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> The Big Five are among the very few results in psychology that are usefully predictive Predictive of what? Other test batteries within the field of psychomet

> The Big Five are among the very few results in psychology that are usefully predictive Predictive of what? Other test batteries within the field of psychometrics? I want personality traits to translate to actual behavior to consider them scientifically useful. And I want the predictive power to be greater then non-personality traits like religion, political affiliation, etc. Tell me of a research which demonstrates that convincingly. I certainly haven’t found it. Other psychological fields have no problem doing this. For example neuroscience show a remarkable behavioral difference of people with specific brain damage, cognitive science shows similarly stark difference in behavior if e.g. some people have been primed with a similar stimuli, and even behavioral scientist can demonstrate that animals will behave radically differently after a certain behavior has been reinforced etc. You may call this pseudo-science, but what I call pseudo-science is when scientists make up new terms, operationally define them, and then validate them by correlating them with each other, without showing any use for these terms out side of their narrow field.

kragen 4y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits#Effect_of_personality_traits_through_life https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits#Ef... I don't think neuroscientists would appreciate being called psychologists, and priming research has replicated poorly enough that I'm comfortable calling it pseudoscience. And, although some predictions of behaviorism have been borne out, behaviorist psychologists publishing unreplicable experiments were Feynman's specific target in Cargo Cult Science.
- runarberg 4y ago
  How many neuroscientists do you know? I know a couple and they are very aware of the fact that their field is a study of human behavior and knowledgeable of their how much fields intersects with other fields of psychology. Most undergraduate degrees of psychology that I know indeed offer an introductory course to neuroscience, and I know many professors of neuroscience contribute to research in other fields of psychology and vice-versa. > priming research has replicated poorly enough that I'm comfortable calling it pseudoscience. You might be thinking of social priming which indeed is pseudo-science. Cognitive priming on the other hand is really easy to replicate, however the interpretations of the effect is often way out there (as is often with fresh discoveries in science [I mean just look at cosmology and all their wild interpretations of e.g. the dark matter discovery]). Given that I understand your skepticism, but the effect is there, it is easy to find, and has been replicated many times (I even did a short priming study during my undergraduates). > Effect of personality traits through life (Wikipedia link) If you read this section it proves my point well, earlier I said: > I want personality traits to translate to actual behavior to consider them scientifically useful. And this wikipedia article summarizes in the sub-section Scope of predictive power: > The predictive effects of the Big Five personality traits relate mostly to social functioning and rules-driven behavior and are not very specific for prediction of particular aspects of behavior. In other words: Personality traits are mainly predicting constructs within social psychology which are also measured with similar tools as those used to measure the traits in the first place. Most of the correlations are to self reported or other batteries from psychometrics. This quote from the Personality Disorders exemplifies my criticism: > Noticeably, FFM publications never compare their findings to temperament models even though temperament and mental disorders (especially personality disorders) are thought to be based on the same neurotransmitter imbalances, just to varying degrees. This looks like a scientific dead end to me. This is as if dark matter would only predict gravitational deviations and not e.g. the cosmic microwave background or gravitational lensing. Dark matter was discovered by exploring these deviations, and if it would have failed to predict anything outside of that narrow scope, it would be a pretty poor theory. This has been the status of Big-5 (and other personality traits) for about the same amount of time since the discovery of dark matter.
  - kragen 4y ago
    Just a couple, as well, and my grandfather did neuroscience research. I guess it's true that things like the IAT show a strong and easily replicable cognitive priming effect, I just hadn't thought of it that way. But the replicability problem isn't limited to social priming; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priming_%28psychology%29#Replicability_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priming_%28psychology%29#Repli... talks about other forms of priming that have experienced replication problems. Several of the Big Five predictive effects mentioned in the WP page do go beyond self-report instruments, even though it's true that there are many more correlations with other self-report instruments. A few of them are large effects.
    - runarberg 4y ago
      For what its worth the source for the statement in the Wikipedia article claiming that Priming studies suffer from the replication crisis is from Bowers (2012) is actually a short non-peer reviewed opinion piece from a magazine called Science News with 0 references, and is actually talking about the replication problem in social psychology, using social-priming as an example. This Wikipedia article probably needs to be edited to reflect that. That said I do admit that I’ve read some claims from cognitive psychologists about priming which probably needs to be replicated, that is cognitive psychology also suffers from the same replication crisis as social psychology. However cognitive priming never reached the same hype as social priming (and why would it; the claims are about some boring reaction times and proportions of false positives after a 1000 trials, etc; unlike social psychology where the claims are all „work faster and more accurate by changing this one thing“)
      - kragen 4y ago
        Maybe you should fix it. I think Gladwell wrote a pretty sensationalist article about the IAT.

