Individual Differences Flashcards
What is a hypothesis?
An idea that a scientist wishes to test through scientific research
What is a theory?
A set of statements designed to explain a set of phenomena
What is a repeated measures design?
The same participants take part in each condition of the independent variable
What is an independent groups design?
Different individuals take part in each condition (control and experimental groups)
Advantages of repeated measures design
- Less variance so easier to obtain significant results
- Each participant acts as their own control as they partake in each condition
- Less variability in the data (age, sex, personality etc.)
Advantages of independent groups design
- Participants aren’t affected by order effects
- Demand characteristics are less likely as there are less clues about what the experiment is about
- Useful for medicine
What is an independent variable?
The variable we manipulate
What is the dependent variable?
The variable we measure
What is the nominal fallacy?
The belief that one has explained an event simply by naming it
What is the operational definition?
The translation of generalities into specific operations
What is validity?
Validity refers to the appropriateness of a variable - the ability of a test to measure what it is supposed to measure
What is ecological validity?
The extent to which the findings of a study are able to be generalised to the real world
The Barnum Effect
Most people believe that vague personality descriptions accurately reflect their own personality
Who is the Barnum Effect named after?
Phineas T Barnum - a circus showman
Who coined the name Barnum Effect?
Meehl (1956)
Furnham and Schofield
- 1987
- The Barnum effect is clearly seen when individuals accept that ‘generalised, vague bogus descriptions of themselves which have high base-rate occurrence in the general population’
Merrens and Richards
- 1970
- People have been found to be more accepting of generalised feedback than actual, factual feedback
Stagner
- 1958
- Administered personality tests to managers and gave them 13 bogus statements about their personality, when asked to rate how strongly they agreed with the statements, almost all indicated that they believed them to some extent
Furnham
- 1994
- Undergraduates gave samples of their hair to an experimenter, a week later they were given a ‘trichological analysis’ (24 bland statements regarding their health which were completely bogus)
- Most students thought they statements were very accurate
Schwartz
- 1999
- Respondents were asked to determine the cause of mass murder, when the heading of the paper was ‘Institute of Personality’ they cited more personality reasons and when it was ‘Institute of Social Science’ they cited more context-social reasons
- Even small details can influence respondents answers
What is reliability?
How consistent the results are
What is interrater reliability?
Two raters score a behaviour independently, if their ratings agree then there is a high interrater reliability
What is split-half reliability?
Divide a questionnaire in half and compare the responses in each half, if there is strong agreement in each half then there is high split-half reliability
What is test-retest reliability?
Administering a test at one time and again some time later should yield the same results if the test is reliable
What is Spearman’s two-factor theory?
An individual performance on a test of intellectual ability is based on 2 factors, the g factor and the s factor
What is the g factor?
The general factor comprising of 3 qualitative principles of cognition….
- Apprehension of experience
- Eduction of relations
- Eduction of correlates
What does apprehension of experience mean?
People’s ability to perceive and understand what they experience
What does eduction of relations mean?
People’s ability to draw out relationships between things
What does eduction of correlates mean?
People’s ability to apply a rule inferred from one case to another
What is the s factor?
The specific ability someone has for a particular test, eg. spatial reasoning ability
What is factor analysis?
A statistical procedure which allows investigators to identify common factors among groups of tests
What is fluid intelligence?
Performance on culture-free tasks such as seeing patterns in a repeating series of items (potential for people to learn)
What is crystallised intelligence?
Performance on tasks which require people to have already acquired information (how they have used their fluid intelligence)
What are the components of Sternberg’s triarchic theory of intelligence?
- Componential intelligence
- Contextual intelligence
- Experiential intelligence
What is componential intelligence?
Mental mechanisms people use to plan and execute tasks
What is experiential intelligence?
The ability to deal effectively with novel situations and to solve automatically problems which have already been encountered
What is contextual intelligence?
Behaviours which would have been subject to natural selection in our evolutionary history: adaptation, selection and shaping
What is Gardner’s theory of intelligence based on?
Neuropsychology
What are the types of intelligence in Gardner’s theory?
- Linguistic intelligence
- Musical intelligence
- Logical/mathematical intelligence
- Spatial intelligence
- Bodily/kinesthetic intelligence
- Two types of personal intelligence
What type of intelligence did Goleman suggest?
Emotional intelligence
Explain the evolutionary theory of sex differences in cognition…
As men used to be the hunters and women used to be the gatherers (and so stay at home) it is not surprising that men are spatially superior to women
Explain the psychosocial theory of sex differences in cognition…
Children fulfil sex-role stereotypes where boys are encouraged to play with toys that involve visuospatial manipulation whereas girls are not
Explain the biological theory of sex differences in cognition…
Men and women vary both in their brain anatomy and in their secretion of, or sensitivity to, some hormones such as testosterone
Explain the cognitive theory of sex differences in cognition…
Women are thought to have a better empathy quotient and men are thought to have a better systemising quotient
The Binet-Simon Scale
Measurement of a group of psychological abilities: imagery, attention, comprehension, imagination, judgements of visual space and memory for various stimuli
The Stanford-Binet Scale
- Consists of various tasks grouped according to mental age
- Contained a formula for computing the intelligence quotient
- mental age/chronological age * 100 = IQ
Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale
A large collection of individual tests validated on 2450 individuals from 13 age groups
The acceptable reliability of a modern test of intellectual ability should be at least _____
0.85
What are descriptive statistics?
Mathematical procedures that enable us to summarise data
What are inferential statistics?
Enable us to determine whether something is statistically significant
A study in which individuals are exposed to all conditions in an experiment is called a __________ study
Repeated measures
A researcher decides to divide her personality questionnaire into two sections to assess the degree of agreement between responses from each section. By undertaking this procedure the researcher is determining
Split-half reliability
Spearman’s theory of intelligence proposed that
A person’s performance on an intelligence test is determined by two factors
Gardner would likely suggest that a person who has excellent social skills is high in __________ intelligence
Interpersonal
Modern intelligence testing originated in __________ with the work of __________
France; Binet
Michael is 7 and has a mental age of 10. What is his ratio IQ?
143
If a test really measures what it purports to measure, the test is said to be
Valid
Spearman described the g factor as being made up of….
Qualitative principles of cognition
