Week 3 - Assessment Flashcards
How is narcissism assessed and how does this change?
- Narcissist people tend to be seen in highly positive ways, but impression goes down and eventually people view them in negative ways
- Narcissism is beneficial for initial personality assessment, eg. superior social and leadership skills
What describes informal personality assessment?
unconsciousness, automatic, arguably evolutionary, everyone
How does self- and other assessment impact yourselves and others behaviour?
Our perception of our personality can influence our behaviour
our perception of others may impact other people’s behaviour depending on how they perceive our perception of them (self-fulfilling prophecy)
Pros and cons of informal assessment?
Pros = Can be accurate with minimal information
Cons
1. Can affect our interactions
- Shapes other people’s perception of themselves: self-fulfilling prophecy
- Can be inaccurate and influenced by superficial features/biases, eg. What do people think of someone who wears makeup? Superficial?
What did Etcoff find? makeup on perception
The amount of makeup people wear seems to influence participants judgements on their likeability, trustworthiness, competence, attractiveness
What did Allport argue in the scientific assessment of personality?
argued that we personality can only be studied in generalised theories, and unique personality CANNOT be studied scientifically
eg. only nomothetic approaches
What are the nomothetic vs. idiographic approaches?
Nomothetic - deals with general knowledges, statistics, quantitative methods
Idiographic - about individuality, single person, to understand an individual
What does Popper argue?
Popper - historical and generalising sciences are distinct
Historical sciences = study particular things/cases
Generalising sciences = interested in developing general laws/theories/explanations of personality
Scientific assessment should be possible for both possible for both the individual and the general
What is psychometrics?
the scientific study of the measurement of individual differences, cognitive ability, attitudes, personality differences - intelligence is NOT considered a personality level, but rather a cognitive ability
What is the difference between objective and subjective tests?
Objective tests - clear, highly structured, able to be scored in objective manner, explicit scoring methods, measuring multiple constructs like Big 5, or single construct tests like narcissism, empathy, psychopathy, statements of yes/no or likert scales
Projective tests - ambiguous, allow people to project traits, needs, motives, on ambiguous stimuli / open ended questions, trying to understand unconscious desires and beliefs,
Used by clinician psychologists
What % of variance in objective tests is due to response biases?
20%
What describes a personality characteristic of being highly cynical, controlling, cold and manipulative to approaching others and the world?
machivallianism
What did Christie and Geis develop and argue?
- developed Mach-IV, highly reliable/valid and predictive, used in research
Unidimensional measure: only measures machiavellianism - argued high scores indicate an absence of psychopathology,
- three traits of machiavellianism: machiavellian tactics, views and morality
What did Monaghan, Bizumic & Sellbom (2016) find?
Only identified machiavellianism views and tactics, couldn’t identify items that represented machiavellian morality in confirmatory factor analysis
Items of machiavellian tactics and views intercorrelated with each other and together at 0.42 correlation
Many machiavellian views relate to and predict psychopathological traits
After studying the Studying the nomological network which is connected to construct validity, what did Bizumic conclude?
- Views and tactics seem to be distinct and present cross-culturally
- Machiavellian views are correlated with high neuroticism and low self-esteem
- Machiavellian tactics are correlated with low conscientiousness and lower quality of family life/communication
- Males tend to be higher in Machiavellian views and tactics, as well as the other Dark Triad traits
What are pro vs. contrait items and why do we have both?
Positive items (portrait)
Negative items (contrait)
Why do tests often have both positive and negative items?
= to avoid acquiescence bias and which is the tendencies to = tend to agree OR disagree with items regardless of their content (that tend to be contrary to each other)
AND
Deviation = when people tend to respond in a highly unusual and odd way
Extreme Responding (culturally related) = responding more extreme than others, eg. only “strongly agree” or “strongly disagree”
Latinos/African Americans use extreme options, Asians often chose more moderately
more likely in collectivist cultures
What are the two subscales of social desirability AND what’s the difference between them?
