaissance came largely from the pathology seen in medical practice. But in the end, a price is paid for this magnification. One may begin to believe that what are essentially special disease processes describe normal functioning. For example, psychiatrists have seen so many neurotic symptoms begin with guilt from the pressure of the super-ego or conscience that for many of them conscience is almost an evil thing! They whittle away at it, and the ‘success’ they achieve is to begin with a neurotic and end with an ‘acting out’ disorder – a social nuisance. Only by study of the vaster number of normal people does one come to see that it was not necessarily any excessive development of conscience which created these neurotics, but rather an abnormality and instability in the way in which they reacted to the demands of their superegos.

The second major shortcoming of the clinical phase was that it did not use and even despised quantitative methods. There is not a single measurement in the work of Pierre Janet, Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler, and Carl Jung – and very little in that of Emil Kraepelin. When Jung tells that patient X became more and more out of touch with his ‘archetypal unconscious’, no measurements are offered to demonstrate it, such as we would require if a doctor argued that a patient’s illness arose from a continual elevation of his blood sugar. These writers gained a huge popular following, in an audience extending from playwrights to anthropologists and medical men, with theories often based on description of a single case and where the very description failed to agree with that by others.

Of course, there are phases in every science which must be more descriptive than quantitative. Many quite sound developments occurred in botany, physiology, geology, etc., before measurement came into use, and one can point to Darwin’s creation of the theory of evolution as a masterpiece which seemed to rest on qualitative description. Measurement, however, was implicit in Darwin’s laws and generalizations and was not missing from his notebooks. Moreover, at the physical level we find far less disagreement and misunderstanding among observers than when different psychologists set out to describe the same set of ‘facts’. If Darwin said that snails in Patagonia are twice as big as in England, few who travelled would have any doubts on this, but if one psychologist says the level of anxiety among Italians is higher than among Frenchmen, there is usually another ready to assert the opposite with equal confidence, and, what is more, to erect an elaborate theory on his observation!

THE LIMITATIONS OF CLINICAL STUDY

It is not surprising that the intrinsically intriguing and intellectually promising clinical phase of inquiry quickly became a luxuriant jungle of conflicting theoretical growths. Despite its scientific ‘intention’, its actual methodological kinship to the first or literary phase is shown, among other ways, by the enthusiasm with which writers, from good novelists to Hollywood script-writers, adopted its concepts and its jargon to give ‘depth’ and ‘insight’ to their stories. ‘Complex’, ‘repression’, ‘defence’, ‘introversion’, ‘inferiority complex’, ‘super-ego’, ‘erotic fixation’, etc., became first literary and then newspaper terms. Of course, science lives by conflicting theories, but what were accepted as ‘theories’ even by many professional psychologists and psychiatrists were very poor imitations of what physical scientists call a theory. These verbally clever elaborations could provide a mystically exciting and rewardingly esoteric conversation for two psychiatrists, but they differed from true scientific theories in that they could neither be proved nor disproved, because they were never thought through with a precision which would permit their being brought into contact with quantitative checks or experiments. Indeed, one of the leading British clinical researchers, Eysenck, has recently thrown a refreshing dash of cold water on these super-heated contestants by pointing out that there is even no proof at the pragmatic level. He points out that there is no proof that therapies based on these theories really perform their intended function – of doing the patient, as distinct from the psychiatrist, some demonstrable good.

History written a generation hence will probably size up the situation by pointing out that although this second phase had its quota of men of great genius, like Jung and Freud, it nevertheless amounted scientifically almost to a disaster in that the impressive façade of pseudo-knowledge took away the incentive to make those more modest experiments on which the advance of science depends. In retrospect, except for something vaguely known as ‘free association’– letting the mind wander – it developed no methods to prove what it asserted. Even the father of psychoanalysis, Freud, based his generalizations on so few cases that a statistician can only blush for him, while critics can assert that the conflicts he described were peculiar to middle-class Viennese in a fin-de-siècle culture. It is not surprising, therefore, that the clinical contribution finished in a kind of intellectual shouting match, such as one might expect if a crowd of newspaper men invaded the affairs of a laboratory. No one can deny a man the right to believe that he is a genius, so it was inevitable that the insights of men like Freud were soon ‘improved’, ‘modified’, or simply called old-fashioned, by several thousand clinicians quite as convinced of their personal genius as was Freud of his.

