Chapter 2 Personality Puzzle

If you want to know what someone is like, why not just ask? S-data are self-judgments. Participants simply tell the psychologist (usually by answering a questionnaire) whether they are dominant, or friendly, or conscientious. They do a self-rating on a scale where they check a number from 1 (not at all) to 9 (very). It could even be as simple as asking descriptive questions and the participant answering yes or no. According to most research, the way people describe themselves by and large matches the way they are described by others. The principle behind the use of S-data is that the world’s best expert about your personality is very probably you.

The Five Advantages and Three Disadvantages of S-Data:

• Advantages

  1. Large amount of information

     • Regardless of what situation you’re in, you are the best observer of your personality. A researcher can’t follow you around from location to location in a variety of situations, but you can.

  2. Access to thoughts, feelings, and intentions

     • A researchers cannot pluck the thoughts and feelings out of your brain.

  3. Definitional truth

     • Because you think it’s true, then it is true. If you think you have high or low self-esteem, then you do.

  4. Causal force

     • You will always try to be more like the you that you’re describing yourself as to others.

  5. Simple and easy

     • All a researcher has to do is ask you questions from a questionnaire.

• Disadvantages

  1. Bias

     • Many of us like to think of ourselves, and tend to describe ourselves as smarter, kinder, more honest, and more mentally healthy than we are. Others can distort in the opposite direction as well.

     • Another bias is that a person is always able to just clam up. There is no way to stop a person from withholding information.

  2. Error

     • Fish-and-water effect, fish do not know that they are wet. And some people may not see that they are a people pleaser, or super grouchy, etc.

  3. Too simple and too easy

     • It isn’t that there’s anything specifically wrong with S-data, it’s just that researchers have used it for so long and so often that they may have forgotten that other methods exist.

I-Data: Find Somebody Who Knows

• These are judgments by knowledgable informants. The author of this book likes to ask for the names and e-mails of the two people on campus who knows them the best. Then those people are recruited to come to the lab to describe the student’s or subject’s personality. The numbers constitute I-data.

The Five Advantages and Four Disadvantages of I-data

Advantage

1. A Large Amount of Information

   • A close acquaintance who describes someone’s personality is in a position to base that description on hundreds of behaviors in dozens of situations. And finding more than one acquaintance for one subject is even better, because you can then average your findings from each participant out to one single definition of a person’s personality.

2. Real-World Bias

   • I-data comes from observing a person in the real world, so the people who know you well rate you highly in certain aspects and lower in others according to how they’ve observed you.

3. Common sense and Context

   • Your acquaintance can contextualize your behaviors.

4. Definitional Truth

   • You can’t self-report things like whether you’re charming, whether you’re likable, etc. These definitions come from your outward performance.

5. Causal Force

   • The opinions of others greatly affect both opportunities and expectancies. If a person who is considering hiring you believes you to be competent and conscientious, you are more likely to get the job than if that person thought you did not have those qualities.

Disadvantage

1. Limited behavioral information

   • They only know what they’ve seen of you. People change depending on the friends and social groups they’re with. Beit, not by much, but it still changes many answers. Your roommate likely does not see the working side of you, unless you work together too.

2. Lack of access to private experience

   • They can’t read your mind.

3. Error

   • A person’s judgments can be mistaken. It simply is not possible to remember everything one has done, informants can’t remember everything they have observed, either. The behaviors that are most likely to stick are those that are extreme, unusual, or emotionally arousing.

4. Bias

   • What if the informant is racist, or sexist. people have all sorts of ideas about what you must be like based on their knowledge of your identity.

L-Data: The Residue of Personality

• Life data, verifiable, concrete, real-life facts that may hold psychological significance

• Try for Yourself

  • Age: 26

  • Gender: Nb

  • The amount of money you earned last month: $1300

  • The number of days of school or work you missed last year because of illness: Probably close to 30 in total??

