EMPATHY FOR GP

Empathy allows students to feel and understand the world from the perspective of another person.  It opens hearts to the diversity of human experience and feeling. 

Answer each of these questions; 

1. How do you feel? 

 

2. What options are available to you?  Which one will you choose and why? 

 

3.  How would you like other people to treat you? 

 

Situations: 

1.  Your family has lived in this city for three generations.  Suddenly your country is plunged into a civil war and your city has become the center of the hostilities as it is the base of the rebels.  Everyday, your city is being bombed by government airplanes and they bomb indiscriminately.  You try to tell the world about your problem through social media but no one cares.  One day, your neighbourhood is bombed and your house is destroyed.  Your parents are killed. 

2.   You took party drugs before during rave parties.  All of your friends know.  Now that the Duterte government is targeting drug users, the barangay has labelled you a drug addict even if you are not using it anymore.  Apparently, your friends have squealed on you.  Now, you are afraid for your life. 

3. Since you were a child, you always felt you were in a wrong gender trapped in your body.  Luckily, your parents are very understanding and liberal and have allowed you to live your life in the gender opposite your real one.  You did well in university and graduated with honors.  Now that you are ready to work, many companies are turning you down because of your bender gender. 

4.  Your family moved to another country because of your father’s job.  However, you are the only student in your new school whose race is different from all the rest of your classmates.  Worse, you cannot yet speak their language.  Recently, the country voted against immigration and tensions against immigrants are high.  Technically, you are not an immigrant since you are there as an expat.  But in school, the other students don’t know the difference – and the taunting and bullying based on your race, starts. 

5.  You chose a career in an industry where the opposite gender is dominant.  However, since you love the job, you still decided on choosing that career.  Now that you are working, you realize that there is gender discrimination in your job. Even if you are the best performer always, they do not acknowledge your work and worse, you don’t get promotions or incentives because of your gender.  Your office mates also make sexual jokes and innuendoes in front of you. 

 

THE BIG FIVE PERSONALITY TEST

 

Introduction

 

The focus of this assignment is to identify the effectiveness and usefulness, as well as criticism of the Big Five Personality Test. This psychological test aims to measure one’s personality. The administrators who helped the author facilitate the survey process and the owner/manager who was interviewed provided statements for and against this test. The respondents/employees, on the other hand, commented on the process itself.

The idea for this assignment to utilize the Big Five Personality Test grew out of my belief that people have long term, dispositional traits that influence their behavior in work settings. I believe that there are meaningful relationships between individuals' personalities and performance outcomes at work. While psychologists have traditionally viewed personality testing as contributing little to the prediction of job performance, recent development of the `big five' personality constructs has shown that personality tests can be valid predictors of performance and may add significant incremental validity to tests of cognitive ability. I think that the use of the Big Five framework in testing personality provides a solid foundation for investigating personality-performance relationship.

 

 

 

 

The Big Five Personality Test

 

 

During the past three decades the view that personality is a poor predictor of job performance has become established among many occupational psychologists in New Zealand. Early reviews by Guion and Gottier (1965) and Mischel (1968) were overly pessimistic in their conclusions. Many criticisms raised by early personality test reviews have been addressed and shown to be less significant than previously thought (Hogan & Nicholson, 1988). One such improvement is the development of personality inventories designed to measure qualities among typical individuals instead of psychopathology among the deviant or mentally disordered.

Guion and Gottier (1965) found that tests developed for specific purposes were more predictive of performance than tests scored with standardised algorithms. Moreover, personality tests designed to measure "normal" behavioural traits are likely to improve the development of logical links between job requirements, personality measurement, and performance (Rosse, Miller, & Barnes, 1991).

In reading the literature pertaining to the structure of personality, it shows that while there is not unanimous agreement among researchers, the views of a number of personality psychologists are converging on five basic factors of personality (Extraversion, Neuroticism, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, and Openness to Experience). Particularly impressive is the evidence showing that these five factors have been obtained in different cultures, with different languages, using different instruments and with different theoretical frameworks. In my opinion, this is the missing link in studies seeking to understand personality-performance relationships. This has provided a useful taxonomy in which to identify consistent and meaningful relationships between personality traits and performance criteria for different occupations.

