Idea Transcript
IN VIRTUE OF WHAT DO PERSONALITY TRAITS EXPLAN? Lilia Gurova Department of Cognitive Science and Psychology New Bulgarian University
PROLOGUE Consider the following case: Jenny has an important exam tomorrow and she knows she must study hard the whole night if she wants to get a good grade. About 8 PM a friend of Jenny’s calls and invites her to go out for a drink. Jenny accepts the invitation. Why did Jenny suddenly change her plans for the evening? A psychologist might suggest the following explanation: ‘Jenny did that because she has an impulsive personality.’ Is this a good (scientific) explanation? And if it is, what renders it a good explanation?
PLAN OF THE TALK The trait approach to personality; The discussions about the nature of traits and their explanatory status; The causal construal of traits as explanatory entities; Problems with the causal construal; Trait explanations as category-based explanations; Conclusions
THE TRAIT APPROACH TO PERSONALITY The ideas that (a) people react differently to the same stimuli because of their different personality, and (b) personality consists of a set of characteristics which all of us possess to some extent, is quite old (could be traced back to Theophrastus, 4-3 c. BC); In scientific psychology these ideas were elaborated by Allport, Cattell, Eysenck, Goldberg and others who laid the foundations of what is known today as ‘the trait approach to personality’; Although different definitions of traits are currently in use, most often traits are associated with patterns of thoughts, feelings and behavior which remain stable in time and across different situations.
DISCUSSIONS ABOUT TRAITS Q1: Are traits identical with the observed/measured stable patterns of thoughts, feelings, and behavior, or are they hidden entities that underlie/cause the stable patterns of thoughts, feelings, and behavior? Q2: Are trait theories of personality merely descriptive or do they provide as well explanations of observed behavior? The prevailing view today, among both the critics and the proponents of the trait approach to personality, is that in order to be explanatory, a trait theory should construe traits as causal entities. I will argue against the prevailing view by showing that (i) causal construal of traits face serious problems, (ii) a non-causal construal of trait explanations as category-based explanations better accounts for what they are appreciated for.
THE CAUSAL CONSTRUAL OF TRAITS (McCrae & Costa, 1995; 2008) Personality traits are: • Hypothetical (theoretical) constructs; • Basic dispositions which interact with other external and internal factors and thus contribute causally to the development of “habits, attitudes, skills and other characteristic adaptations” (McCrae & Costa, 1995, p.231); • Distal causes of overt behavior (they do not influence behavior directly and do not provide causal-mechanistic explanations).
THE DEFENSE OF THE CAUSAL CONSTRUAL OF TRAITS (McCrae & Costa, 1995; 2008) • The manifested stable patterns of thoughts, feelings and behavior are highly inheritable; • One cannot explain stability across time, situations and culture by learning (external influences) only; “there is something about the individual that explains the regularities [in her behavior]” (McCrae & Costa, 1995, p. 244); • Trait explanations are good explanations because they provide ‘surplus meaning’, which means they “allow inferences which go beyond the observed data” (McCrae & Costa, 1995, p. 243); due to this ‘surplus meaning’ trait explanations are not circular.
PROBLEMS WITH THE CAUSAL CONSTRUAL OF TRAITS (1) • Little is known about traits, construed as underlying causes of phenomenal patterns of behavior. No evidence exists that the underlying biological structure is isomorphic to the structure of traits elicited from behavioral observations. • “A trait is known not by its cause but by what it causes.” (Allport, 1927) • Traits are ‘institutional facts’ (Searle) that comply with socially important distinctions rather than with entirely natural distinctions. (Wiggins, 1973) • Traits are elicited by between-subject analyses which do not allow to conclude that the same factor structure exists within the individual persons (Borsboom et al., 2003; Cervone, 2004; Borsboom, 2015)
PROBLEMS WITH THE CAUSAL CONSTRUAL OF TRAITS (2) • Even when they are interpreted as underlying causes of observed phenomenal patterns, traits are described in terms of their phenomenal manifestations. That provokes a charge of circularity or in the best case, a charge of violation of the requirement that the cause should be described independently of its alleged effect (Boag, 2011). Is there any account of trait explanations which avoids the obscure causal interpretation of traits described as stable patterns of thoughts, feelings, and behavior, and which in the same time demonstrates that trait explanations are not circular and that they provide ‘surplus meaning’?
