Observer Bias: An Interaction of Temperament Traits with Biases in the Semantic Perception of Lexical Material

Abstract

The lexical approach is a method in differential psychology that uses people's estimations of verbal descriptors of human behavior in order to derive the structure of human individuality. The validity of the assumptions of this method about the objectivity of people's estimations is rarely questioned. Meanwhile the social nature of language and the presence of emotionality biases in cognition are well-recognized in psychology. A question remains, however, as to whether such an emotionality-capacities bias is strong enough to affect semantic perception of verbal material. For the lexical approach to be valid as a method of scientific investigations, such biases should not exist in semantic perception of the verbal material that is used by this approach. This article reports on two studies investigating differences between groups contrasted by 12 temperament traits (i.e. by energetic and other capacities, as well as emotionality) in the semantic perception of very general verbal material. Both studies contrasted the groups by a variety of capacities: endurance, lability and emotionality separately in physical, social-verbal and mental aspects of activities. Hypotheses of “background emotionality” and a “projection through capacities” were supported. Non-evaluative criteria for categorization (related to complexity, organization, stability and probability of occurrence of objects) followed the polarity of evaluative criteria, and did not show independence from this polarity. Participants with stronger physical or social endurance gave significantly more positive ratings to a variety of concepts, and participants with faster physical tempo gave more positive ratings to timing-related concepts. The results suggest that people's estimations of lexical material related to human behavior have emotionality, language- and dynamical capacities-related biases and therefore are unreliable. This questions the validity of the lexical approach as a method for the objective study of stable individual differences.

Temperament and arousal systems: A new synthesis of differential psychology and functional neurochemistry

“…Universally all models have a large Extraversion factor, as a main trait energizing the behavior (Digman & Takemoto-Chock, 1981;Eysenck, 1995;Goldberg, 1993;Guilford & Zimmerman, 1956;McCrae & Costa, 1997;Norman, 1963;Thurstone, 1951). Trofimova (2014) pointed out that the concept of Extraversion might be an artifact of the sociability bias of lexical material used to derive Big Five and other personality models that include the scale of Extraversion. Her experiments demonstrated that the use of lexical material skews the resulting dimensionality of models based on a factor analysis of such material due to a sociability bias of language and a negativity bias of emotionality.…”

Phenomena of Functional Differentiation and Fractal Functionality

“…Unfortunately, this has led to the development of mathematical models and methods ideally suited to reductionist, "Lego" science, and ill suited to the study of natural systems. The wholesale adoption of these methods by biology, economics, social science and psychology, has led to the widespread misapplication of linear methodologies such as factor analysis, leading to stalled progress, misleading and even erroneous results [5,6] For example, in evolution theory, many models use a concept of traits/characteristics z i that are either inherited or not under the process of natural selection, using a fitness function w i. , and discuss the covariance of these traits at the individual, group or population levels. Problems arise, however, when we attempt to partition the evolving systems and their traits into the units of analysis.…”

“…When biologists reason about features of species they might also suffer an observation bias steaming from specific, socio-cultural properties of human nature. For example, it has been noticed that humans of different sex and temperament perceive neutral and abstract concepts differently [4,6,10,11]. In general, the selectivity of observation means, by definition, that most properties are not being perceived.…”

“…Modern evolution theory recognized that the classical portrayal of evolution as a ladder of progress leading towards better traits for adaptation and fitness is insufficient to explain many phenomena in biology. Instead of a drive to perfection, evolution appears to be associated with a drive for diversification (not necessarily with increasing complexity) [6,7,9,15]. One of the main benefits of having a diversity of systems at say, the i-level, is that when selection tendencies from the i+1-level are not compatible with the i-1 components in one i-level system, there are alternative i-level structures.…”

“…denotes an integration of a prf at the i level based on compatibility of offers at the upper (/\ i+n ) and lower (/\ i−n ) levels of complexity in contribution to the emerging performance, such compatibility might be affected from both sides of the diagonal, with the /\ i+n ↔ [] i for the selection as a contribution from the upper levels. However, it is often an oversight that performance capacities of the lower level work as a selective factor in a integration /\ i−1 (O i−n ) ↔ [] i , and psychological phenomena of "projection through capacities" or "embodiment" are example of such dynamics [6,10].…”