Personality Structure and Measurement (Psychology Revivals)

Hans J. Eysenck, Sybil B.G. Eysenck

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781135021573
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Originally published in 1969, this book deals extensively with the description and measurement of personality.

Beginning with a statement of the principles of typological research in psychology, set against the background of general taxonomic principles in biology, the study discusses in detail results and generalisations from the Eysencks' previous work. The second part of the book describes several large-scale studies using personality questionnaires prepared by the authors, as well as the standard ones of Cattell and Guilford. There is a comparative study of the Eysenck, Cattell and Guilford inventories, which analyses the degree to which similar factors can be found in these three instruments and discusses areas of agreement and disagreement between the three authors. The third part deals with personality studies in children, and includes a chapter on personality structure in subnormal subjects. These studies are concerned with discovering the extent to which personality structure changes with increasing age, and to what extent it is possible to measure personality in younger children. They also examine sex differences in personality structure, and show quite marked differences between the sexes on a number of primary personality traits.

The results of the Eysencks' work in this field directed new light on the structure of personality and cast doubt on many widely accepted findings of the time.

PART ONE

Nature and History of Human Typology

By H. J. Eysenck

I

CLASSIFICATION IN SCIENCE

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CLASSIFICATION is one of the classic methods of science and is fundamental in all fields of study. This is equally true in biology as in physics. Systems of classification are always at first simple, governed by common-sense appearances, and far removed from the complexities of later developments. Thus Thales, the first of the Greek philosophers to think about the constitution of the world and its elements, held the theory that everything was originally water, from which earth, air and living things were later separated out. Later on Anaximander and Anaximenes modified this hypothesis to include earth, air and fire as well as water as the main elements. These of course were mere pre-scientific guesses of little value in the actual development of chemistry and physics, but at least they served to pose a problem.

More fruitful was an approach which appears to have originated with the Chinese. In chemistry we are dealing with a fundamental duality which is exemplified by metals and non-metals; this we now know to be due to a shortage or excess of electrons. As Bernai (1957) has pointed out: ‘There is evidence for tracing the first appreciation of this duality to the Chinese, who already in pre-historic times used red cinnabar as a magic substitute for life blood and had resolved it into its elements, sulphur and mercury. From these notions the Taoist sect developed a system of alchemy from which it is probable that first Indian and then Arabic alchemy was derived.’ To these two opposites of sulphur and mercury a third element was added by Philipus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, who called himself Paracelsus to show his superiority to Celsus, the great doctor of antiquity. By adding the neutral salt he established the so-called tria prima as a foundation of his ‘spagyric’ art of chemistry.

Curious as these ancient methods of classification seem to us yet there is good modern justification for this spagyric system of mercury, sulphur and salt. We have here a reasonable prevision of three of the four sub-fields into which the general field of chemistry is now subdivided: that of the rare gases, where all electrons remain attached to atoms; that of metals, where there is an excess of electrons; that of non-metals, where there is a lack of electrons; and that of salts, where exchanges have taken place between the metal and the nonmetal ions. Even the analogy from external appearance on which the spagyric art was originally based has now found an explanation in terms of quantum theory.

There are certain important lessons to be learned from this brief excursion into ancient chemical history. One of them is that progress in classification is ultimately dependent on, and in turn central to, general development of the science of which it forms a part. Another important idea is this. The principles of classification based on analogies from external appearance may incorporate very important insights without which the development of a science would be very much slower, although of course it is not suggested that we should rest content with arguments from external appearances. When we turn to the study of classification in the biological sciences we will encounter this point again.

