Condon, David

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https://hdl.handle.net/1794/27223

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Now showing 1 - 20 of 36

Open Access
The Roles of Time and Change in Situations
(SAGE Publications, 2015-06-24) Mroczek, Daniel K.; Condon, Daniel M.
Rauthmann, Sherman and Funder have made a landmark contribution to situation research in the target article of this issue. However, we propose that their work overlooks the need to incorporate a developmental perspective. This includes the separate but related issues of time and change. Situations often unfold over long periods of time, can bleed together, and are not time-delimited in the way traditional laboratory experiments define them. Moreover, individuals systematically change over time (lifespan development) and their reactions to situations, as well as their personality-situation transactions, develop in tandem.
Open Access
A Call for Cross-Fertilization Among Personality and Personnel Selection Researchers
(SAGE Publications, 2017-09-01) Lezotte, Daniel V.; Condon, David M.; Mroczek, Daniel K.
Lievens (2017) makes a case for SJTs in personnel selection, a recommendation with which we agree. In particular, we like the emphasis on branching out from current methodologies and using new techniques such as SJTs not only in I/O or personnel selection research but also in basic personality research. Despite our enthusiasm, we point out some flaws, most notably lack a time dimension to SJTs.
Open Access
Running head: COLLECTING LIFE NARRATIVE DATACapturing the stories of our lives: Examining the collection of life narrative data
(PsyArXiv, 2018-01-21) Guo, Jen; Weston, Sara J.; Condon, David M.
Objective: Do different methods for collecting life narratives – the integrated, autobiographical construction of the past and imagined future – produce similar lexical features and relationships to personality traits? The present study compares accounts from an in-person and online sample on measures of word categories, narrative themes and their relationships with Big Five traits. Method: The first sample (N = 157, mean age = 53.7, 64% female, 55% White, and 43% Black) consisted of narratives gathered in-person and the second (N = 256, mean age = 30.6, 61% female, 70% White, 30% non-White) contained type-written responses to the same prompts from an independent online sample. Participants’ responses to the narrative prompts were coded for thematic redemption and contamination. Results: Tests revealed significant differences between samples in 25 of 63 LIWC word categories. Online participants’ narratives also had higher odds of thematic redemption (but not contamination) above and beyond word count, type of narrative scene, participant demographics, and Big Five traits. Lastly, comparisons revealed no significant differences across the samples’ relationships between personality traits and narrative themes. Conclusion: This research supports conditional assimilation of correlational findings from different narrative methodologies and proposes methodological considerations for future research involving life narratives.
Open Access
Reliability
(Wiley, 2018-02-16) Condon, David M.; Revelle, William
Separating signal from noise is the primary challenge of measurement and is the fundamental goal of all approaches to reliability theory. Reliability is the ability to generalize about individual differences across alternative sources of variation. Generalizations within a domain of items use internal consistency estimates. This chapter examines reliability to estimate the true score given an observed score, and to establish confidence intervals around this estimate based upon the standard error of the observed scores. The concept that observed covariances reflect true covariances is the basis for structural equation modeling, in which relationships between observed scores are expressed in terms of relationships between latent scores and the reliability of the measurement of the latent variables. Reliability estimates can be found based upon variations in the overall test, variations over time, variation over items in a test, and variability associated with who is giving the test.
Open Access
Descriptive, predictive and explanatory personality research: Different goals, different approaches, but a shared need to move beyond the Big Few traits
(SAGE Publications, 2020) MÕTTUS, RENÉ; Wood, Dustin; Condon, David M.; Back, Mitja D.; Baumert, Anna; Costantini, Giulio; Epskamp, Sacha; Greiff, Samuel; Johnson, Wendy; Lukaszewski, Aaron; Murray, Aja; Revelle, William; Wright, Aidan G. C.; Yarkoni, Tal; Ziegler, Matthias; Zimmermann, Johannes
We argue that it is useful to distinguish between three key goals of personality science – description, prediction and explanation – and that attaining them often requires different priorities and methodological approaches. We put forward specific recommendations such as publishing findings with minimum a priori aggregation and exploring the limits of predictive models without being constrained by parsimony and intuitiveness but instead maximising out-of-sample predictive accuracy. We argue that naturally-occurring variance in many decontextualized and multi-determined constructs that interest personality scientists may not have individual causes, at least as this term is generally understood and in ways that are human-interpretable, never mind intervenable. If so, useful explanations are narratives that summarize many pieces of descriptive findings rather than models that target individual cause-effect associations. By meticulously studying specific and contextualized behaviours, thoughts, feelings and goals, however, individual causes of variance may ultimately be identifiable, although such causal explanations will likely be far more complex, phenomenon-specific and person-specific than anticipated thus far. Progress in all three areas – description, prediction, and explanation – requires higher-dimensional models than the currently-dominant “Big Few” and supplementing subjective trait-ratings with alternative sources of information such as informant-reports and behavioural measurements. Developing a new generation of psychometric tools thus provides many immediate research opportunities.
