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Methodologies of personality enquiry

  • Published: 12-05-2016 Edited: 12-06-2016
  • Oh yes, so another dialectical post trying to iron out the conceptual confusion embedded in the field of personality.

    Example methodologies
    Here comes a list of example methodologies one can use to make personality science:

    Folk-psychological

    1. Discover an essence of personality you consider useful
    2. Articulate under what conditions this essence manifests itself:
      3. * Is it limited to certain categories of individuals, i.e. europeans
      * Is it limited to certain environmental conditions, i.e. hot weather
    3. Teach people about your discovery through telling about anecdotes
    4. Now think about whether your descriptions are describing some part of the truth about people

    Normative subjective

    1. Systemise the essence you experience from different kinds of people
    2. Teach other people to experience the same essence
    3. Try to make descriptions about these essences that you are experiencing
    4. Now think about whether your descriptions are describing some part of the truth about people

    Statistical self-reporting

    1. Give a lot of people a lot of questions that are related to personality
    2. Apply statistical methods such as exploratory factor analysis and parallel analysis to find categorical attributes
    3. Try to find the essence of people having the different categorical attributes
    4. Articulate the essences of people having different categorical attributes
    5. Now think about whether your descriptions are describing some part of the truth about people

    Statistical physical reduction

    1. Gather a lot of data of physical activity, i.e. such as EEG, fMRI, blink-rates
    2. Apply statistical methods such as exploratory factor analysis and parallel analysis to find categorical attributes
    3. Try to find the essence of people having the different categorical attributes
    4. Articulate the essences of people having different categorical attributes
    5. Now think about whether your descriptions are describing some part of the truth about people

    Statistical physical reductionism correlated with statistical self-reporting

    1. Gather a lot of data of physical activity, i.e. such as EEG, fMRI, blink-rates
    2. Apply statistical methods such as exploratory factor analysis and parallel analysis to find categorical attributes
    3. Give a lot of people a lot of questions that are related to personality
    4. Apply statistical methods such as exploratory factor analysis and parallel analysis to find categorical attributes
    5. Make correlations with categorical attributes from self-reporting to categorical attributes of physical activity
    6. Try to find the essence of people having the different categorical attributes
    7. Articulate the essences of people having different categorical attributes
    8. Now think about whether your descriptions are describing some part of the truth about people

    Final remarks

    • One of the main issues with any personality systemising is how concepts and categories affect peoples experience of personality. Is there an objective/impersonal/detached way of seeing people? In example, would anyone experience a person as having the essence of extroverted if you didn’t first learn to associate a certain essence of personality with extroversion? This kind of reasoning just proves a tautology or fulfils a formalism. If you define a certain experience as a concept and you later associate an experience with this concept it does not prove that the concept is real or that the concept is useful. The value of an concept should be its correspondence with reality at face-value. Concepts shouldn't require extensive training to be seen as useful.
    • The most rational way of doing personality research is to motivate the systemising and categorising with solid principles grounded in biology and that the system is useful at face-value.
    • One problem with physical reductionism regarding the brain is that concepts and ideas change the physical structure of the brain. So concepts and ideas can be physically useful for the brain in its development and activity even though they may not represent physical structure in an ideal way. So the ideal system for understanding the brain may not be the system which corresponds the most with the physical structure of the brain. Concepts can be of instrumental value.