FUNDER’S VIEW ON TRAIT EXPLANATIONS (FUNDER, 1991) “The recognition of a pattern of behavior is a bona fide explanation of each of the behaviors that comprise it. Indeed, the more global a trait is, the more explanatory power it has. Connections between apparently distal phenomena are the most revealing of the deep structure of nature. For instance, if a general trait of social skill exists …, then to explain each of various, diverse behavioral outcomes with that trait is not circular at all. Instead, such an explanation relates a specific behavioral observation to a complex and general pattern of behavior. Such movement from the specific to the general is what explanation is all about.” (Funder, 1991, p. 35; Funder, 1999, p.51)
CATEGORY-BASED EXPLANATIONS • Category: a set of instances that have something in common (obey the same rule, share a list of defining features, exemplify a kind of family resemblance, or are similar in some degree to a ‘prototype’); • Category-based explanations: x demonstrates the property/behavior y in virtue of being an instance of the category X; • In psychology the term ‘category-based explanations’ has been used sporadically (see Schilperoord, 1996; Price et al., 1997; Mummendey et al., 2000; Patalano et al., 2003; Jameson, 2005; Patalano et al., 2006; Arvanitis, 2014). McGarty (1999) explicitly stated that categorization is always explanatory insofar as it is a meaning-creation process.
CATEGORY-BASED EXPLANATIONS IN SCIENCE “One tool scientists use is the detection of patterns in data, patterns that contribute to our understanding of nature …One of the best examples of this tool’s use is the development of the periodic table which provides a fundamental understanding of the chemical behavior of the elements …. The periodic table explains how more than 100 elements can be formed from three particles, the electron, the proton, and the neutron.” (Serway & Jewett, 2010; 1418) A question from SAT Subject Test Chemistry (10th edition): “the placement of the halogen family in the Periodic Table explains which of the following statements?” (Mascetta, 2010);
TRAITS AS CATEGORIES • Traits are viewed as categories by the proponents of the so-called ‘act frequency approach’ to personality traits. • According to this approach (see e.g. Larsen & Buss, 2013, p. 64), “traits are categories of acts”. Just as different animals and plants form different species categories and each particular plant or animal is an instance of a particular species, different human acts form different trait categories and each particular act instantiates a particular trait.
TRAITS AS CATEGORIES: EXAMPLE The trait category ‘impulsivity’ is instantiated by the following acts which may inform us that Jenny is an ‘impulsive person’. ‘Jenny planned to spend the evening studying at home but she changed her mind when a friend of her called to go out for a drink’. ‘Jenny could not resist to buy the red dress although she knew she would probably never wear it.’ To view one as an ‘impulsive person’, according to the act frequency approach, she should perform more ‘impulsive acts’ relatively to other persons.
ARE TRAIT CATEGORIES EXPLANATORY ? • The proponents of the act frequency approach (Amelang, Buss, Romero) view trait categories as entirely descriptive. • It is possible, however, to demonstrate that they can play an explanatory role, too. EXAMPLE Why did Jenny decide to go out for a drink instead of keeping to the plan to spend the evening studying at home? Because Jenny is an impulsive person.
THE LEGITIMACY OF CATEGORYBASED TRAIT EXPLANATIONS • They rule out some alternative explanations; E.g. the explanation that Jenny accepted the invitation to go out for a drink because she liked the friend who invited her very much and was waiting for such an invitation for a long time.
• They increase our understanding of the explained phenomenon Knowing that Jenny is an impulsive person will allow us to properly understand other instancies of her behavior and even predict that she could not resist buying a thing she likes even when she does not really need it.
HOW DO CATEGORY-BASED EXPLANATIONS RELATE TO THE KNOWN TYPES OF EXPLANATION? • Are category-based explanations a sub-species of DN explanations? • No, only few category-based explanations could be construed as DN explanations – those which refer to nomological categories.
