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The article's description of the research is unhelpful, and almost certainly wrong. This doesn't sound like an attempt to identify four basic personality types.
by dash2 10y ago
The article's description of the research is unhelpful, and almost certainly wrong. This doesn't sound like an attempt to identify four basic personality types. It's an attempt to categorise behaviour in a single, very precisely defined economic experiment. We already know the five basic dimensions of personality: openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism (OCEAN).
It's sad that there is so much good social/psychological science out there, but people know so little about it and fall for this kind of ignorant reporting.
- amelius 10y ago> We already know the five basic dimensions of personality What is wrong with questioning existing knowledge, or proposing a completely different approach?
- j1o1h1n 10y agoI don't know why anyone tries to improve on Hippocrates. Who needs to know more than that we are a balance of sanguine, choleric, melancholic and phlegmatic? And that this balance is cause by precious bodily fluids, blood, the two biles and phlegm. Bonus feature! You can fix any persons imbalances by simply letting the relevant fluids.
- dash2 10y agoGood point but that is not the issue. I have no beef with the research. The problem is that it is being misdescribed. The article claims this is a new way to categorise all human personalities. It's not. It's just a new way to categorise play in a very specific game. I very much doubt whether the researchers would claim they have found new basic dimensions of human personality.
- fsloth 10y ago" We already know the five basic dimensions of personality" That model present five dimensions, to which the personality traits are mapped. It does not mean they are the basic dimensions of personality. Similarly I can map the world into 2 dimensions as in a photograph. But I cannot say I've mapped the world to it's basic dimensions. I've lost quite a lot of data already - I'm missing 4 dimensions of data. The 3.rd coordinate, and 3 for momentum.
- dash2 10y agoIt's a fair point. People can't be reduced to a 5-D vector of traits. (Otherwise novelists would be out of a job.) But OCEAN does capture a lot of human variability.
- disgruntledphd2 10y agoCan you provide citations please? All the correlations I've seen have been in the 0.3 range, which doesn't equate to a lot of human variability. I actually think this study is pretty interesting. Full text here: http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/2/8/e1600451.full http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/2/8/e1600451.full I don't believe in their clustering, but then I rarely believe the output of any unsupervised learning methods. Its an interesting approach, the real question is whether or not it captures incremental variance relative to an OCEAN (or the six factor one they like in medicine) baseline.
- dash2 10y agoHeh, so now I had to read the actual study. I agree it's interesting, but my original impression was also true: this isn't about discovering basic personality types. It's about correlating play across four 2 x 2 experimental games. This is a very, very narrow domain of social behaviour. Standard personality psychology, by contrast, aims to predict behaviour across a much wider range of situations. (I still think that is true, even if individual correlations are low in any one situation. But, if you know better and personality measures actually a crock of crap, feel free to correct me!) Of course, it's possible that there really are four deep types of human personality, that you can capture them in these four games, and that they predict behaviour in lots and lots of domains. But I doubt it, and this article provides no evidence for it. What's more interesting is the comparison between this unsupervised clustering method, and more theory-driven ways of categorising play in games, like inequality aversion models. I think there is an interesting race between psychologists, who pay greater attention to internal validity, and experimental economists who focus on theory consistency. I'd like to know which kind of models does better at predicting out of sample.
- the_other 10y agoI'll have to look up OCEAN, thanks. It sounds like it functions as another, parallel model to the one described in the article. Where's the harm?