Individual Differences Lecture 1 Flashcards
Individual difference types
Personality
Intelligence
Abnormality/ psychopathology
Criminality
sexuality
Age, sex, gender
Cultural, political, religious, ideological differences
Everything (stupid point)
The study of individual differences
We can
- predict differences
- predict similarities
- create meaningful clusters or groupings
- use information to identify abilities/ disabilities/ psychopathologies
- link to other things we know about biology and environment
The field isn’t new
Plato (the republic) - ‘ no two persons are born exactly alike but each differs from the other in natural endowments one being suited for one occupation and the other for another’
Hippocrates and Galen (100BC- 129 AD)
Humorism (Latin meaning fluid)
Sanguine- blood- spring/air- optimistic, cheerful, fun loving
Choleric- yellow bile- summer/fire- leader, ambition, drive
Melancholic- black bile- autumn-earth- kind, considerate, creative, depressed
Phlegmatic- phlegm- winter/water- self- content, kind, shy, relaxed
Anthropometrics- The phrenologists
Franz Joseph Gall (1976)
Influential in the 19th century but falls out of favour by the 20th century
Shape of the skull indicative of psychological traits
Precursor to- modern neurology, modern neuropsychology and theories of modularity
Anthropometrics- Criminal Atavism
Cesare Lombroso (1835-1909)
‘Born criminal’ - although later expanded into social factors
Believed criminals were physically different- somehow born different from non criminals and from each other eg-
- murderers had sloped foreheads
- sexual offenders have full lips
Influential to begin with but had significant limitations (big ol’ racist) criticised for being imprecise, poorly sampled and lacked systematic analysis
Francis Galton (1822- 1911)
Significant scientific contributions in the field
- the phrase nature Vs nurture
- the systematic surveys and questionnaires
- correlation, regression, standard deviation and variance
- the lexical hypothesis
- fingerprinting
- anthropometric data collection
Wrote ‘ hereditary genius’ in 1869
Galton’s beliefs
- human characteristics are normally distributed
- need large, systematically gathered data sets to examine individual differences
- characteristics are heritable- eminent people come from eminent families
- there is something akin to general ability or intelligence
- amount of brain tissue related to intelligence
- intelligence related to sensory acuity
- some groups are superior to others
Evaluating Galton
- leads to the first theories of intelligence
- consideration of sensory and motor abilities eg- reaction time
- emphasis on large samples describe IDs in a population
- the beginning of modern psychometrics
But - his work was the beginning of the eugenics movement and emphasised the superiority of some races/ ethnicities over others
Idiographic
- idios= private or personal
- emphasises individual uniqueness
- deep rich understanding
- qualitative
- aims to tell us something fundamental about a person
Nomothetic
- Nomos= law
- similarities between groups of individuals
- identity consistently occurring traits/ traits clusters
- quantitative
- allows ‘norms’ for comparison- how does one person differ from the population?
Idiographic approaches to individual dufferences
- Sigmund Freud (1856- 1939)- psychoanalysis
- Erik Erikson (1902- 1994)- psychosocial stages
Not all psychoanalysts were purely idiographic
- Karl Jung (1875- 1961)
Idiographic approaches to individual differences- George Kelly (1905- 1967)
- Theory of personal constructs
- in therapy the aim is to change the clients construction of the world
- each person is their own scientist with their own construction of reality (constructs)
- we use these constructs to make sense of the world by predicting and classifying
- self interpretations will differ from others interpretations of you
- you will have constructs that are not shared by others
- unlike psychoanalysis, work focused more on normal, student samples (not patients)
Idiographic approaches to individual differences - Carl Rogers (1902- 1987)
- Person centered therapy
- humanistic focus- people are experts of their own subjective reality
- focuses on a persons feelings and lived experience ( phenomenology)
-‘Self concept’ - who we are based on others feedback about us - ’ self actualisation’- an innate, positive drive to help us maximise our potential
Idiographic approaches to individual differences (Carl Rogers, self actualisation)
- in perfect conditions we would wholly ‘self actualise’
- rarely happens
- aim to be fully functioning person
- open to experience
- characterised by existential living
- trust in their own ability to attribute value
- creative
- live rich lives and are self aware
- rationale- not defensive
- may need help becoming this via counselling and therapy
Evaluating idiographic Approaches
-Philosophical
- real depth of personal understanding
- therapeutic relevance
But
- can you prove the self concept exists? Falsifiability
- generalisability
- problems of data- self- report qualitative case studies
Psychometrics
-Literally mind measurements
- often cant directly observe psychological phenomenon
- create tools ( measure) to help us evaluate them
- measures contain items, items measure specific elements of psychological construct
- psychometrics is the scientific creation and evaluation of items and measures
Psychometrics I fall broadly into two categories
Psychometric tests- items are right/ wrong
Psychometric assessments- often more subjective- like scales
Construct Validity
- how do we know a measure of something measures that something?
Convergent reliability
- in a verbal intelligence measure, vocabulary should correlate with phenome ability
Discriminant validity
- verbal intelligence should not correlate with sporting ability
Concurrent validity
- verbal intelligence should be correlated with other measures of verbal intelligence
Predictive validity
- verbal intelligence should predict test scores on a language test
Face/Content validity
- the verbal intelligence test has items that appear on inspection to be relevant to something we call verbal intelligence
Interrater reliability
- multiple observers should measure the same thing in the same way
Test- retest reliability
- taking the test multiple times should give the same result
Alternative form reliabiliy
- intelligence test A and intelligence test B should be strongly correlated if they both measured intelligence
Internal reliability
- the items on a scale should all correlate with each other often indexed by something called Cronbachs alpha
Deeper examination of items
Often look at measures in terms of their underlying factor structure
Theory driven
Advanced psychometric techniques include
- factor analysis
- latent class analysis
- cluster analysis
- multidimensional scaling
- confirmatory factor analysis
Aim to reduce lots of items down to a handful of meaningful scores
Representing constructs (Factors and latent variables- constructed statistically from the items)
Conscientiousness- dependable, self disciplined or disorganised and careless
Extraversion- extraverted, enthusiastic or reserved, quiet
Openness- open to experience complex or conventional, uncreative
Neuroticism- anxious, easily upset or calm and emotionally stable
Agreeableness- critical, quarrelsome or sympathetic, warm
-Representation of the big 5 personality traits
What do we do with our constructs?
- analysis often correlational
- positive correlation - when one goes up so does the other
- negative- one goes up the other goes down
Evaluating the nomothetic approach
- allows us to easily gather lots of data (often quickly)
- allows group comparisons/norm references
- can measure anything as long as it can be operationalised
- established procedures to examine the integrity of the measures
But - Little attention to the individual
- measurement error/ statistical conclusion validity/ construct validity
- causality is problematic to establish
Nomothetic theorists
- Hans Eysenck
-Paul Costa - Robert McCrae
Idiographic theorists
- Sigmund Freud
- George Kelly
- Carl Rogers