  • GPA: 3.6

  • The number of miles you travel in an average week: About 12 miles on average

  • Is your bedroom neat and tidy right now?: Absolutely not

  • How much and what kind of food is currently in your kitchen?: Not a lot, but mostly mexican food and breakfast foods

  • Have you ever been fired from a job?: Never

  • Are you or have you ever been married?: Nope

  • Do you hold a valid passport?: I literally just submitted the paperwork for one on Sunday, so no, not yet.

  • How much time do you spend on social media during an average day?: About 8 hours a day :(

After you have written your answers, read them over, and answer the following questions:

• Are any of these answers particularly revealing about the kind of person you are? I think that in some regard, the gender, amount of sick days, GPA, bedroom tidiness, ever having been fired, ever having been married, and how much social media a person uses can tell a significant amount of who a person is.

• Are any of these answers completely uninformative about the kind of person you are? I think the number of miles I travel, my age, how much food and what kind of food i have in my kitchen, holding a valid passport are uninformative about who i am as a person.

• Are you certain about your answer to the previous question? Yes.

• If someone who didn’t know you read these answers, what conclusions would they draw about you? Probably that I’m a poor genderqueer, who misses a lot of school and work, struggles getting good grades, is very messy, and that I spend too much time on social media (and depending on the type of beliefs they hold, that last one might tie back into my gender identity)

• In what ways would these conclusions be right or wrong? The would be pretty much right.

L-data can be thought of as the results, or “residue,” of personality. Just as a snail leaves a trail behind wherever it goes, your behavior also leaves traces of where you have been and what you have done. For example, L-data reflect how your exercise and work behaviors, over time, have affected important life outcomes, such as health or occupational success. Or even consider the condition of your bedroom. It’s current state is determined by what you have done it it, which is, in turn, affected by the kind of person you are. One study sent observers into college students’ bedrooms to rate them on several dimensions. These ratings were then compared with personality assessments obtained separately. It turned out that people with tidy bedrooms were relatively conscientious, and people whose rooms contained a wide variety of books and magazines were open to new ideas. In other words, conscientious people make their beds. Curious people read a lot. But the rooms of extraverts and introverts look about the same.

L-Data has 3 Advantages and One Big Disadvantage:

Advantage

1. Objective and verifiable

   • Measures of outcomes such as income, marital status, health, and the number of online followers one has generate can be admirably concrete and even be expressed in exact, numeric form.

2. Intrinsic importance

   • Often—when they concern outcomes more consequential than the neatness of one’s bedroom—L-data constitutes exactly what the psychologist wants to know. The goal of every applied psychologist is to predict, and even have a positive effect on, real-life consequences such as employment status, success in school, accident-proneness, or health.

3. Psychological relevance

   • L-data can be strongly affected by and uniquely informative about psychological variables. Some people have traits that promote career success, while others’ characteristic behaviors make automobile accidents more likely, which is why your rates go up after you file a claim. And relationship satisfaction, occupational success, and health are all importantly affected by personality.

Disadvantage

1. Multidetermination

   • However, L-data have many causes so trying to establish direct connections between specific attributes of personality and life outcomes is chancy. This disadvantage has an important implication: If your business is to predict L-data from personality, no matter how good you are at it, your chances of success are limited. The possibility of predicting employment status, academic success, health, accidents, marriage, or anything else is constrained by the degree to which any of these outcomes was determined by personality in the first place.

B-data: See what the person does

• Actions speak louder than words, observations of behavior in daily life or in a laboratory produce b-data, the B, as you probably already figured out, stands for “behavior”

Natural B-data

• The ideal way to collect B-data would be to hire a private detective, armed with state-of-the-art surveillance devices and a complete lack of respect for privacy, secretly to follow the participant around night and day. The detective’s report would specify in exact detail everything the participant said and did, and with whom. Ideal, but impossible—and probably unethical, too. So, psychologists have to compromise. One way is by providing diary and experience-sampling methods. Research in my lab has used both. Participants fill out daily diaries that detail what they did that day: how many people they talked to, how many times they told a joke, how much time they spent studying or sleeping, and so one. Or they might report how talkative, confident, or insecure they acted in a situation they experienced the previous day. In a sense, these data are self-reports, but they are not self-judgments; they are reasonably direct indications of what the participant did, described in specific terms close to the time the behavior was performed. But they are a compromise kind of B-data because the participant, rather than the psychologist, is the one who made and reported the behavioral observations.

