How Can Evolutionary Psychology Successfully Explain Personality and Individual Differences?

ABSTRACT— Although evolutionary psychology has been successful in explaining some species-typical and sex-differentiated adaptations, a large question that has largely eluded the field is this: How can the field successfully explain personality and individual differences? This article highlights some promising theoretical directions for tackling this question. These include life-history theory, costly signaling theory, environmental variability in fitness optima, frequency-dependent selection, mutation load, and flexibly contingent shifts in strategy according to environmental conditions. Tackling the explanatory question also requires progress on three fronts: (a) reframing some personality traits as forms of strategic individual differences; (b) providing a nonarbitrary, evolutionary-based formulation of environments as distributions and salience profiles of adaptive problems; and (c) identifying which strategies thrive and which falter in these differing problem-defined environments.     

Impulsive Choice in Adults: How Consistent are Individual Differences?

The Psychological Record - With animated cartoons as the reinforcer, college students repeatedly made choices between a schedule providing 15 s of viewing followed by 75 s of waiting and a schedule...     

Can Outcome Expectancies Help Explain Sex Differences in Direct and Indirect Aggression?

This study examined the role of outcome expectancies in explaining sex differences in adolescents' inclination to engage in acts of aggression. Using a sample of Australian adolescents, 2 scales were developed to measure outcome expectancies of direct and indirect aggression. The data were used in subsequent mediation analyses. Sex differences in direct aggression were partially mediated by 2 types of aggression expectancies. Relative to females, males anticipated more overall benefits associated with acting aggressively and less fear of reprisals from authority figures. This pattern of expectancy beliefs predicted higher levels of self‐reported direct aggression. Sex differences in indirect aggression were fully mediated by anticipation of personal benefits, with males expecting greater personal benefits for engaging in this type of aggression.     

How Can We Study Heroism? Integrating Persons,Situations and Communities

Heroism—an individual's commitment to a noble purpose, usually aimed at furthering the welfare of others, and involving the willingness to accept the consequences of achieving that purpose—has received little attention from political psychologists, even though a person is arguably as liable to act heroically as she is to act in a morally reprehensible manner. Specifically, important questions remain in how heroes can be identified beforehand and how such behavior can be successfully studied and promoted. We posit that recent work in genocide studies, positive psychology, personality psychology, ecological psychology, and moral psychology provides new and promising directions for better understanding heroic behavior. These developments can provide the tools for understanding the complex interplay of factors—including traits, situations, and communal beliefs—motivating heroic behavior.     

Individual differences in preschool children: temperament or personality?

Individual differences among adults have generally been conceptualized in terms of personality theory and traits. In contrast, individual differences among very young children (birth to kindergarten) have generally been conceptualized in terms of temperament theory and traits. The present study compares and contrasts measures of temperament and personality in a sample of preschool children. Temperament traits were assessed with a well‐established measure (the Rothbart CBQ), and a new preschool rating instrument was used to assess personality traits from the five‐factor framework (M5‐PS). Indeed, a key purpose of this study was to further the development of the M5‐PS. Data were gathered on 122 preschool children who were rated by their teachers. Significant correlations were found between the temperament trait Surgency and the personality trait Extraversion, between the temperament trait Negative Affect and the personality trait Neuroticism, and between the temperament trait Effortful Control and the personality trait Conscientiousness. The overall pattern of correlational data suggests that individual differences in preschool children can be adequately described using the five‐factor theory, and that this framework may effectively subsume traditional theories of temperament. Preliminary support for the reliability and validity of the M5‐PS is offered. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Individual in Organizations: Rediscovered or Lost Forever?

In this article the author argues that managers are confronted with increasing pressures to transform the human being into a sheer economical resource. Three related factors are discussed to explain this penetrating influence of a utilitarian conception of the human being: (1) A movement away from a communitarian towards a new individualistic ideology, (2) the overriding influence of a materialistic, meta-economic theory, and (3) the deep separation of clinical and organizational psychology in teaching, research, and practice. The trend to reduce the human being to an instrumental resource is illustrated by a discussion of current management and consulting practices. These practices include participation as social engineering, modal management with lack of concern for understanding the human being in his or her individuality, and the practice of contracted relations between organizations and employees.     

Generational Differences in Work Ethic: Fact or Fiction?

