Ultimately, I hope this can be a starting point for more explicit discussion about personality measurement

I give several recommendations for improving measurand-measurement alignment in personality research — most of which hinge on making our goals and assumptions explicit instead of implicit

But if we change our measurement procedure to better reflect the data-generating process of personality patterns by explicitly working situations into measurement (eg experience sampling, lab-based situations, low-fidelity simulations), we can be more reliably capture differences in GENERATORS

I made some simple simulations to see how well we might expect typical inventory style measurement to recover individual diffs in generators and patterns.

Turns out, we can’t expect to recover GENERATOR differences reliably without very strong assumptions (which I think are unlikely)

These are different measurands, so we should have different measurement procedures for recovering each. But most personality research relies on a one-size-fits-all measurement procedure: decontextualized personality inventories.

How well can we expect this to recover the different measurands?

GENERATORS are the psychological mechanisms that generate behavior in tandem with situations (specifically inter individual diffs in their functional parameters), while PATTERNS are the manifest behavioral tendencies that arise from interactions between generators and the situations

Basically, I think my confusion stems from the fact that there are multiple conceptualizations of personality in the literature, and different conceptualization actually imply different theoretical measurement targets (measurands). I identify two broad classes of measurands: patterns and generators

The third chapter reviews the lexical approach to personality that led to the currently dominant models of personality: Big Five and HEXACO

Feedback appreciated!

The second chapter reviews some historical, non-empirical personality perspectives (e.g., humourist, freudian, adlerian), highlighting their flaws and setting up the focus on more modern data-driven approaches for the rest of the course.

Feedback welcome!

discord?

The first chapter covers frameworks that I think are essential for guiding psychological research—often overlooked at the undergrad level. It sets the stage for examining human personality from ultimate and proximate perspectives across levels of analysis.

Any and all feedback welcome!