Open Access
Age Differences in Personality Structure
(Oxford University Press, 2021-12-17) Jackson, Joshua; Condon, David M.; Beck, Emorie
Most investigations in the structure of personality traits do not adequately address age, as few studies look at the structure of personality traits a-theoretically, instead presupposing a theoretical structure e.g., Big Five. As a result, the relationship among indicators within a trait (coherence) are often highlighted but relationships across traits (differentiation) are not thoroughly examined. Using a large-scale sample of 369,151 individuals ranging in age from 14 to 90, the present study examines whether personality indicators show differential relationships as a function of age. Results indicate that coherence shows few changes across the lifespan, while differentiation weakens across adulthood into old age. These finding suggest that Big Five indicators only parallel the Big Five structure among young but not older adults. Thus, using standard Big Five personality trait assessments in older adults may, at best, not reflect reality and, at worse, undermine the predictive utility of personality traits.
Open Access
The Convergence of Self and Informant Reports in a Large Online Sample
(University of California Press, 2021-01-04) Zola, Anne; Condon, David M.; Revelle, William
Despite their added benefits, informant-reports are largely underutilized in personality research. We demonstrate the feasibility of collecting informant-reports online, where researchers have unprecedented access to large, global populations. Using an entirely free, opt-in procedure tied to an existing personality survey, we collected 1,554 informant-reports for 921 unique targets, in conjunction with over 158,000 self-reports. Informant-reports showed a strong correspondence to self-reported traits at three levels of analysis: among the Big Five domains, the lower-level SPI-27 factors (Condon, 2018), and at the item-scale level. Among the Big Five, self-informant agreement ranged between .63 and .72, except for Openness (.42). Higher informant-ratings of Extraversion were positively associated with all Big Five self-ratings in the direction of social desirability. Across the Big Five and the 27 lower-order traits, agreement was strongest between self-reports of compassion and informant-reports of agreeableness (.74) and weakest between self-reported emotional expressiveness and informant-reported emotional stability (.02). Agreement between informants was roughly equivalent for all of the Big Five traits (.29 to .35) and attractiveness (.37), though agreement between informants for perceived intelligence was non-significant. In addition, we empirically identified the self-report items that best predict what informants say about targets, highlighting the features of self-reported personality that are most readily confirmed by informants. Finally, we discuss group level differences of participants who interacted with the informant-report system at various levels. In general, participants who sought and provided informant reports are more open and agreeable than the general sample, though targets’ personality did not affect whether or not invited informants provided ratings.
Open Access
Personality Predictors of Emergency Department Post-Discharge Outcomes
(PsychOpen, 2021-11-22) Atherton, Olivia E.; Willroth, Emily C.; Schwaba, Ted; Goktan, Ayla J.; Graham, Eileen K.; Condon, David M.; Rao, Mitesh B.; Mroczek, Daniel K.
Personality traits are important predictors of health behaviors, healthcare utilization, and health outcomes. However, we know little about the role of personality traits for emergency department outcomes. The present study used data from 200 patients (effective Ns range from 84 to 191), who were being discharged from the emergency department at an urban hospital, to investigate whether the Big Five personality traits were associated with post-discharge outcomes (i.e., filling prescriptions, following up with primary care physician, making an unscheduled return to the emergency department). Using logistic regression, we found few associations among the broad Big Five domains and post-discharge outcomes. However, results showed statistically significant associations between specific Big Five items (e.g., “responsible”) and the three post-discharge outcomes. This study demonstrates the feasibility of assessing personality traits in an emergency medicine setting and highlights the utility of having information about patients’ personality tendencies for predicting post-discharge compliance.
Open Access
Imagination as a facet of Openness/Intellect: A new scale differentiating experiential simulation and conceptual innovation
(PsyArXiv, 2022-02-09) Sassenberg, Tyler A.; Condon, David M.; DeYoung, Colin G.
