Assessing Personality
Traits (and more
Assessing Personality)
Personality Science
Person-Situation Debate
100
This type of reliability should be high when we are assessing traits, but low when we are assessing states.
What is test-retest reliability? [What other type of reliability did we discuss? How is interjudge agreement similar to reliability?]
100
Come up to the board and draw a personality profile for Aaron Rodgers. Be able to explain your profile.
Many possible answers. [How does a personality profile differ from using typologies? How does the single-trait approach relate to the essential-trait approach?]
100
A group of researchers assessed levels of the Big Five in 15 year olds. Many years later, they obtained criminal records for their sample. They found that lower Agreeableness at age 15 was associated with more extensive criminal records. What is the dependent variable in this study?
Extensiveness of criminal records. [What type of data is this? What are the advantages & disadvantages of this type of data?]
100
According to Richards et al., what is the average correlation between situation variables and outcomes?
What is ~.21 -- lower than what Funder & Ozer found for a handful of seminal social psych studies. [How does this compare with what Mischel and/or Nisbett found for personality variables?]
200
What are the 3 types of test construction discussed in your textbook?
The rational method, the factor analytic method, and the empirical method. [How does the factor analytic method relate to the Big Five?]
200

This research method has pretty poor generalizability but is great for coming up with new ideas about people and their personality.

What is the Case Method?  [What are the two other types of methods?  What can we use them for?  What can and can't they tell us?]

200
Describe 2 common biases in our research procedures that reduce generalizability.
What are gender biases (but this has changed over time!), conscientiousness bias, and WEIRD samples. [Make sure you can explain how those biases "work." How can we improve generalizability?]
200

Name and provide an example of either of the two person-environment transactions we discussed in class.

Many possible answers -- must reflect either situation selection or situation evocation.  [After the debate, what perspective on the cause of behavior have most personality psychologists taken?]

300
What is the projective hypothesis?
The projective hypothesis says that our personality exists outside of our awareness, but that it will leak out when we are faced with ambiguous or neutral stimuli. [How does this hypothesis relate to the Rorschach's and Thematic Apperception Test's items? How is the validity of these measures?]
300

Choose any of the Big Five traits.  Explain what it is and then provide 1 advantage or disadvantage of being high on that trait.

Many possible answers -- must relate to the OCEAN traits.  Answers must be based on evidence provided in the text or in class.  [Can you identify the advantages and disadvantages of all the traits?]

300
Why has Null Hypothesis Significance Testing recently come under fire by personality psychologists?
NHST is based on the probability (p-value) that you would get your results even if there was no important relationship between your variables. (IOW: if p < .05 then there is a less than 5% chance that you would find a relationship in your sample that wasn't "real" in the population.) However, these cut-offs are arbitrary and don't tell us anything about whether the finding has "real-world" importance. (Plus, they can be over-influenced by things like sample size.)
300
What are the 3 arguments of the situationist perspective?
1) Personality tells us very little about behavior 2) Situations tell us much more about behavior 3) There is no reason to waste resources on assessing personality. [Can you provide a rebuttal to each of these?]
400
Describe 4 moderators of accuracy.
Many possible answers -- different ones for Judge characteristics, Target characteristics, Trait characteristics, and Info characteristics. [What is the RAM model? How does the value of accuracy compare with the value of consensus? How is consensus related to validity?]
400
Choose 2 Big Five traits and the 1 trait unique to the HEXACO model. What Natural B-Data could you use as evidence that a person was LOW on these traits?
Many possible answers, but the person must address Honesty-Humility (which is unique to the HEXACO model). [Can you do the other traits? What about evidence that a person is high on the traits?]
400
Which type of research design can be used to ask questions about personality development over time? What can't they tell us?
Longitudinal designs -- but they can't tell us WHY people change in the ways they do. [Is a longitudinal design correlational or experimental? What kind of design can we use to study cohort effects?]
400
Although the Person-Situation Debate caused quite a bit of conflict, explain how it was also ultimately beneficial for personality psychologists.
It forced us to ask ourselves important questions -- just how useful is personality as a predictor? What can and can't it be used to predict? These helped us become stronger scientists.
500
Explain Funder's 3 Laws in your own words.
Here are his words: 1) “Great strengths are usually great weaknesses, and surprisingly often the opposite is true as well” 2) “There are no perfect indicators of personality; there are only clues, and clues are always ambiguous.” 3) “Something beats nothing, two times out of three.”
500

Explain how the dictionary was essential to the development of the most prominent essential-trait approach.  Be sure to name the hypothesis that led to the use of the dictionary too!

The Lexical Hypothesis states that we probably have words for all important features of a person.  So Allport & Odbert used the dictionary to find all of the words that describe people.  They used statistics to figure out where those words "lumped" into the essential Big Five traits.  [What do we know about the universality of these traits?  What do we know about the variability of them?]

500
Researchers find a correlation of .26 between a personality variable and an outcome. Produce the BESD for this correlation -- show all your math. Then, give an example of an outcome for which it would be "worth it" to seek out an intervention that targets the personality trait.
Ultimately, the math should show: 50 + 13 = 63 and 50 - 13 = 37. Many possible answers for the outcome that is "worth it." [Can you do a BESD backwards?]
500
According to Funder, the results of the debate suggest some important directions for future research in personality psychology. Provide 2.
1) We need to find ways of gathering more Natural B-Data in our studies 2) We should assess and learn more about individual differences in behavioral consistency 3) When we ask if personality can help us predict outcomes, we need to be assessing behavioral trends
M
e
n
u