Description: Think about what you have read, learned or heard about wisdom. It is not a characteristic typically applied to young people, is it? In fact, it is one of the few positive things associated with aging and with advanced age in particular. Why is that? What is it about wisdom that leads us to… Read more »
Posts Categorized: Assessment: Intellectual-Cognitive Measures
How Trustworthy are Personality Tests? Or is That the Right Question?
Description: Want to find out about yourself? You can take a personality test. But before you do, consider whether you will be able to trust the results. Are the accurate? Stable? Predictive of how you will behave in future? How would you go about answering those questions? Well, you could just throw caution to the… Read more »
How Might You Test for Wisdom?
Description: Are you wise (not as in wise guy but as in wise like an owl)? What does wisdom involve? What sorts of things, if you observed them in the behavior of, or otherwise applying to, a particular person would lead you towards thinking that they were a wise person? Now think of this as… Read more »
Do People-Pleasing and Sociopathy Anchor an Important Dimension?
Description: You probably already know a bit about how the typical dimensions that make up our big theories of personality were derived. Basically, they are reflections of the dimensions that people have created in their own minds based upon their observations of their own and other social behaviors. Those dimensions make up our Implicit Theories… Read more »
Psychologists as Expert Witnesses: Ethics = Reliability + Validity
Description: What do Psychologists do in courtroom when they serve as expert witnesses? This is a huge and complicated topic so let’s focus in a bit. If a Psychologist has been asked by the court to assess an accused individual and if they use a measure or two in order to develop their opinion of… Read more »
Personality Testing: Diversion or Thin Edge of the Big Data Wedge?
Description: How do you feel about personality tests? If your response to this question is some version of “meh” you might want to reconsider. Aside from being a part of all introductory psychology course curricula many people view personality tests as those diversions they encounter in magazines (well, on line these days). However, it is… Read more »
Eurocentric Bias in Psychology: Remembering Joseph White
Description: You may not have known of Joseph White, a psychologist who died recently, but you should know about what he spent his life trying to do. White spent much of his career and life pointing out that the core theories within the discipline of psychology were blindly eurocentric. By this he meant that the… Read more »
Hiring and Other Prediction Decisions: Interviews Help, Right?
Description: Imagine you are going to hire someone to work for you. What information would you want to gather before making a hiring decision? Would you want to interview the applicants who looked good on paper? How much weight would the interview have in your decision about who to hire? How about if you were… Read more »
Eugenics and Forced Sterilization in Your Community?
Description: It is often hard to see local examples of some of the historical issues that come up in relation to the earlier days of psychology or the application of concepts related to psychology to the general population. The idea that it made sense from a social policy perspective to create a mechanism whereby “mentally… Read more »
Is Common Sense a Problem?
Description: It is quite common for those talking about the nature of human rationality to point out that a number of the shortcuts or heuristics that we use in analyzing information that the world is presenting us may in fact lead us in the direction of making decisions that are ultimately less rational. This review… Read more »
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