Personality and Sheltering-in-place during the Pandemic – Scott McGreal (Unique—Like Everybody Else)

Personality traits are robustly related to behavior even during these difficult times.

Who Supports Freedom of Speech? Tolerance vs. Prejudice – Scott McGreal (Unique—Like Everybody Else)

Intellectual humility, associated with higher intelligence, increases support for free speech, even for groups one does not like.

Who Uses Drugs and Why? – Scott McGreal (Unique—Like Everybody Else)

The kinds of recreational drugs people use reflect their personality traits.

Why Religious People are Less Likely to Own Cats – Scott McGreal (Unique—Like Everybody Else)

People who attend church frequently are less likely to be cat owners than other people. Could this be related to differences in personality between "dog people" and "cat people"?

Thoughts on “Ego Depletion” and Some Related Issues Concerning Replication – David Funder (funderstorms)

This brief essay was stimulated by a chapter by Baumeister (2019), which can be accessed at https://psyarxiv.com/uf3cn/.  “Fatigue,” though a common word, is far from being a boring or neglected concept. A quick search on PsychInfo reveals thousands of published articles on the subject (14,892, to be exact). A lot of this work is theoretical, more of it is applied, and all of it focuses on an experience that is common to everybody. I was particularly impressed by an article by Evans, Boggero, and Segerstrom (2016) that illuminates the connections between physical and psychological factors, and specifically addresses “how fatigue can occur even in the presence of sufficient resources.”  In fact, I read their article as providing evidence that fatigue usually occurs in the presence of sufficient resources – it’s not primarily a physical phenomenon at all; it’s a psychological one. This fact has many important implications. Fascinating stuff. The related phenomena demonstrated by many, many studies of “ego depletion” are real, and important, and I personally have no doubt whatsoever about that. When people are tired, including psychologically tired (an interesting concept in its own right), their self-control abilities wane, prepotent responses (such as emotional lashing out, simplistic thinking, overlearned habits, selfish impulses) tend to take over as conscious control weakens. Isn’t that pretty much what the studies show, in the aggregate? Does anybody doubt that really happens? Continue reading

The Real and Fake Faces of Personality’s ‘Big One’ – Scott McGreal (Unique—Like Everybody Else)

Despite claims that there is a single super-factor underlying personality, research suggests that it is an artefact of measurement and socially desirable responding.

Deceptive Food Calls & the Dark Triad – Scott McGreal (Unique—Like Everybody Else)

Dating someone to get a free meal, despite lacking any romantic interest in the person, is associated with selfish antisocial traits.

Descriptive ulceritive counterintuitiveness – Brent Roberts (pigee)

An interesting little discussion popped up in the wild and wooly new media world in science (e.g., podcasts and twitter) concerning the relative merits of “descriptive” vs “hypothesis” driven designs. All, mind you, indirectly caused by the paper that keeps on givingTal Yarkoni’s generalizability crisis paper.   Inspired by Tal’s paper, a small group of folks endorsed the merits of descriptive work and the fact that psychology would do well to conduct more of this type of research (Two Psychologist, Four Beers; Very Bad Wizards). In response, Paul Bloom argued/opined for hypothesis testing–more specifically, theoretically informed hypothesis testing of a counterintuitive hypothesis.   I was implicated in the discussion as someone who’s work exemplifies descriptive research. In fact, Tal Yarkoni himself has disparaged my work in just such a way.* And, I must confess, I’ve stated similar things in public, especially when I give my standard credibility crisis talk.   So, it might come as a surprise to hear that I completely agree with Bloom that a surgical hypothesis test using experimental methods that arrives at what is described as a “counterintuitive” finding can be the bee’s knees. It is, and probably should be, the ultimate scientific achievement. If it is true, of course. Continue reading

MIsgivings: Some thoughts about “measurement invariance” – David Funder (funderstorms)

As a newcomer to cross-cultural research a few years ago, I soon became aware of the term “measurement invariance,” which typically is given as a necessary condition for using a psychological measurement instrument, such as a personality inventory, in more than one cultural context[1]. At one of the first talks where I presented some then-new data gathered in 20 different countries, using a new instrument developed in our lab (the Riverside Situational Q-sort) a member of the audience asked “what did you do to assess measurement invariance.”  I had no real answer, and my questioner shook his head sadly. Which, I started to realize, is kind of the generic response when these issues come up. If a researcher gathers data in multiple cultures and doesn’t assess measurement invariance, then the researcher earns scorn – from certain kinds of critics – for ignoring the issue. If the researcher does do the conventional kinds of analyses recommended to assess measurement invariance, the results are often discouraging. The RMSEA’s are out of whack, Delta CFI’s are bigger than .01, and oh my goodness, the item intercepts are not even close to equivalent so scalar invariance is a total joke, not to mention the forlorn hope of attaining “strict” invariance (which sounds harsh, because it is) . A member of a symposium I recently attended exclaimed, “If you can show me some real data where strict measurement invariance was achieved across cultures, I shall buy you a beer!” He had no takers. The following message is approaching the status of conventional wisdom: the lack of equivalence in the properties of psychological measures across cultures means that they cannot be used for cross-cultural comparison and attempts to do so are not just psychometrically ignorant, they are fatally flawed. As I have become a bit more experienced, however, I have begun to develop some misgivings about this conclusion, and the whole business of “measurement invariance,” which I put in scare quotes because I suspect there is less there, than meets the eye. Below, I shall refer to it simply as MI. Continue reading

Bright Minds, Dark Hearts: Intelligence in the Dark Triad – Scott McGreal (Unique—Like Everybody Else)

Despite popular belief that psychopaths are smart people, a recent study suggests that Machiavellianism but not psychopathy is associated with intelligence.