On the object level, this is a study about personality, and it majorly changed the way I view some personality traits:
I now see conservatism/progressivism as one of the main axes of personality,
It further cemented my perception that “well-being”, or “extraversion minus neuroticism”, is the strongest of the traditional personality dimensions, and that maybe also this raises questions about what personality even means (for instance, surely well-being is not simply a biological trait),
I’m now much more skeptical about how “real” many personality traits are, including traits like “compassion” that were previously quite central to my models of personality.
I think my study on the EQ-SQ model follows in the footsteps of this, rethinking much of what I thought I knew about differential psychology.
However, I actually view the fundamental contribution of the post quite different from this. Really, I’m trying to articulate and test theories of personality, as well as perform exploratory analyses, and I hope that I will inspire others to do so, as well as that I will become better at doing so over time. If this interests you, I would suggest you join Rationalist Psychometrics, a small discord server for this general topic.
In terms of methodology, this study is heavily focused on factor analysis. At the time of writing the post, I thought factor analysis was awesome and underrated. I still think it’s great for testing the sorts of theories discussed in the post, and since such theories take up a lot of space in certain groups’ discussion of differential psychology, I still think factor analysis is quite underrated.
But factor analysis is not everything. My current special interest is Linear Diffusion of Sparse Lognormals, which promises to do much better than factor analysis … if I can get it to work. As such, while the post (and psychometrics in general) focuses quite heavily on factor analysis, I cannot wholeheartedly endorse that aspect of the post.
On the object level, this is a study about personality, and it majorly changed the way I view some personality traits:
I now see conservatism/progressivism as one of the main axes of personality,
It further cemented my perception that “well-being”, or “extraversion minus neuroticism”, is the strongest of the traditional personality dimensions, and that maybe also this raises questions about what personality even means (for instance, surely well-being is not simply a biological trait),
I’m now much more skeptical about how “real” many personality traits are, including traits like “compassion” that were previously quite central to my models of personality.
I think my study on the EQ-SQ model follows in the footsteps of this, rethinking much of what I thought I knew about differential psychology.
However, I actually view the fundamental contribution of the post quite different from this. Really, I’m trying to articulate and test theories of personality, as well as perform exploratory analyses, and I hope that I will inspire others to do so, as well as that I will become better at doing so over time. If this interests you, I would suggest you join Rationalist Psychometrics, a small discord server for this general topic.
In terms of methodology, this study is heavily focused on factor analysis. At the time of writing the post, I thought factor analysis was awesome and underrated. I still think it’s great for testing the sorts of theories discussed in the post, and since such theories take up a lot of space in certain groups’ discussion of differential psychology, I still think factor analysis is quite underrated.
But factor analysis is not everything. My current special interest is Linear Diffusion of Sparse Lognormals, which promises to do much better than factor analysis … if I can get it to work. As such, while the post (and psychometrics in general) focuses quite heavily on factor analysis, I cannot wholeheartedly endorse that aspect of the post.