Personality and Individual Differences

Revisiting the Classic Studies

Philip Corr

• Editore: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Anno: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781526455222
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Psychologie
• Categoria: Persönlichkeit in der Psychologie

Revisiting the Classic Studies is a series of texts that introduces readers to the studies in psychology that changed the way we think about core topics in the discipline today. It provokes students to ask more interesting and challenging questions about the field by encouraging a deeper level of engagement, both with the details of the studies themselves and with the nature of their contribution.

Edited by leading scholars in their field and written by researchers at the cutting edge of these developments, the chapters in each text provide details of the original works and their theoretical and empirical impact, and then discuss the ways in which thinking and research has advanced in the years since the studies were conducted.

Personality and Individual Differences: Revisiting the Classic Studies traces 14 ground-breaking studies by researchers such as Hans Eysenck, Raymond Cattell, Ernest Tupes and Raymond Christal to re-examine and reflect on their findings and engage in a lively discussion of the subsequent work that they have inspired.

1 Assessing and Enumerating Personality Dimensions Revisiting Webb (1915)

Ian J. Deary

Background to the study

Today, researchers in the psychology of individual differences almost take it for granted that people can usefully be described in terms of a limited number personality traits (Matthews, Deary, & Whiteman, 2009). These traits are non-cognitive aspects of character on which people differ, usually with a normal (bell-shaped) distribution in the population. Traits are often derived from questionnaires using multivariate statistical methods. Prior to the scientific study of personality characteristics, there were descriptions of human personality for millennia. For example, Theophrastus’s Characters was written in the 4th century BCE (Rusten & Cunningham, 1993; Diggle, 2004). Edward Webb’s (1915) paper is important because it was arguably the first study scientifically to discover a personality trait using recognizably modern methods. Toward the end of the empirical part of his study of human character differences, Webb concluded as follows:

We therefore venture to suggest (tentatively and with much desire for further evidence) that the nature of the second factor [after general intelligence], whose generality would appear to extend so widely in character, is in some close relation to ‘persistence of motives.’ This conception may be understood to mean consistency of action resulting from deliberate volition, or will. (For convenience, we shall in future represent the general factor by the symbol ‘w’.) (p. 60)

Today, the leading model in the scientific study of personality traits is the Five-Factor Model (or ‘Big Five’) (Matthews et al., 2009). That is, there is much evidence, from lexical and questionnaire-based studies, that people differ with respect to neuroticism, extraversion, conscientiousness, agreeableness and openness (see Chapter 5). There is a broad consensus that these five traits usefully describe important aspects of human psychological variation (i.e., systematic and measurable differences between people). They are moderately stable across decades of adult life, are partly heritable (between about 30% and 50%), are found in different cultures, and predict important life outcomes such as mental and physical health. Of course, there are disputes. Some favour more (see Chapter 3) or fewer (see Chapters 4 and 5) dimensions. Some prefer to study narrower (e.g., sensation seeking) or broader (e.g., a general factor of personality) traits. Some personality schemes render and name the traits slightly differently. There is still no validation of the nature and number of these traits in terms of brain structure and function (Deary, 2009). Nevertheless, the Five-Factor Model is the currently best-agreed scientific model with which one might compare a classic study.

Several histories of the Five-Factor Model have been written (e.g., Digman, 1990; Goldberg, 1993; McCrae & John, 1992; Deary, 2009). Most acknowledge the work of R. B. Cattell (e.g., 1945, 1947; see Chapter 3) in taming, culling and organizing the huge number of trait terms listed by Allport and Odbert (1936; see Chapter 2). Their work leads into both questionnaire and lexical approaches to personality traits that have a lineage to today’s understandings of the nature and number of human personality trait differences. The importance of Webb’s (1915) classic study is that it was arguably the first to use recognizably modern methods to find a trait like conscientiousness. Moreover, although he did not appreciate it, we shall see later that Webb produced a dataset in 1915 that contained components resembling most of the five factors that are recognized today.

Detailed description of the study

Webb’s (1915) study was his Doctor of Science thesis for the University of London. A request for the thesis from the university brings a bound copy of the article. It was published as a Monograph Supplement to the British Journal of Psychology, a format that the journal did not continue for long. The article, with its preface included, is over 100 printed pages long, and has some large fold-out sheets containing correlation matrices. Webb’s (1915) paper is similar in page-numbers length to Charles Spearman’s (1904) paper in which the latter discovered general cognitive ability (usually known as g). That is relevant, because Spearman was Webb’s doctoral advisor and is mentioned often in the article, the statistical methods are Spearman’s, and the article may be seen as the discovery of the first general psychological (personality) factor after Spearman’s g. There are several remarkable things about Webb’s study, in addition to its length, namely its style, the study design, the data collected, the statistical analyses, the results and its latent content. Each of these is now described and discussed in turn.