The five-factor model of personality is based upon peer ratings using ordinary trait vocabulary (Digman, 1990). While a number of researchers have claimed to successfully identify a larger number of major personality traits, these five dimensions have proved to be replicable over different theoretical frameworks, using different instruments, and with ratings obtained from different sources, a variety of samples, and with a high degree of generality. 

In brief, Extraversion is marked by sociability, energy, and a buoyant frame of mind. Neuroticism is the inclination towards expressing anxiety, anger, depression, and other negative affects. Agreeableness is a tendency towards altruism, trust, and sympathy. Conscientiousness is characterised by self-discipline, order, reliability, and foresight. And Openness is characterised by objectivity, need for variety, and curiosity. According to McCrae and Costa (1987), these dimensions are relatively independent of cognitive ability measures. Personality tests tap into performance variance beyond that which can be explained by cognitive tests alone (Driskell, Hogan, Salas, & Hoskin, 1994).

Inconsistencies in research findings highlight the need for precise and differentiated research on personality-job performance links (Goldberg, 1993). The poor validity of many job performance measures, and summarising of criterion-related validities across either predictor or criterion constructs, obscures the usefulness of personality scales (Hough, 1992). Furthermore, the relationship between personality and performance is susceptible to the moderating variables of performance criterion and job type (Barrick & Mount, 1991).

While the five-factor model has demonstrated the usefulness of personality for selection, the `big five' themselves may in fact be too broad to have predictive usefulness among job applicants (e.g., McAdams, 1992). Hough (1992) found nine factors to be more appropriate than the "big five". Saville, Nyfield, Sik, and Hackston (1991; cited in Schmit & Ryan, 1993) found specific facets of the `big five' constructs were better predictors than the broader global measures.

Schmit and Ryan (1993) have identified an "ideal employee" factor based upon work-related facets, further suggesting that the `big five' model may be inappropriate for personnel selection. Their ideal employee factor included mainly Conscientiousness items but also items from the other four broad dimensions. Personality tests designed to measure middle-level traits within the big five may better account for different personality requirements between occupational groups (Schmit & Ryan, 1993) than instruments designed to only assess the broader `big five' dimensions.

 

Methodology

 

For this assignment, I conducted a survey and interview. As I am only concerned on how the respondents view the Big Five Personality Test in terms of effectiveness, the results are not discussed. The use of the questionnaire would provide the researcher the ability to test the views and attitudes of the respondents. The distribution and collation methods used to manage the questionnaire process would ensure anonymity.

Twenty-five employees from a small company (retail) participated in the survey. The owner and manager of the business is a friend of the author, so it was never difficult to access its human resource.  Despite this, the author issued a letter of consent, containing the purpose of the survey. Further, the author made sure that the employees completely understand what was to be done. A random sampling was conducted. During their break, the respondents were divided into five groups. Each group was facilitated by a member of my team. We encouraged the respondents to clarify statements that were not clear. After answering the questionnaires, we had a brief focus group to find out how they view the survey process. The respondents were told that the purpose of the test was to measure their personality; and that the management (owner) had nothing to do with it. They were told that it was part of the author’s assignment.

Prior to the survey process, the author selected four colleagues to help in administering. They were told as to what this assignment intended to accomplish. The administrators did not need to be trained because they had previous experience in such research process. As part of the objective of this assignment, the administrators were asked about their view on the test.

For the interview part, open-ended questions were used to obtain as much information as possible about how the interviewee feels about the research topic. The owner/manager of the small business was also interviewed. The interviews took 45 minutes. The questions were based on the questions for this assignment: how effective is the Big Five Personality Test in terms of the effects of personality on performance. Here, the researcher encouraged the interviewee to clarify vague statements and to further elaborate on brief comments. The researcher did not share personal beliefs and opinions.

To determine how the respondents perceive their own personality, the researcher prepared a questionnaire that was based directly on the Big Five Personality Test. The questionnaire was a 48-item test. This test aimed to measure the respondents’ personality in terms of Extraversion, Neuroticism, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, and Openness to Experience. The structured questionnaire was based on a Likert scale, a rating scale that requires the subject to indicate his or her degree of agreement or disagreement with a statement. The respondents would grade each statement in the survey-questionnaire using a Likert scale with a five-response scale wherein respondents would be given five response choices.

