so I want to tell you I want to make a little announcement first. I'm going to do a series of lectures, I think, starting in May. Maybe at the Isabel Bader Theatre?
We're trying to look into booking that. On a, I'm going to do a psychological interpretation of the bible from beginning to end. That's the plan anyway.
So I'm going to do that once a week. So if you are interested in that, I would recommend that you. .
. (and maybe your not an that's fine obviously) but, if you go onto my Twitter account you can just, there's a place you can sign up It doesn't mean that you'll attend. I'm just trying to see if there are people who are interested.
I've been interested in doing that for a long time and so I think I'm going to try it and so. Anyways! That's the announcement.
Then, is that about it? I guess so. OK!
So look we are going to switch gears today. Um. The first half of this course, as you've no doubt already err gathered, is.
. . because it's grounded essentially in clinical theories of personality it tends more towards the philosophical.
And I told you that the reason for that was that I regard clinical psychology as a branch of engineering rather than a branch of science. It's Human Engineering obviously; and because of that it's an applied science and so that means it straddles the ground between a science and a practice and and it, because it's, it involves human beings, it necessarily involves value because we live inside value structures; and so the logical consequence of that is that investigation into the philosophy of value is necessary in order to understand clinical Psychological theories. Because really what you are trying to do as a clinician, you could say that you are trying to do two things; one is to help people have less terrible lives.
But you are also trying to help them have better lives. and there is obviously a value structure that is inherent in that attempt because you are moving from something of less value to something of more value and so. .
and it's best to just to face that and all the complexities that come along with that, head on. Now! I think that what you do as a clinician, to overcome what ever tendency you might have to impose your value structure on someone is you do an awful lot of listening And so my basic practise with people is to say to them.
"Well; obviously you are here because you would like things to be better. But that's OK. We can use your definition of what constitutes better.
We can use your definition of what constitutes worse. Or we can establish that through dialogue, and negotiation. What are you aiming at?
How would you like things to be better a year from now say? If you could have what you wanted, if your life was put together what would that look like? And you can have a very straight forward discussion with people about that if you are not cram the way that they are orienting the world into your particular perspective.
Now. That's one of the dangers of being the adherent of a given psychological school. Now having said that.
It's also. . .
There was research done many years ago, showing that if you were an eclectic psychotherapist which means that you sort of pick and chose from different therapeutic schools. You tended to not be as effective as you were if you were the dedicated adherent of a given school and I think that the reason for that is that there are so many schools of psychological thought that if you say that you pick an choose from all of them, what that really means is that you don't know anything about any of them. And then there's also the additional factor (maybe, you might call it) that if someone comes to you and they're very chaotic and confused.
Helping them impose ANY STRUCTURE onto their life is likely to be an improvement over no structure at all. And you can think about that in a Piagetian sense, is that you know you’re going to be happier playing a game, rather than no game. And there's many games that you can play that are better than no game.
And so if you go to a therapist that has a particular view point and they help you structure your understanding of the world within the confines of a given clinical model; and you came in there very chaotic and uncertain, then maybe that's going to be a lot better for you than just floundering. And I think that there's some real truth in that. And I think that that's part and parcel of the same, er; of another, what, you might call it "reasonable observation about maturation" is that it's very necessary for people at some point in there life to dedicate themselves to a single game, of some sort.
Which is kind of what you are doing at University. You Know, you have to become 'one thing' at some point in your life; and the sacrifice of course is that you give up all the other things that you could become. But you don't really have a choice because if you don't decide voluntarily to become one thing.
You know to become a disciplined adherent of some specific er practise or profession or view point then you risk just ageing Chaotically And you don't get away with not ageing. So you might as well age into something that's actually something rather than just becoming an old child Which is really. .
. Which is not a good thing. It's not a good thing to see.
Especialy when people hit about 40. It's not, it's not pretty, For them or anyone else. And even at 30, it's getting pretty old at that point.
40; it's like almost irreparable at 40. And the reason for that is, you start running out of opportunities when you're young and stupid people don't care because they think, you know, whatever. You've got decades of of possibilities still ready to unfold in you, but if you are in the same unspecified position at 40 people are much less forgiving especially if they are going to hire someone who doesn't know what's going on.