Style

There are enjoyable literary and historical allusions throughout Webb’s (1915) article. For example, the Preface addressed potential critics of the seemingly intractable topic of human psychological variation using Tennyson’s ‘Flower in the crannied wall’. Later, in excoriating pre-scientific conceptions of personality, Webb uses concepts from Francis Bacon’s 17th century Novum Organum. For these and other literary-historical references, Webb does not mention the original authors; he expects the reader to know them. In several places, Webb’s (1915, p. 23) writing explicitly recognized that he was taking the study of personality from pre-science to science: ‘The present work is guided by the principle that neither casual observation nor dialectical discussion can furnish the groundwork of any empirical science, the decision between the conflicting opinions of descriptive psychologists must rest with definite, and as a rule, quantitative evidence.’

Webb’s (1915) writing often has a critic clearly in mind, and is therefore reminiscent of Spearman’s style (see Spearman, 1927). For example, as Webb (1915) moved to the very important Chapter V in his paper – ‘A Second General Factor’ – he had by that stage reviewed past efforts, had collected data and had analysed the intelligence variables (finding g, of course). He was then ready to look for any further general aspects of psychological variation, probably in non-intellectual traits. He wrote (p. 52) as follows:

A few of these unwarranted generalisations [concerning human psychological variation, by past writers] which have been put forward are passion, will, pleasures and pains and their corresponding interests; strength and weakness of activity; speed of activity; vitality (sanguine, choleric, etc.); primary and secondary functions; spontaneity; easy and difficult reactibility … But all that these writers have really done is to observe a person’s actions to have certain characteristics under certain particular conditions. They have never produced, nor even tried to produce, any evidence of the same person exhibiting the same characteristics generally, that is to say, under varied conditions.

That last sentence is a pretty good approximation to what personality traits are. In this part of his paper Webb makes the connection with Spearman clear by stating that the clarity that his own work brings to personality research is like the clarity that the discovery of general intelligence (g) brought to the study of cognitive differences.

Toward the end of Chapter V, Webb (1915) stated his main discovery as an hypothesis, as follows: ‘The evidence thus appears to be decisive; and we therefore venture to put forward the hypothesis: That a second factor, of wide generality, exists; and that this factor is prominent on the “character” side of mental activity (as distinguished from the purely intellective side’ (p. 58, italic in the original). Also in this chapter were things one would expect to see in a modern Discussion section (i.e., a reflection on how the research integrates with and develops previous work, and some practical application). Indeed, the practical application is rather fun; it applies Webb’s newly discovered general personality factor of ‘w’ (persistence of motives) to two highly intelligent thinkers: Isaac Newton (1642–1726/7; a high scorer on w, Webb reckons) and Francis Bacon (1561–1626; a low w scorer, Webb reckons). And Chapter VI continued the ‘Discussion section’ by addressing limitations in the research undertaken.

In summary, Webb’s (1915) over-100-year-old (at the time of this writing) paper is a good read. It has the excitement of someone writing with awareness that he was among the first to conduct adequate-quality empirical research on important aspects of personhood. It is perhaps expected that one would have to make allowances for limitations in such an old paper in terms of its design, data and analyses. However, bearing in mind how the majority of personality trait studies are conducted today, allowances for limitations mostly would have to be afforded by Webb to today’s researchers, and not vice versa. Early in the Preface Webb quoted Galton’s (1883) urging that character should be studied more and that schoolmasters might be well placed to make assessments: ‘It would be necessary to approach the subject wholly without prejudice, as a pure matter of observation, just as if the children were the flora and fauna of hitherto undiscovered species in an entirely new land’ (p. v). What did Webb do?

Design

In Webb’s (1915) review of previous scientif...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Half Title
• Publisher Note
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• About the Editor
• About the Contributors
• Introduction Revisiting Classic Studies in Personality and Individual Differences
• 1 Assessing and Enumerating Personality Dimensions Revisiting Webb (1915)
• 2 Classification of Trait-Names Revisiting Allport and Odbert (1936)
• 3 Factor Analysis of Trait-Names Revisiting Cattell (1943)
• 4 The Dimensional Model of Personality and Psychopathology Revisiting Eysenck (1944)
• 5 Five Strong and Recurrent Personality Factors Revisiting Tupes and Christal (1961)
• 6 The Challenge to Trait Theory Revisiting Mischel (1968)
• 7 Sensitivity to Punishment and Reward Revisiting Gray (1970)
• 8 Effects of Rewards on Self-Determination and Intrinsic Motivation Revisiting Deci (1971)
• 9 Genetic Influences on Behaviour Revisiting Bouchard et al. (1990)
• 10 The Evolution of Personality Revisiting Buss (1991)
• 11 Personality, Health and Death Revisiting Friedman et al. (1993)
• 12 Realistic Ratings of Personality Revisiting Funder (1995)
• 13 Personality Traits as State Density Distributions Revisiting Fleeson (2001)
• 14 The Dark Side of Personality Revisiting Paulhus and Williams (2002)
• Author Index
• Subject Index