By rating scale we mean the scales that are usually used to measure attitudes towards an object, the degree to which an object contains a particular attribute, toward some attribute, or the importance attached to an attribute. Rating scales require the rate to place an attribute of the object being rated at some point along a numerically valued continuum or in one of a numerically ordered series of categories. The equivalent weights for the answers would be: 1- Strongly Disagree, 2- Disagree, 3- Neither Disagree nor Agree, 4- Agree, 5- Strongly Agree.

For validation purposes, the author initially submitted the sample of the set of survey questionnaires to some of her peers; and after approval, the survey was initially conducted to five respondents. After the questions were answered, the author asked the respondents for any items that were not clear to them to ensure further improvement and validity of the instrument.  The researcher again examined the content of the interview questions to clear vague statements. Afterwards, the author changed words that would be deemed difficult by the respondents, to much simpler terms. The author excluded the five respondents who were initially used for the validation of the instrument. 

 

In/Effectiveness of the Device

 

This section presents the merits as well as criticisms of the Big Five Personality Test as viewed by the administrators; the importance of this test for the owner/manager of the small company; and the comments of the employees. 

 

Administrators

Mr. D states that the results of the study may enhance understanding and contribute to the theoretical development of causal models explaining job performance. He believes Conscientiousness to be the important trait-oriented motivation variable that has long eluded I-O psychologists. This meant that there are now two dispositional predictors in our field whose validity generalizes: general mental ability and conscientiousness.

Ms. A argues that if prediction rather than description is important, the Big Five may not be an adequate taxonomy. She suggests that the Big Five is not an adequate taxonomy of personality variables for predicting important criteria. Mr. B adds that the Big Five constructs are too heterogeneous and incomplete. Moreover, he noted a study by Houggh (1992) that provides evidence of different patterns of criterion-related validity for at least nine personality constructs. If only the Big Five personality constructs are used, he says, several important differences in the criterion-related validities of Dependability, Achievement, Potency, and Affiliation are obscured and the usefulness of the taxonomy thereby diminished. According to him, the constructs Locus of control and Rugged Individualism are important predictors of important life outcomes and are missing entirely from the Big Five. If prediction of life outcomes or criteria is important in evaluating personality taxonomies, the Big Five is an inadequate taxonomy of personality constructs.

 

The Owner/Manager

Personality tests such as the Big Five Personality Test are beneficial to any business as research has found that personality has something to do with job performance. According to the owner/manager, the strength of the test lies in the positive correlation of one of the Big Five dimensions, Conscientiousness, with job performance. Individuals who are dependable, persistent, goal directed and organized tend to be higher performers on virtually any job; viewed negatively, those who are careless, irresponsible, low achievement striving and impulsive tend to be lower performers on virtually any job.

In addition, extraversion was a valid predictor for two occupations, managers and sales, where interactions with others are a significant portion of the job. Thus, traits such as being sociable, talkative, assertive, and energetic contribute to performance in such jobs. Extraversion and Openness to Experience were valid predictors of training proficiency across occupations. Being active, sociable, and open to new experiences may lead individuals to be more involved in training and, consequently, learn more. This test, according to the owner/manager, no matter what job one is selecting for, if the employer wants employees who will turn out to be good performers, he or she should hire those who work smarter and work harder.

 

 

Employees

As for the employees, they felt that the survey was not a big deal. It was as if they were only answering something that had not significance at all. When asked how they found the process, the problems they encountered, if there is any, majority of them said that the questionnaire was easy to understand and answer. With regard to privacy, a respondent/employee stated that the survey did not require them to provide very personal information. Thus, according to him, there was no need for anonymity. What alarmed the author was when an employee joked that if it were not for my assignment, he would fake his answers. He said that if the management were the one who conducted the test, of course he would lie so as to provide a more positive answer.  

 

 

References

 

 

Barrick, M.R., & Mount, M.K. (1991). The big five personality dimensions and job performance: A meta-analysis. Personnel Psychology, 44(1), 1-26.

 

Digman, J.M. (1990). Personality structure: Emergence of the five-factor model. Annual Review of Psychology, 41, 417-440.

 

Driskell, J.E., Hogan, J., Salas, E., & Hoskin, B. (1994). Cognitive and personality predictors of training performance. Military Psychology, 6(1). 31-46

 

Goldberg, L.R. (1993). The structure of phenotypic personality traits. American Psychologist, 48, 26-34.

 

Guion, R.M., & Gottier, R.F. (1965). Validity of personality measures in personnel selection. Personnel Psychology, 18, 135-164.