Or employ them or sorry engage them is some sort of productive activity. They might as well take a chance on someone young and full of potential rather than someone who has really lived more than half of their life already because of course you have, by the time you are 40. OK.
So, anyway, so that is with regards to putting the first half of the course to bed so to speak. The second half is more scientific. and there is a bit of a gap and it's a bit of a gap I am trying to resolve conceptually because now we move into more biological models and into models that are psychometric and Psychometrics is the psychological study of the study of psychological measurement.
And now if you are a scientist there's a couple of things that you are obliged to do if you are a scientist one is to utilise the scientific method that's usually the experimental method where you take 2 groups randomly selected, apply a manipulation to one of them and not equivalent manipulation of a different sort to another; hypothesize about what the outcome is likely to be and then test it ah, that's the technical experimental model anyways you're also obliged as a scientist to come up with a measurement of your, of your to come up with a measurement, let's just put it that way that's reliable and valid. Okay, and what a reliable measure is one that measures the same way across multiple measurements. So, for example, you wouldn't want to take a ruler that's made out of flexible rubber to measure things with because it wouldn't give you the same measurement if you put it in different situations That's reliability, and it's a term you need to know.
It means that the measurement tool produces stable results across different instances of the measurement. Without that, you don't have a measurement. And the other critical factor with regards to a measurement is that it has to be valid, which means that it actually has to measure what it preports to measure and it actually has to be usable for an array of different purposes as a consequence, so, you might think well the purpose of scientific endeavor is to predict and to control, you could say understand, predict, and control but understanding, prediction, and control are all manifestations of the same underlying throughly designed comprehension.
Now, here's what's happened with the measurement of personality It's a funny story in some sense, a peculiar story, because in many ways, what we've come to understand about personality from a scientific perspective, developed in a very atheoretical manner. It's not very common in scientific endeavor that that occurs, is that what we know about personality emerged from, I would say, statistically rigorous observation, without it being the consequence of any real model. So, often, what happens, in scientific endeavor is that someone generates a model first, a theoretical understanding, and then they generate measurement tools based on that theoretical understanding and then they test the measurement tools to see if well if the measurement tools perform properly, and if they fail at least to invalidate the underlying theory That isn't what happened with psychometrics.
Except in a loose way, so here's the loose theory, and you've got to get this exactly right to understand this properly. You've got to get it exactly right, and it's really important, because, insofar as you guys are interested in psychology, especially in the experimental end of psychology, measurement is everything and so much of what psychologists publish and write about is incorrect, and the reason it's incorrect is cause they do not have their measurements properly instantiated. It's a massive problem especially in social psychology.
In fact it's probably a fatal problem, in that most of the things that social psychologists measure don't exist. And social psychology has been rife with scandals for the last 4 or 5 years, and there's good reason for it but a big part of the problem is is that, the measurement that people are not stringent and careful enough about their measurements so we're going to walk through this very very carefully, so I'm going to set forward a set of propositions and you have to think about it, cause each of them are. .
. they're axiomatic, so you sort of have to accept them before you go on to the next step. And there's certainly room to question them.
But here's the bare bones of the psychometric model of personality so we'll call it roughly the big 5 model and the reason it's called the big 5 model is because the psychometric investigations have indicated that you can specify human personality along 5 basic dimensions. You might ask well what exactly is personality, and well that's partly what we have been trying to wrestle with in the entire course so far and I would say umm what exactly is a trait. Think of an trait as an element of personality; and I think the best way to think about a trait is as a sub-personality.
So you are made up of sub-personalities that are integrated into something vaguely resembling a unity. But the unity is diverse. There are describable stable elements that characterize you.
That are elements of your being. So for example, here are some common ones. I would say, are you so sure ,or would you rather be alone?
So here is a good question for you to define decide whether you are an extrovert or an introvert. It's pretty straightforward. It is the first major dimension.
Basically if you take any set of questions, about, any set of questions that could be applied descriptively to a human being, and you subject them to a statistical process called factor analysis. You can determine how they group together. So, what I would be interested in, Let's say I ask you a hundred questions.