• Are category-based explanations causal explanations? • No, categories do not bring into existence their members, neither any of their members’ features.
• Category-based explanations could be viewed as a kind of • “in-virtue-of explanations” (Skow, 2013) • abstract explanations (Pincock, 2014)
TAKE HOME MESSAGES • Trait explanations are genuine explanations: they increase our understanding of the explained phenomenon by revealing new objective dependence relations between the explained phenomenon and other phenomena and thus allowing to rule out alternative explanations and draw new inferences (predictions) about the phenomenon to be explained. • Trait explanations are best construed as categorybased explanations: x is explained in virtue of x being an instance of the category X. • The objective dependence relations which trait explanations rest on are not causal: these are relations between a category and category member, and between members of the same category. • The inferences which trait explanations license are not deductive (only few of them are).
REFERENCES • Allport, G. (1927). Concepts of trait and personality. Psychological Bulletin, 24, 284-293. • Borsboom, D. (2015). What is causal about individual differences?: A comment on Weinberger. Theory and Psychology (forthcoming) doi:10.1177/0959354315587784 • Borsboom, D., Mellenbergh, G., van Heerden, J. (2003). The Theoretical Status of Latent Variables. Psychological Review 110 (2), 203-219. • Cervone, D. (2004). Personality assessment: Tapping the social-co gnitive architecture of personality. Behavioral Therapy, 35 (1), 113129. • Funder, D. (1991). Global traits: A neo-Allportian approach to personality. Psychological Science 2, 31-39. • Funder, D. (1999). Personality Judgement: A Realis Approach to Person Perception. San Diego, CA: Academic Press.
REFERENCES • Jameson, K. (2005). Why grue? An Interpoint-distance model analys is of composite color categories. Cross-Cultural Research 39 (2), 159-204. • Larsen, R., Buss, D. (2013). Personality Psychology: Domains of Knowledge about Human Nature. London: McGraw-Hill. • McCrae, R., Costa, P. (1995). Trait explanations in personality psychology. European Journal of Personality, 9, 231-252. • McCrae, R., Costa, P. (2008). Empirical and theoretical status of the Five-Factor Model of personality traits. In: Boyle, G., Matthews, G., Saklofske, D. (Eds.) The SAGE Handbook of Personality Theory and Assessment, vol.1. London: SAGE Publications, 273-295. • McGarty, C. (1999). Categorization in Social Psychology. London: SAGE Publications. • Mascetta, J. (2010). SAT Subject Test Chemistry: 10th edition. Hauppauge, NY: Boston’s Educational Series.
REFERENCES • Mummendey, A., Otten, S., Berger, U., Kessler, T. (2000). Positivenegative asymmetry in social discrimination: Valence of evaluation and Salience of categorization. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 26 (10): 1258-1270. • Patalano, A. L., Ross, B. H., & Chin-Parker, S. (2003). The role of coherence in category-based explanation. In: Proceedings of the Twenty-Fifth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 910-915. • Pincock, C. (2014). Abstract Explanations in Science. The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, doi: 10.1093/bjps/axu016 • Price, S., Axsom, D. K., Coupey, E. (1997). The Persuasive Impact of Autobiographical Memories in Advertising: Episodic SelfReferencing Or Schema-Triggered Affect?", in Brucks, M., MacInnis, D. (Eds.) NA - Advances in Consumer Research Volume 24. Provo, UT : Association for Consumer Research, 229-234. • Schilperoord, J. (1996). It’s about Time: Temporal Aspects of Cognitive Processes in Text Production. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
REFERENCES • Serway, R., Jewett, J. (2010). Physics for Scientists and Engineers. Boston, MA: Cengage Learning. • Skow, B. (2013). Are there non-causal explanations (of particular ev ents)? The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, doi: 10.1093/bjps/axs047 • Wiggins, J. (1973/1997). In defense of traits. In (Hogan et al., 1997, 95-113).
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT This project was supported by the Central Fund for Strategic Development ruled by the Board of Trustees of New Bulgarian University (Contract No 1000/14.04.2015).