 

Hogan, R. & Nicholson, R. (1988). The meaning of personality test scores. American Psychologist, 43, 621-626.

 

Hough, L.M. (1992). The "big five" personality variables-construct confusion: Description versus prediction. Human Performance, 5, 139-155.

 

McAdams, D.P. (1992). The five-factor model in personality: A critical appraisal. Journal of Personality, 60, 329-361.

 

McCrae, R.R., & Costa, P.T., Jr. (1987). Validation of the five-factor model of personality across instruments and observers. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 52, 81-90.

 

Rosse, J.G., Miller, H.E., & Barnes, L.K. (1991). Combining personality and cognitive ability predictors for hiring service-oriented employees. Journal of Business and Psychology, 5(4), 431-445.

 

A Criticism of Piaget’s Cognitive Development Theory

 

Although Jean Piaget's insightful observations of children remain unmatched and his overall contributions to developmental research have earned him a place in psychological research, he is not without criticism. In this paper,  Piaget's theory of cognitive development shall be criticized in terms of the lack of emphasis placed on the role played by the child's social world, an underestimation of the infant's and young children's cognitive competence and a lack of empirical support for qualitative changes in children's cognitive ability.

Piaget’s research in developmental psychology was directed at elaborating upon a theory of knowledge about cognitive development (Driscoll, 1994). According to him, the growth of knowledge is a progressive construction of logically embedded structures superseding one another by a process of inclusion of lower, less powerful logical means into higher and more powerful ones up to adulthood. Therefore, children’s logic and modes of thinking are initially entirely different from those of adults. Piaget referred to his view as constructivism, believing that the acquisition of knowledge is a process of continuous self-construction. While the child is constructing this knowledge, Piaget assumed there to be an interaction between heredity and environment and also labelled his view as interactionism (Driscoll, 1994).

 

Piaget’s Four Stages of Developments

Piaget proposed four major stages of development: the sensorimotor period (birth to 2 years), preoperational thought (2 to 6/7 years), concrete operations (6/7 to 11/12 years) and formal operations (11/12 to adult). During the first stage, infants’ and toddlers’ cognitive system is limited to motor reflexes, but they build on these reflexes to develop more sophisticated procedures. In the second stage, children acquire representational skills in the area of mental imagery, and especially language. They are very self-oriented, and have an egocentric view.

Children on the third stage, on the contrary, are able to take into account another person’s point of view and consider more than one perspective simultaneously. According to Piaget, their thought process is more logical, flexible, and organized than in early childhood. However, he argued that in this stage, children cannot yet contemplate or solve abstract problems, and that they are not yet able to consider all of the logically possible outcomes. Those who reach the formal operations stage are capable of thinking logically and abstractly, and can reason theoretically. Piaget considered this the ultimate stage of development.

Piaget believed that a child’s scheme or logical structure changes with age and are initially action-based (sensorimotor) and later move to a mental (operational) level (Driscoll, 1994). According to him, the cognitive performance in children is directly associated with the cognitive development stage they are in. So, if a child were in the preoperational stage (age 2 to 6/7), he would not successfully be able to master tasks of a concrete operational stage (ages 6/7 to 11/12) child.

Criticism of Piaget’s Theory

Since its conception in 1969, there have been many criticisms of Piaget’s theory. Most notably, developmental psychologists debate whether children actually go through these four stages in the way that Piaget proposed, and further that not all children reach the formal operation stage. Moreover, while most development theorists accept Piaget's outline of cognitive growth in infants, there are questions about his measures of assessing their development.

A major criticism of Piaget’s cognitive development theory is that he underestimated children’s abilities (Gerow, 1996). Infants’ knowledge of the physical world has been a popular research topic. It is agreed that object permanence is developed as the child develops an understanding of the permanence of objects-- the uncovering of a hidden toy or candy is a demonstration of this. However, Piaget failed to take into account the need for motivation in order for children to search, Kagan's (cited in Berger, 1988) theory of object permanence is that 9 month old infants show an ability to search for hidden objects because they have had a growth in memory capacity, rather than because they have a new cognitive structure as stated by Piaget. Similarly, Baillargeon (1987) drew the conclusion that infants are born with basic knowledge of what is possible and impossible. This is based on research that infants stare longer at an impossible event than at a possible event.

