Descriptive, predictive and explanatory personality research: Different goals, different approaches, but a shared need to move beyond the Big Few traits

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dc.contributor.authorMÕTTUS, RENÉ
dc.contributor.authorWood, Dustin
dc.contributor.authorCondon, David M.
dc.contributor.authorBack, Mitja D.
dc.contributor.authorBaumert, Anna
dc.contributor.authorCostantini, Giulio
dc.contributor.authorEpskamp, Sacha
dc.contributor.authorGreiff, Samuel
dc.contributor.authorJohnson, Wendy
dc.contributor.authorLukaszewski, Aaron
dc.contributor.authorMurray, Aja
dc.contributor.authorRevelle, William
dc.contributor.authorWright, Aidan G. C.
dc.contributor.authorYarkoni, Tal
dc.contributor.authorZiegler, Matthias
dc.contributor.authorZimmermann, Johannes
dc.date.accessioned2022-07-14T18:10:43Z
dc.date.available2022-07-14T18:10:43Z
dc.date.issued2020
dc.description31 pages. Assigned DOI has been reported as broken.en_US
dc.description.abstractWe 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.en_US
dc.identifier.citationMõttus, R., Wood, D., Condon, D. M., Back, M. D., Baumert, A., Costantini, G., Epskamp, S., Greiff, S., Johnson, W., Lukaszewski, A., Murray, A., Revelle, W., Wright, A. G. C., Yarkoni, T., Ziegler, M., & Zimmermann, J. (2020). Descriptive, Predictive and Explanatory Personality Research: Different Goals, Different Approaches, but a Shared Need to Move beyond the Big Few Traits. European Journal of Personality, 34, 1175–1201. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1002/per.2311en_US
dc.identifier.doihttps://doi.org/10.1002/per.2311en_US
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/1794/27461
dc.identifier.urihttps://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/per.2311en_US
dc.language.isoenen_US
dc.publisherSAGE Publicationsen_US
dc.rightsCreative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0-USen_US
dc.subjectPredictionen_US
dc.subjectExplanationen_US
dc.subjectCauseen_US
dc.subjectHierarchyen_US
dc.subjectPersonalityen_US
dc.titleDescriptive, predictive and explanatory personality research: Different goals, different approaches, but a shared need to move beyond the Big Few traitsen_US
dc.typeArticleen_US

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