The notion of classification always implies an idea about that which is being classified. Thus in chemistry it implies the very important notion of an element. Boyle gave the first precise definition: ‘No body is a true principle or element… which is not perfectly homogeneous but is further resolvable into any number of distinct substances how small so ever.’ This insight into the nature of elements unfortunately was unable to furnish him with techniques which could decide in any but a few cases whether a given substance was or was not an element; Boyle's criterion remained inapplicable for another hundred years. Finally of course Boyle's definition and the work of the next few centuries resulted in that great monument of classification, Mendeleev's periodic table of the elements, in 1869. This appeared a final step in classification for a time, but then came the discovery that the atom was not after all indivisible, and since then we have had a whole shower of long lived elementary particles and anti-particles, as well as resonances, isobars, and excited states—so much so that few except professional physicists can find their way about among the fermions and bosons, the leptons, baryons and mesons, the nucleons and hyperons and the neutrinos, neutrettos, muons, lambdas, sigmas, pions, kaons, and so on and so forth. Obviously another classification was required, and now that we have the theory of unitary symmetry known as SU(3) we have gone some way towards achieving a more satisfactory state, particularly since the discovery of the omego-minus particle has seemed to verify the principles on which the theory of unitary symmetry was based. Modern as all these recent advances may seem, many of them had been foreseen already by Newton, who had evolved a theory of the atom composed of shell within shell of parts held together successively more firmly. All these anticipations of future developments by Boyle and Newton were of little use in the development of chemistry because, as Bernai points out: ‘In the seventeenth century chemistry was not yet in a state in which the corpuscular analysis could be applied. For that it needed the steady accumulation of new experimental facts that was to come in the next century. Chemistry, unlike physics, demands a multiplicity of experience and does not contain self-evident principles. Without principles it must remain an ‘occult’ science depending on real but inexplicable mysteries.’

This is an important limitation which applies to psychology just as much as it did to chemistry. The cry is often heard for a Newton to rescue us from the avalanche of facts, and to remedy the lack of self-evident principles in psychology. Yet even Newton, who worked at chemistry for much longer than at physics, did not in fact succeed in advancing that science to any particular degree. Both in the matter of classification and that of the creation of a genuine science of psychology we simply have to live within our means, and realize the bounds set by the nature of the material to the development of the laws we all would like to see develop.

2

PRINCIPLES OF NUMERICAL TAXONOMY

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PSYCHOLOGISTS who work in the field of classification, whether that of normal or abnormal personality, seldom concern themselves with the history of classification in physics and chemistry. This may be explained in terms of the obvious differences between animate and inanimate matter. However, they also very rarely seem to show any interest in the history of biological classification or taxonomy, and this is rather more difficult to understand because most of the problems which occur in psychology have also been dealt with by biologists and botanists at various stages, and a knowledge of their experiences may be of considerable use in dealing with our own problems.

This is not to say that biological taxonomy has been an unqualified success, or has failed to develop problems of its own. Consider the following quotation from Singer (1959): ‘We would stress the fact that, from the time of Linnaeus to our own, a weak point in biological science has been the absence of any quantitative meaning in our classificatory terms. What is a class, and does class A differ from class B as much as class C differs from class D? The question can be put for the other classificatory grades, such as order, family, genus and species. In no case can it be answered fully, and in most cases it cannot be answered at all … until some adequate reply can be given to such questions as these, our classificatory schemes can never be satisfactory or “natural”. There can be little better than mnemonics—mere skeletons or frames on which we hang somewhat disconnected fragments of knowledge. Evolutionary doctrine, which has been at the back of all classificatory systems of the last century, has provided no real answer to these difficulties. Geology has given a fragmentary answer here and there. But to sketch the manner in which the various groups of living things arose is a very different thing from ascribing any quantitative value to those groups.’

Similarly, Sokal and Sneath (1963) in their classic book on Principles of Numerical Taxonomy have this to say: ‘It is widely acknowledged that the science of taxonomy is one of the most neglected disciplines in biology. Although new developments are continually being made in techniques for studying living creatures, in finding new characters, in describing new organisms, and in revising the systematics of previously known organisms, little work has been directed towards the conceptual basis of classification—that is, taxonomy in the restricted sense of the theory of classification. Indeed, the taxonomy of today is but little advanced from that of a hundred, or even two hundred, years ago. Biologists have amassed a wealth of material, both of museum specimens and of new taxonomic characters, but they have had little success in improving their power of digesting this material. The practice of taxonomy has remained intuitive and commonly inarticulate, an art rather than a science.’

Sokal and Sneath give the following definition of classification: ‘Classification is the ordering of organisms into groups (or sets) on the basis of their relationships, that is, of their asso...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Editors' Introduction
• Part One: Nature and History of Human Typology
• Part Two: Trait and Type Factors
• Part Three: Personality in Children
• Epilogue
• Appendix
• Bibliography and Author Index
• Subject Index