- Self-deception
- Impression management
Self-deception = UNCONSCIOUSLY enhancing your personality/performance
Impression management = CONSCIOUSLY presenting oneself in a positive light
why is intelligence not measured as a personality measure?
(intelligence is about cognitive ability, separate to personality)
Whats a bipolar scale?
low score on one end does not indicate an absence of the trait, but rather the opposite of the trait, eg. dominance, social recognition
What validity scales did the PRF use?
- infrequency: controls deviant responding to items, identifying people were respond to implausible, pseudo-random way, saying YES to “i make all my clothes and shoes”
- Desirability = social desirability
What type of test is the Personality research form?
- rational
- based on previous data
What type of test is the MMPI?
- empirical
- developed on empirical evidence and correlations between people with similar disorders and traits
What type of test is the Big 5 Traits?
- factor analysis
- mathematical technique to identify latent personality traits
Examples of projective tests?
- Thematic apperception test (Murray, 1930s) = used to understand the main unconsciousness needs of peoples, goals, wishes, drives and emotions that they are unaware of”
Set with pictures and asked to construct a story on each card and then a black one, making a story with internal and external variables
What does the TAT infer?
- Attributes of the characters/heroes may often represent personality tendencies in the participant, ie. i wrote a story about the character anxious to the point that it becomes hard to conceal, AND THAT’S EXACTLY HOW I FEEL ATM
- Attributes of the environment may present forces of the person’s environment, ie. feelings of not having all the right information, not feeling in control, masking to others, not receiving good news, not knowing what will happen in the future”
Limitations of projective tests?
Projective Tests
Not very used, only thought of as somewhat useful, sometimes used by clinicians
Issues on validity and reliability are controversial
Lilienfield (2005) - found 80-82% of clinicians used projective tests occasionally, but 40-60% used objective more frequently
What is the Rotter Incomplete Sentence Blank?
People are presented with 40 items and complete sentences “the happiest time”
Ways to computer scan scores and focus on positive, negative and neutral responses and draw conclusions on the type of valence of their responses to reveal maladjustment, psychopathy, etc.
Criticised for not being deep enough, others say its good validity and reliability
what are omnibus inventories?
cover a wide range of personality traits
what is the main con of projective tests?
- can be difficult to interpret or extrapolate the meaning behind
why do personality tests have so many items?
- need aggregation - multiple responses to similar items to improve reliability
what methods are used to make objective tests?
- rational methods
- factor analysis
methods of evaluating tests?
- statistical significance
- effect size (magnitude)
- binomial effect size display (BESD) - “a correlation of .40 means that 70 percent of those who got the drug are still alive” (translating r into a 2x2 table)
- replicability / reproducibility
what are questionable research practices?
- not deceptive but things that increase the chance of getting the effect that the researcher wants
what is p-hacking?
analyzing the data in different ways until getting the desired result
what is publicating bias?
tendency for journals to prefer to only publish findings with strong results
What are the consequences of personality judgement?
Other people’s judgments of an individual can affect that person’s opportunities and can create self-fulfilling prophecies or expectancy effects
How is personality judgment objectively measured?
through
1. consensus
2. predictive validity
first impressions can be surprisingly accurate, ie. from voice, clothing, bedroom, face
What 4 things affect the likelihood of being good at judging personality?
- the good judge = people good at judging
- the good target = people who are easy to read
- the good trait = easier to detect
- the good information
What is the realistic accuracy model?
- the RAM model says accurate personality judgment is a function of
- relevance
- availability
- detection
- using behavioural cues
and claims its quite difficult and can be also used to explain self-knowledge
what is the best way of improving self-knowledge?
going to new places and meeting new people
what is interjudge agreement?
like inter-rater reliability but for informal personality judgment
What is constructivism vs. critical realism?
- constructivism = reality as a concrete entity does not exist and only constructs of reality exist
- critical realism = we can only use empirical evidence to determine what aspects of reality are valid