Previous research has investigated the nature of imagination as a construct related to multiple forms of higher-order cognition. Despite the emergence of various conceptualizations of imagination, few attempts have been made to explore the structure of imagination as a trait in the context of existing hierarchically-nested personality dimensions. We present a scale for measuring trait imagination that distinguishes between experiential simulation and conceptual innovation, aligned with the two major subfactors (aspects) of the Big Five dimension Openness/Intellect. Across two large samples, we provide evidence of a consistent factor structure distinguishing experiential, conceptual, and general descriptions of imagination, as well as validity as measures of facets of Openness and Intellect. Our findings provide a measure of major forms of imagination in line with mainstream models of the hierarchical structure of personality.
Open Access
The Personality of American Nations: An Exploratory Study
(PsychOpen, 2021-01-14) Lanning, Kevin; Warfel, Evan A.; Wetherell, Geoffrey; Perez, Marina; Boyd, Ryan; Condon, David M.
Some scholars have presented models of the United States as a set of “nations” with distinct settlement histories and contemporary cultures. We examined personality differences in one such model, that of Colin Woodard, using data from over 75,000 respondents. Four nations were particularly distinct: The Deep South, Left Coast, New Netherland, and the Spanish Caribbean. Differences between nations at the level of the individual person were typically small, but were larger at the level of community, revealing how aggregation can contribute to differences in the lived experience of places in nations such as Yankeedom or Greater Appalachia. We represented effects in a three-dimensional model defined by Authoritarian conventionalism (which differentiated ‘Red’ and ‘Blue’ nations) as well as Cognitive resilience and Competitiveness (which differentiated among the Blue nations). Finally, we adjusted Woodard’s model to better fit the data, and found that nations largely maintained their boundaries, with the most drastic changes occurring on the East Coast.
Open Access
Deep Lexical Hypothesis: Identifying personality structure in natural language
(Cornell University, 2022-03-04) Cutler, Andrew; Condon, David M.
Recent advances in natural language processing (NLP) have produced general models that can perform complex tasks such as summarizing long passages and translating across languages. Here, we introduce a method to extract adjective similarities from language models as done with survey-based ratings in traditional psycholexical studies but using millions of times more text in a natural setting. The correlational structure produced through this method is highly similar to that of self- and other-ratings of 435 terms reported by Saucier and Goldberg (1996a). The first three unrotated factors produced using NLP are congruent with those in survey data, with coefficients of 0.89, 0.79, and 0.79. This structure is robust to many modeling decisions: adjective set, including those with 1,710 terms (Goldberg, 1982) and 18,000 terms (Allport & Odbert, 1936); the query used to extract correlations; and language model. Notably, Neuroticism and Openness are only weakly and inconsistently recovered. This is a new source of signal that is closer to the original (semantic) vision of the Lexical Hypothesis. The method can be applied where surveys cannot: in dozens of languages simultaneously, with tens of thousands of items, on historical text, and at extremely large scale for little cost. The code is made public to facilitate reproduction and fast iteration in new directions of research.
Open Access
Frequency of use metrics for American English person descriptors: Extensions of Roivainen's internet search methodology
(PsyArXiv, 2022-05-02) McDougald, Sarah; Condon, David M.
Personality traits are often measured using person-descriptive terms, but data are limited regarding the frequency of usage for these terms in everyday language. This project reports on the relative frequency of usage for a large pool of American English terms (N = 18,240) using count estimates from search engine results and in books cataloged by Google. These estimates are based on the ngrams formed when each descriptor is combined with a common person-related noun (person, woman, man, girl, boy). Results are reported for each noun form and a frequency index in an online database that can be sorted, searched, and downloaded. We report on associations among the different noun forms and data types, and propose recommendations for the use of these data in conjunction with other resources. In particular, we encourage collaborative approaches among research teams using large language models in psycholexical research related to personality structure.
Open Access
Multilevel analysis of personality: Personality of college majors
(Society of Multivariate Experimental Psychology, 2012-10) Revelle, William; Condon, David M.
Open Access
Estimating ability for two samples
(2022-07-13) Revelle, William; Condon, David M.
Using IRT to estimate ability is easy, but how accurate are the estimate and what about multiple samples?
Open Access
PERSONALITY TRAITS (. . .BUT NOT THE BIG FIVE) PREDICT THE ONSET OF DISEASE
(Oxford University Press, 2017-06-30) Condon, David M.; Mroczek, Daniel K.; Khan, A.; Weston, Sara J.