By contrast, the scientific study of personality which got slowly into motion at the turn of this century has based its theories on actual behavioural measurements. Different laboratories can repeat them and statistical and mathematical treatments of these measurements can be applied by anyone who wishes to check. If a theory asserts that breast-fed babies are more optimistic in temperament as adults than those who are not, the experimenter applies measures of optimism of attitudes to a hundred of each. If it is suspected that anxiety rises in adolescence, then anxiety measures can be given to persons at each of a dozen age levels, and curves plotted. A generalization that introverts more easily become neurotic can be examined by measuring children leaving school on introversion-extraversion scales and keeping clinical records for ensuing years, and so on. It is a harder task, but a more rewarding one, when different scientists can cross-examine the evidence and reach agreement, and when the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle of psychology begin solidly to fit together.

At first there was some tendency to put new wine in old bottles, in that many of the new experimentalists tended, sometimes unconsciously, to take the theories to be experimentally tested exclusively from the second or clinical phase of observation. But increasingly they are finding ideas – ideas of greater precision and complexity – directly from laws and regularities observable in their own more exact data. Even though one believes that the distinction in methodological rigour between the scientific and the proto-clinical is a vital one for science, in which no sloppy compromise can be tolerated, yet it is not necessary to combine new methods with complete rejection of old theories, or to indulge the scientific snobbery of denying our ideational ancestry. There are valuable adumbrations of new and useful concepts to be found in the sensitive intuitions of clinical men. For that reason the present writer has carried on, in his own experimental work, the actual psychoanalytic terminology, wherever recent experiment confirms and sharpens the earlier concept (though not without criticism from some experimentalist colleagues!). On the other hand, personality psychologists have no need to depend for more than a fraction of their hypotheses on second-hand clinical concepts. As the following pages may show, the new methods have produced directly a fascinating array of new notions – notions which, moreover, are immediately in terms and operations fit for continuing experiment.

THE MULTIVARIATE AND UNIVARIATE EXPERIMENTAL METHODS

Possibly the reader is beginning to feel that he has now served a sufficient apprenticeship to historical perspectives and talk about methods, and is ready to be rewarded with some factual discoveries. In physical science, at least until recently, the layman could go a long way in understanding the essentials with little disciplining in method. But psychology is a more tricky field, in which even outstanding authorities have been known to run in circles ‘describing things which everyone knows in language which no one understands’. Quite a number of statistical concepts, for example, are essential to understanding what experimental psychology is saying that is different from older notions. Indeed, the student making a profession of psychology is now accustomed to taking about a year simply to get sophisticated about methods, statistics, and the pitfalls which caught earlier generations, and into which he is otherwise all too likely to fall. Consequently we must devote another page or two to defining methods and approaches before we are ready to look at findings.

On scrutinizing the third – quantitative and experimental – historical phase of personality study, we recognize that in fact it splits into two distinct streams. On the one side we see a powerful current of behavioural experiment which began in Russia with Ivan Pavlov and has centred on the conditioned reflex and learning theory. Occasionally writers have miscalled this ‘behaviourism’...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Chapter 1. By What Methods Can Personality be Studied?
• Chapter 2. The Formation of Personality by Environment and Heredity
• Chapter 3. Personality Structure: The Larger Dimensions
• Chapter 4. Further Traits, and their Integration
• Chapter 5. The Techniques of Objective Personality Measurement
• Chapter 6. Finer Issues in Personality Measurement: States, Instruments, Roles
• Chapter 7. The Main Features of Our Dynamic Structure
• Chapter 8. The Clinical Measurement of Conflict and Maladjustment
• Chapter 9. Analysis of the Concept of Integration of Personality
• Chapter 10. The Development of Personality
• Chapter 11. Personality Testing and the School Child
• Chapter 12. Personality Measurement and the Solution of Some Social Problems
• Glossary
• Index of Subjects
• Index of Names