Several researchers have proposed that infants under 6 months of age possess considerable conceptual knowledge about the physical world (e.g. Baillargeon, 1987). Some of the most striking claims have been that infants as young as 2 1/2 months understand that one solid object cannot pass through another solid object (Spelke et al., 1992) and that infants as young as 3 1/2 months understand that objects continue to exist even when not in view (Baillargeon & DeVos,1991). Baillargeon (1987), employing a rotating screen study, supposes that infants as young as 3 1/2 and 4 1/2 months of age understand that objects are permanent. These results had also been found with 5-month-old infants (Baillargeon et al., 1985).

Traditionally, object permanence in infants was studied using a Piagetian manual search task in which infants were tested on whether or not they would reach for a hidden object. Using this method, it was found that infants do not succeed until around 8 to 9 months. Baillargeon and others, however, claimed that Piaget’s manual search task is too conservative as a test of object permanence because it requires infants to perform means-end sequential actions, an ability that young infants may lack (e.g. Baillargeon et al., 1985).

Another shortcoming of Piaget’s theory is his contention that children only show intellectual development through their actions. But perception researchers argue that infants know more than they can physically demonstrate with limited motor actions; they have found that newborn infants try to look for sounds, grasp objects and respond to human faces, and believe that perceptual learning occurs, particularly aural, before birth (Berger, 1988). Also, the physical nature of Piaget's theory fails to explain how children understand abstract words that don't necessarily relate to an immediately physical object.

Piaget put too much emphasis on the individual's internal search for knowledge, and not enough on external motivation and teachings (Berger, 1988), neglecting the individual differences of children-- the differences caused by heredity, culture and education. Piaget did little research on the emotional and personality development of children and possibly would have been more accurate to view cognitive development as a gradual and continuous rather than having definite demarcation stages. Although Piaget's information processing approach provides a good way of assessing intelligence and gathering information about memory development and other cognitive processes, it fails to address the importance of creativity and social interaction (Paplia, Olds, and Feldman, 1998).

According to Gray (1994), Piaget offers no substantial evidence for a qualitative difference in cognitive capacity between two children of different stages; Piaget does not provide sufficient evidence for a qualitative difference between stages. This implies that if each stage is marked by a new type of thinking, then as a child ages there should be signs indicating the sudden acquisition of certain abilities. On the contrary, children tend to progress rather slowly and gradually.

The likes of Lev Vygotsky, criticises Piaget for his inattention to culturally specific influences on cognitive development. Most of children who participated in Piaget’s grew up in Geneva. He worked in a context of Western culture where children attend school and are trained in certain forms of thinking, affecting the universality of his theory. Yet Piaget largely ignored this influence and attributed each child's intellectual growth to the individual's cognitive reaction to the environment. Other tests (Segall et al., 1990 cited in Gray, 1994) have also shown that Piaget's formal operational period and even the concrete operational period are heavily dependent on formal Western schooling.

Piaget's elegant and striking tests of children's thought processes have attracted the attention of developmental researchers. His theories have brought substantial changes to psychology, education, and childrearing, and they have sparked countless research studies both to extend and to contradict his ideas. In conclusion, although Piaget made strides in developmental research, his stages do not prove to be culturally universal. Many aspects affect the timing and extent to which the behaviors and characteristics develop. It can not be concretely predicted when each stage will take place in any individual across any culture in any period of time. Moreover, his emphasis on qualitative rather than quantitative changes in thinking is excessive, and that his estimation of children's thinking abilities is too low.

 

 

 

References

Baillargeon, R. (1987). Object permanence in 3.5- and 4.5-month-old infants. Developmental Psychology, 23, 655-664.

 

_________, Spelke, E. S., & Wasserman, S. (1985). Object permanence in five-month-old infants. Cognition, 20, 191-208.

 

Berger, K.S. (1988). The developing person through the life span (2^nd ed.). New York: Worth Publishers Ltd.

 

Driscoll, M. P. (1994). Psychology of learning for instruction. Needham Heights, MA: Allyn & Bacon.

Gerow, J. R. (1996). Essentials of Psychology. New York: Harper Collins.

Gray, P. (1994). Psychology (2nd edition). Boston: Worth Publishers.

Papalia, D. E., Olds, S. W., and Feldman, R. D. (1998). Human development (7^th ed.). Boston: McGraw-Hill.

Spelke, E. S., Breinlinger, K., Macomber, J., and Jacobson, K. (1992). Origins of knowledge. Psychological Review, 99, 605-632.