Speaker
Ian Davidson, History & Theory of Psychology, York University
Title
The Era of Skepticism: Origins of the Five-Factor Model during the Crisis of Traits
Abstract
The historiography of the Five-Factor Model (FFM), or the Big Five personality traits, is sparse and largely written by personality psychologists. According to the typical history of the Big Five, the five factors had been discovered in the mid-twentieth century, and psychologists were very close to unanimously agreeing to the FFM as the standard model of personality in the early 1960s; but progress was delayed by "The Era of Skepticism," or what is more neutrally called the person-situation controversy. This era, apparently instigated by the watershed 1968 publication of Walter Mischel's Personality and Assessment, is remembered in these histories as a time so critical of trait approaches that FFM research was delayed. In this talk, Ian will be examining personality textbooks (often written by psychologists directly involved with the person-situation controversy) from the 1970s into the 1990s in order to trace how the history of the person-situation controversy is portrayed by different researchers (and how they fit trait approaches, factor analysis, and the FFM into this history).
Bio
Ian J. Davidson is a second-year Psychology Master's student in York University's History and Theory of Psychology program. He completed his honours thesis at St. Thomas University, Fredericton, New Brunswick where his research included theoretical work looking at the relationship between positive psychology and economic theory concerning happiness and well-being, and experimental work investigating the biological bases of extraversion using event-related potentials. His current research interests include the history and meta-theory of personality psychology (particularly psychometric-trait approaches), narrative psychology, and digital history.