• Experience-sampling methods try to get more directly at what people are doing and feeling moment by moment. One early technique used pagers that beeped several times a day. The participants then wrote down what they were doing. Technological innovations updated this procedure; participants might carry around handheld computers and enter their reports directly into a database.

• One useful technique for direct behavioral assessments in real life is the electronically activated recorder (EAR), developed by psychologist Matthias Mehl and his colleagues. The EAR is a digital audio recorder, carried in a research participant’s pocket or strapped onto a belt, which samples sounds at preset intervals such as, in one study, for 30 seconds at a time, every 12.5 minutes. Afterward, research assistants listen to the recordings and note what the person was doing during each segment, using categories such as “on the phone,” “talking one-on-one,” “laughing,” “singing,” “watching TV,” “attending class,” and so forth. This technique has some limitations, two of which are that the record is audio only (no pictures) and that for practical reasons the recorder can sample only intermittently during the research participant’s day.

• According to data collected from smartphones, extraverts have longer conversations and move around more.

• Cellphone data is also more likely to be used for B-data!

Laboratory B-data

• A participant is put in to a room, something is made to happen, and the psychologist directly observes what the participant then does. The “something” that is made to happen can be dramatic or mundane. The participant might be given a form to fill out, and then suddenly there is a crisis; smoke is pouring under the door. The psychologist, sitting just outside holding a stopwatch, intends to measure how long it will take before the participant goes for help, if that ever happens. If a researcher wanted to assess the participant’s latency of response to smoke from naturalistic B-data, it would probably take a long time, if ever, before the appropriate situation came along. In an experiment, the psychologist can just make it happen.

• Physiological measures: this measure provides another, increasingly important source of laboratory-based B-data. These include measures of blood pressure, galvanic skin response (which varies according to moisture on the skin, that is, sweating), hormonal responses, heart rate, and even highly complex measures of brain function, such as pictures derived from CT scans or PET scans. All of these can be classified as B-data because they are things the participant foes—albeit involuntarily via the nervous system—and are measured directly.

Advantages of B-Data

1. Range of contexts

   • The psychologist does not have to sit around waiting for a situation like this; if people can be enticed into an experiment, the psychologist can make it happen. The variety of B-data that can be gathered is limited only by the psychologist’s resources, imagination, and ethics.

2. Appearance of objectivity:

   • To the extent that B-data are based on direct observation, the psychologist is gathering the information about personality and does not have to take anyone else’s word for it.

Disadvantages

1. Difficult and expensive

   • Experience-sampling methods require major efforts to recruit, instruct, and motivate research participants, and may also need special equipment. Laboratory studies require the researcher to set up the testing situation, to recruit participants (and induce them to show up on time), and to code the observational data. This is probably the main reason B-data are not used very often compared to the other types.

2. Uncertain interpretation

   • No matter how it is gathered, a bit of B-data is usually a number, and numbers do not interpret themselves. Worse, when it comes to B-data, appearances are often ambiguous or even misleading. If you make a lot of long calls on your smartphone, does this really means you’re extravert? If you become annoyed during a laboratory experiment, does this really mean you are unhappy?

Psychology' emphasizes the methods by which knowledge can be obtained. Knowledge about methods is necessary for conducting research, and also for understanding the results of research done by others.

Science is the seeking of new knowledge, not the cataloging of facts already known. Technical training conveys current knowledge about a subject, so that the knowledge can be applied. Scientific education, by contrast, focuses on how to find out what is not yet known.