The utility of personality measures as predictors of distal outcomes (e.g., mortality, longevity) is well-documented. Few have reported on more proximal outcomes; one prominent exception (Weston, Hill, & Jackson, 2014) considered personality predictors of chronic disease onset. We report here on efforts to (1) replicate their findings in a second cohort of participants from the Health and Retirement Study and (2) extend their analyses to evaluate the effects of socioeconomic factors. For 7 chronic diseases and the Big Five scales, the only significant measure in both samples when controlling for SES was Openness as a protective factor in the development of a heart condition. SES, by contrast, was a significant predictor in more than one-third of the models. We also demonstrate methods for empirically deriving outcome-specific scales with substantially improved predictive utility and advocate for broader use of these methods when prediction is more important than taxonomic description.
Open Access
Laying personality BARE: Behavioral frequencies strengthen personality-criterion relationships
(PsyArXiv, 2020-08-24) Elleman, Lorien G.; Condon, David M.; Revelle, William
Personality consists of stable patterns of cognitions, emotions, and behaviors, yet personality psychologists rarely study behaviors. Even when examined, behaviors typically are considered to be validation criteria for traditional personality items. In the current study (N = 332,489), we conceptualize (self-reported, yearlong) behavioral frequencies as measures of personality. We investigate whether behavioral frequencies have incremental validity over traditional personality items in correlating personality with six outcome criteria. We use BISCUIT, a statistical learning technique, to find the optimal number of items for each criterion’s model, across three pools of items: traditional personality items (k = 696), behavioral frequencies (k = 425), and a combined pool. Compared to models using only traditional personality items, models using the combined pool are more strongly correlated to four criteria. We find mixed evidence of congruence between the type of criterion and the type of personality items that are most strongly correlated with it (e.g., behavioral criteria are most strongly correlated to behavioral frequencies). Findings suggest that behavioral frequencies are measures of personality that offer a unique effect in describing personality-criterion relationships beyond traditional personality items. We provide an updated, public-domain item pool of behavioral frequencies: the BARE (Behavioral Acts, Revised and Expanded) Inventory.
Open Access
Supplementary materials to: Personality predictors of emergency department post-discharge outcomes
(PsychOpen, 2021) Atherton, Olivia E.; Willroth, Emily C.; Schwaba, Ted; Goktan, Ayla J.; Graham, Eileen K.; Condon, David M.; Rao, Mitesh B.; Mroczek, Daniel K.
Supplementary materials to: Atherton, O. E., Willroth, E. C., Schwaba, T., Goktan, A. J., Graham, E. K., Condon, D. M., Rao, M. B., & Mroczek, D. K. (2021). Personality predictors of emergency department post-discharge outcomes. Personality Science, 2, Article e7193. https://doi.org/10.5964/ps.7193
Open Access
Personality Trait Descriptors: 2,818 Trait Descriptive Adjectives Characterized by Familiarity, Frequency of Use, and Prior Use in Psycholexical Research
(Ubiquity Press, 2022) Condon, David M.; Coughlin, Joshua; Weston, Sara J.
This dataset contains 2,818 trait descriptive adjectives in English and information about the extent to which each term is known among a large and approximately representative sample of U.S. adults. The list of personality-related terms includes all 1,710 adjectives previously studied by Goldberg (1982) and draws on prior work by Allport and Odbert (1936) and Norman (1967). The extent to which terms were known by respondents was based on the administration of vocabulary questions about each term-definition pair online to a sample of English-speaking U.S. residents with approximately average literacy levels. The open data are accompanied by an online database that allows the terms to be searched and filtered.
Open Access
Behaviors predict outcomes better than the Big Five
(2017) Elleman, Lorien G.; Condon, David M.; Revelle, William
Figure 1: Correlation matrix of traditional Big Five scales, behavioral Big Five scales (composed of items from Tables 1-5), four outcomes, and four empirical scales formed from items most highly correlated with each outcome (composed of items from Tables 6-9). Color-coded for size and sign. All correlations corrected for item overlap. Lower diagonal: raw correlations. Upper diagonal: corrected for attenuation. Diagonal: alphas.
Open Access
Selected personality data from the SAPA-Project: 08Dec2013 to 26Jul2014
(Harvard Dataverse, 2015) Condon, David M.; Revelle, William
These data were collected to evaluate the structure of personality constructs in the temperament domain. In the context of modern personality theory, these constructs are typically construed in terms of the Big Five (Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, Neuroticism, Openness, and Extraversion) though several additional constructs were included here. Approximately 24,000 individuals were administered random subsets of 696 items from 92 public-domain personality scales using the Synthetic Aperture Personality Assessment method between December 8, 2013 and July 26, 2014. The data are available in rdata format and are accompanied by documentation stored as a text file. Re-use potential include many types of structural and correlational analyses of personality. (2015-04-13)

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