PSYC 050 Lecture 12: Introduction to Psychology 12
Document Summary
Scientific findings on human psychological differences are shocking. Sexual identity is at the core of being, male or female. How we refer to you in language is indexed on that. Personality is defined by peoples style of dealing with the world and other people. We are talking about stable trait across situations in time. If person next to you smacks that, you might be angry but that"s not personality. How do we scientifically characterize differences in personality. Two conditions have to be satisfied- reliability, which means no measurement error, a test is reliable if you test the person at different times and you get the same result. A personality test that gives two different results at different times isn"t reliable. Validity is the other one- it measure what its supposed to. Suppose testing intelligence by date of birth; is that reliable?, yes. The claim is these are the five fundamental ways in which people differ from one another.