Even though stereotypes suggest that older generational cohorts (e.g., Baby Boomers) endorse higher levels of work ethic than younger generations (e.g., Millennials), both the academic literature and popular press have found mixed evidence as to whether or not generational differences actually exist. To examine whether generational differences exist in work ethic, a dataset was compiled (k = 105) of all published studies that provided an average sample age and average work ethic score, with each sample becoming an observation, and being assigned a generational cohort based upon the average age of the sample. Three hierarchical multiple regressions found no effect of generational cohort on work ethic endorsement. In two of the three phases, results found a main effect of sample type, such that industry samples had higher work ethic endorsement than student samples. Implications for applied practitioners and future research streams for generational and work ethic research are discussed.     

Procedural interference in perceptual classification: Implicit learning or cognitive complexity?

Researchers have argued that an implicit procedural-learning system underlies performance for information integration category structures, whereas a separate explicit system underlies performance for rule-based categories. One source of evidence is a dissociation in which procedural interference harms performance in information integration structures, but not in rule-based ones. The present research provides evidence that some form of overall difficulty or category complexity lies at the root of the dissociation. The authors report studies in which procedural interference is observed for even simple rule-based structures under more sensitive testing conditions. Furthermore, the magnitude of the interference is large when the nature of the rule is made more complex. By contrast, the magnitude of interference is greatly reduced for an information integration structure that is cognitively simple. These results challenge the view that a procedural-learning system mediates performance on information integration categories, but not on rule-based ones.     

Culture or anonymity? Differences in proposer behaviour in Korea and Germany

This study explores the proposer behaviour in an ultimatum game (UG) frame under anonymous and non‐anonymous conditions among a Korean and German subject pool (n = 590) in comparison. Whereas the anonymous condition is represented by the standard UG, the non‐anonymous condition integrates an aggregate of the Korean cultural context variables university affiliation, regional origin and seniority. The latter, a classic Confucian context variable, is measured by age differentials. The former two are impactful components of so‐called Yongo networks, a unique Korean informal institution identical to Chinese Guanxi ties. Yongo networks, yet underrepresented in research, are said to be a central context variable to explain Korean social ties and decision‐making behaviour. We observe significant differences between the offer behaviours of Korean and German subjects when exposing selected cultural variables. We argue that the behavioural differences observed are in fact due to culture not anonymity.     

Does the Value Circle Exist Within Persons or Only Across Persons?

This study tests whether the Schwartz (1992) value circle exists within individuals, not only across individuals, thereby providing evidence for the within‐person rationale underlying the value circle. We analyze responses from five samples (a representative sample in Britain, a general population sample in the United States, and university students in Britain and Iran) varying in value measures of the Schwartz value theory (SVS, PVQ40, PVQ21). An unfolding model is used to map each person's value profile into a two‐dimensional space representing both persons and values. In all samples, clear value circles were found, with values ordered around the circle largely according to the theory. The model also represents most individuals well. The value circle exists within individuals, providing strong support for the underlying within‐person rationale for the Schwartz (1992) value theory. The unfolding analysis allows identifying which persons fit the model less well and in which way, identifying how meaningful subgroups differ in their value profiles, and testing whether meaningful subgroups have different value structures. The model opens up many new possibilities for research linking values to other variables.     

Differences between Art and Design Education—or Differences in Conceptions of Creativity?

The principles and techniques of design education have begun to influence art education in the United States, but their effect so far has been modest, primarily because of a gaping divide in beliefs about creativity and how to stimulate it. With K–12 art education on the chopping block of a culture awash with budget cuts and testing fever, this is a particularly a significant time to examine these disparate conceptions. The argument here is that the division that exists today between pre‐K–12 art education and design education in the United States is not justified and ignores historical perspective. After describing and comparing the two approaches, we examine how conceptions of creativity in the visual arts may have led to this artificial separation of similar disciplines. Because educators in many countries grapple with defining and implementing creative art education curricula, this article will consider international perspectives that offer insights for American art educators.     

Do Differences in Grammatical Form between Languages Explain Differences in Ontology between Different Philosophical Traditions?: A Critique of the Mass-Noun Hypothesis

It is an assumed view in Chinese philosophy that the grammatical differences between English or Indo-European languages and classical Chinese explain some of the differences between the Western and Chinese philosophical discourses. Although some philosophers have expressed doubts about the general link between classical Chinese philosophy and syntactic form of classical Chinese, I discuss a specific hypothesis, i.e., the mass-noun hypothesis, in this essay. The mass-noun hypothesis assumes that a linguistic distinction such as between the singular terms and the predicates is sufficient to justify or necessarily leads to a specific ontological distinction such as the distinction between the particular and the universal. I argue that one cannot read off semantic properties simply from syntactic ones and hence the syntactic differences do not automatically translate into the semantic differences between languages, that the syntactic features of Chinese nouns do not have explanatory significance in explaining why the particular-universal problem does not arise in the classical period of Chinese philosophy, and that the part-whole ontology allegedly informed by the mass-noun-like semantics does not provide a natural or intuitive picture of the language-world relation.     