kragen 4y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits#Effect_of_personality_traits_through_life https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits#Ef... I don't think neuroscientists would appreciate being called psychologists, and priming research has replicated poorly enough that I'm comfortable calling it pseudoscience. And, although some predictions of behaviorism have been borne out, behaviorist psychologists publishing unreplicable experiments were Feynman's specific target in Cargo Cult Science.

runarberg 4y ago
How many neuroscientists do you know? I know a couple and they are very aware of the fact that their field is a study of human behavior and knowledgeable of their how much fields intersects with other fields of psychology. Most undergraduate degrees of psychology that I know indeed offer an introductory course to neuroscience, and I know many professors of neuroscience contribute to research in other fields of psychology and vice-versa. > priming research has replicated poorly enough that I'm comfortable calling it pseudoscience. You might be thinking of social priming which indeed is pseudo-science. Cognitive priming on the other hand is really easy to replicate, however the interpretations of the effect is often way out there (as is often with fresh discoveries in science [I mean just look at cosmology and all their wild interpretations of e.g. the dark matter discovery]). Given that I understand your skepticism, but the effect is there, it is easy to find, and has been replicated many times (I even did a short priming study during my undergraduates). > Effect of personality traits through life (Wikipedia link) If you read this section it proves my point well, earlier I said: > I want personality traits to translate to actual behavior to consider them scientifically useful. And this wikipedia article summarizes in the sub-section Scope of predictive power: > The predictive effects of the Big Five personality traits relate mostly to social functioning and rules-driven behavior and are not very specific for prediction of particular aspects of behavior. In other words: Personality traits are mainly predicting constructs within social psychology which are also measured with similar tools as those used to measure the traits in the first place. Most of the correlations are to self reported or other batteries from psychometrics. This quote from the Personality Disorders exemplifies my criticism: > Noticeably, FFM publications never compare their findings to temperament models even though temperament and mental disorders (especially personality disorders) are thought to be based on the same neurotransmitter imbalances, just to varying degrees. This looks like a scientific dead end to me. This is as if dark matter would only predict gravitational deviations and not e.g. the cosmic microwave background or gravitational lensing. Dark matter was discovered by exploring these deviations, and if it would have failed to predict anything outside of that narrow scope, it would be a pretty poor theory. This has been the status of Big-5 (and other personality traits) for about the same amount of time since the discovery of dark matter.
- kragen 4y ago
  Just a couple, as well, and my grandfather did neuroscience research. I guess it's true that things like the IAT show a strong and easily replicable cognitive priming effect, I just hadn't thought of it that way. But the replicability problem isn't limited to social priming; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priming_%28psychology%29#Replicability_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priming_%28psychology%29#Repli... talks about other forms of priming that have experienced replication problems. Several of the Big Five predictive effects mentioned in the WP page do go beyond self-report instruments, even though it's true that there are many more correlations with other self-report instruments. A few of them are large effects.
  - runarberg 4y ago
    For what its worth the source for the statement in the Wikipedia article claiming that Priming studies suffer from the replication crisis is from Bowers (2012) is actually a short non-peer reviewed opinion piece from a magazine called Science News with 0 references, and is actually talking about the replication problem in social psychology, using social-priming as an example. This Wikipedia article probably needs to be edited to reflect that. That said I do admit that I’ve read some claims from cognitive psychologists about priming which probably needs to be replicated, that is cognitive psychology also suffers from the same replication crisis as social psychology. However cognitive priming never reached the same hype as social priming (and why would it; the claims are about some boring reaction times and proportions of false positives after a 1000 trials, etc; unlike social psychology where the claims are all „work faster and more accurate by changing this one thing“)
    - kragen 4y ago
      Maybe you should fix it. I think Gladwell wrote a pretty sensationalist article about the IAT.