In this video I describe a nomothetic approach to personality using universal trait dimensions. Comparisons between people allow us to place them on a dimension for a number of possible traits. Unlike the infinite possible responses of projective techniques, responses to trait assessments are usually limited and this means many people may receive the same scores. Trait assessment can be difficult because it often relies on self-reports and it can be especially difficult to obtain accurate information on negative traits.
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Video Transcript
Hi, I’m Michael Corayer and this is Psych Exam Review. In this video we’ll be looking at trait-based ways of assessing personality. So in the previous video we looked at projective techniques and I mentioned that these were idiographic because they’re focused on studying the particular peculiarities of someone’s responses, right? And they’re very much about each individual person rather than comparisons across people. But a trait based approach is going to be nomothetic and this means that it’s looking for universal laws. This comes from the Greek “nomos” for law, so the idea of trait-based assessment is that we’re looking for a universal trait dimensions that all people share.
So the idea is we have some dimension here, we say, okay some particular trait like introversion, we might say we have some extremes, you know, low and high extremes of this particular trait. And the purpose of the assessment is to figure out where do you stand on that line. The idea is that everybody falls on here somewhere. And so, you know, you might score here and somebody else might score somewhere else and then we can do that for a number of different traits.
Now one of the problems that we had with projective techniques is that because they’re so individualized because we have essentially an infinite number of different responses. They’re very difficult to score and it’s hard to have standardization. Now we sort of have the opposite problem with the trait-based approach because, while it’s easier to standardize the scoring of trait based assessments, we have to remember that many people are going to get the same scores. Because, you know, this particular ranking for that dimension is going to happen for a lot of people because we don’t have an infinite number of possible responses. It’s important to remember, then, that many people will get the same scores but that doesn’t mean that they have the same personality.
And this is something I also talked about when I talked about intelligence, because we said just because two people get an IQ score of 110 it doesn’t mean they have exactly the same cognitive abilities. And the same will be true for other traits. So if we’re measuring a number of different traits, we’re going to have many people who actually get pretty much the same score on all of those traits. But of course that doesn’t mean they have identical personalities.
Ok, so there are some problems with the trait-based approach. So I pointed out some problems with projective techniques and the problems with the trait based approaches are; first of all that they tend to rely on self reports. So that means that we’re relying on people telling us about themselves. So often you’re given maybe a list of statements and you say how much does this describe you. And of course if we’re describing ourselves we have a high potential for bias, right? And we might even ask if it’s possible for us to know ourselves. Can we really know our own personalities and then accurately reflect that on some type of assessment? And maybe these assessments are telling us more about who we think we are than who we actually are.
This is especially problematic when we think about negative traits, because when we talk about negative traits most people don’t want to admit that they have negative traits. And it’s very hard to get people to report about their own negative traits. If you remember in one of the videos on intelligence I talked about the concept of face validity and this was the idea that we look at a surface-level judgment of an assessment. We say, “yeah it looks like, looks like a good test of artistic talent” or “this looks like it’s testing something related to intelligence”, right? It’s a surface-level assessment of validity and what we see now when we talk about negative traits in personality is that sometimes we actually don’t want to have face validity. We actually want to use a little bit of deception. We don’t want people to know what we’re asking about because if we ask them directly about negative traits they’re almost always going to deny that they have those traits.
So, for instance, if we looked at a statement like “I frequently mistreat others” now, we might think on the surface level that this looks like a good way to measure some trait like maybe, we say, that seems like, you know, callousness, alright? Somebody who’s a callous person will frequently mistreat others. So we could put this on our test and it looks like an assessment of callousness but the problem is that most people, even callous ones, will not agree with that statement. They’ll say “no, that doesn’t describe me. I don’t mistreat other people”, right? And so it gets very hard to assess negative traits. There’s two ways we try to get around this problem.
The first way is we try to catch people who are faking. So how do we do that? Well, we might wonder, you know, do people fake bad or fake good, right? So I might decide I want to look more callous than I actually am. And I could be faking in that way or, of course, I might want to make myself look better. I might want to make answers that are what we’d say are “socially desirable“, right? Ones that I think other people would like and so I could fake good in that way. And one way that we try to catch faking is we put some questions on the assessments that look like they’re measuring something else when in fact they aren’t. So we might have a statement like “I never feel angry”. You might look at this and say “oh, it’s a question about levels of hostility or anger” but actually maybe it isn’t. Because what we could do with the question like this is we can use this to assess honesty rather than anger. Because this is the type of statement that’s not going to be true for anyone. Everybody feels angry sometimes and so the people who say “oh, this very strongly describes me. I am never angry. I’ve never had an angry thought in my life”. Then we might say, “yeah, you know what, I think this person is not being honest in the assessment”. So maybe that’s going to change how we interpret some of the other responses. We say that, you know, this, this looks like the question about anger but it’s actually a question that’s getting at their level of honesty with the assessment. So that’s one way we can try to get around this problem of traits with negative connotations.
And another way is we can try to use implicit measurements, implicit assessments. So we might measure things that are indirectly associated with the negative traits we want to study. So these are generally things that are going to be difficult for the participant to conceal, even if they want to. So I’ve mentioned this briefly when we talked about research methods and one of the ideas of implicit measurement is that if these things are difficult to conceal then people don’t know how to hide them. So we might measure things like their blinking rate or, if you’re familiar with the polygraph, what you might know is that it measures the galvanic skin response. And that’s something that people can’t fake very easily. It is possible but it’s difficult to conceal and it takes a bit of practice to be able to do that. And so we can therefore measure something that maybe has a negative connotation indirectly.
Now we’ll talk about this again in a future video when we talk about the implicit association test, which is used to assess implicit prejudice, and we’ll see that there’s a number of problems with using implicit measures and this is not a perfect solution to the problem. We’ll go into that in more detail in a future section and in the next video we’ll talk a little bit more about how we assess the accuracy of these personality assessments. So I hope you found this helpful, if so, please like the video and subscribe to the channel for more. Thanks for watching!