Individual Differences in Affective Priming Effects: Any Links with Personality and Trait Affectivity?

Processing tendencies refer to individual differences in the automatic processing of affective stimuli. Using the affective priming paradigm one can tap these processing tendencies and differentiate positive and negative affective priming scores. In this study we used a classical evaluative decision task with nouns as primes and adjectives as targets to assess individual differences in positive and negative affective priming in two time points. Using Steyer’s (Steyer et al. in Methods of Psychological Research Online 2(1), 21–33, 1997) true intraindividual change modeling approach, the positive and negative priming scores were defined on a latent level. No significant relationships were found between positive affective priming and trait positive affect nor extraversion, as well as between negative affective priming and trait negative affect and neuroticism. As these findings are not in line with previous research (Robinson et al. in Emotion 10(5), 615–626, 2010; Robinson et al. in Personality and Individual Differences 42(7), 1221–1231, 2007) possible moderating influences are discussed.     

Individual differences in syllogistic reasoning: deduction rules or mental models?

Two studies examined the correlates of reasoning ability on a syllogistic reasoning task in subjects who lacked formal background in logic. The main issue addressed was the extent to which reasoning proficiency arises from the consideration of multiple possible set relations (mental models) as opposed to explicit or implicit reliance on deduction rules. Evidence for the use of both models and rules was obtained. Although "good" and "poor" reasoners differed even when time constraints were imposed (consistent with the supposition of a better set of rules among good reasoners), good reasoners showed more improvement and chose to take longer amounts of time when time constraints were removed, suggesting that they considered more alternatives than did the poor reasoners. A comparison between these two groups and a third group of subjects, graduate students who had studied logic, reveals striking differences in both accuracy and speed.     

Driven,Distracted, or Both? A Performance‐Based Ex‐Gaussian Analysis of Individual Differences in Anxiety

Since the inception of the empirical study of personality, and even before it, individual differences in anxiety and distress have been viewed as key predictors of behavioral performance. Yet such literatures have always entertained 2 perspectives, one contending that anxious individuals are "driven" and the other contending that anxious individuals are "distracted." The present 3 studies (total N=289) sought to reconcile such discrepant views according to an ex-Gaussian parsing of reaction time performance tendencies in basic cognitive tasks. As hypothesized, a particular pattern marked by faster responding on the preponderance of trials (in terms of the ex-Gaussian μ parameter) in combination with slower responding on other trials (in terms of the ex-Gaussian τ parameter) was predictive of higher levels of anxiety. Implications for understanding neuroticism, distress, the anxiety-performance interface, and cognitive models of personality processes are discussed.     

Response mode differences in perspective taking: Differences in representation or differences in retrieval?

Three experiments explored whether response mode differences in perspective taking result from different spatial representations or different retrieval processes. Participants learned object locations and then, while blindfolded, pointed to or verbally described object locations from perspectives aligned or misaligned with their facing direction and aligned or misaligned with the learning perspective. Pointing was facilitated from the perspective aligned with the body during testing. Similar facilitation occurred when verbally labeling, but only when conducted in the context of pointing (e.g., after pointing). Without this pointing context, or after third-person strategy instructions, the effect of body alignment was eliminated for verbal responses. Pointing was less responsive to context and strategy. Across all conditions, performance was facilitated for the learning perspective. Taken together, these experiments indicate that response mode differences are due to differences in the retrieval process, which varies with strategy, rather than differences in the organization of the underlying spatial memory.     

Implicit task sets in task switching?

In 2 experiments, the authors compare stimulus-based versus task-rule-based task performance. Participants practiced 8 stimulus-response mappings either with or without knowledge about 2 underlying task sets. After practice, 2 transfer blocks with 8 new stimuli were presented. Results show that rule knowledge leads to significant switch and transfer costs, whereas without rule knowledge neither switch nor transfer costs occur. However, significant Task Type x Response Type interactions occurred in both conditions. In a second experiment including only the no rule condition, half of the stimulus-response mappings in the transfer blocks were incongruent to the underlying task rule. Slower response times for these incongruent stimuli as compared with congruent stimuli and the absence of switch costs suggest that participants acquired (presumably implicit) knowledge about 4 different stimulus-response categories.