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