Cattell: personality model (16 PF)

Without a doubt, Cattell’s model is one of the most famous and his attempt to describe personality has reached us through his famous test, the 16 PF. Of course, Cattell’s own original version is not used today, but much of the initial spirit of the test is maintained.

On the other hand, Cattell stands out for having proposed two types of intelligence: fluid intelligence and crystallized intelligence.. Fluid intelligence would be closer to the current concept of intelligence. For example, we would use it when solving logic problems in which the person’s experience matters little but rather their expertise in working with the challenge itself. Crystallized intelligence would collect all of the person’s experience and would serve to answer questions and problems essentially related to memory.

The topic of intelligence and Cattell’s development of it being very interesting, in this article Let’s focus on his interesting model of personality and in the questionnaire that is used to apply it, 16 PF.

Cattell and the 16 PF

The study of personality has been one of the most controversial in psychology.. This kind of property of the self, conditioned by the environment and its genetics, has given rise to countless models that have fought to compete for hegemony.

Not only has the origin of personality (genetics-environment) been discussed, but there is also an open debate about to what extent personality can mutate or influence a person’s behavior. Another interesting debate regarding personality is related to its division, segmentation and dynamics.

In this sense, we can consider Cattell as a synthesizer of the works carried out by British and American authors in the field of basic mental abilities and personality. For both the scientific study of intelligence and the scientific study of personality, used a very powerful methodology for the time. Its objective was to isolate different primary factors.

For your studies, such as data collection techniques He used three sources.

Q (questionnaires).L (grades or interviews).T (objective tests).

Methodologically, his work is characterized by being a serious and rigorous attempt to analyze and build a solid model, stable and reliable from the three sources we have listed. Furthermore, we can understand the development of its model in three phases:

First phase: part of no more and no less than 171 personality traits. He identified this huge number of traits from the even longer list that Allport and Odbert had made a few years earlier. In this peculiar list, these two curious people included all the terms related to personality that he had found in the two main English dictionaries of the time.Second stage: focused on the information obtained in the ratings or interviews to try to give theoretical content to these factors.Third phase: used information from questionnaires (Q) and objective tests (T). At the end of all the content and mathematical analysis he came to the conclusion that there are 16 personality factors, dimensions in which in some way we can all classify ourselves. Mathematically they are the logical product of a first-order factor analysis. These would be presented in a bipolar way: Emotional expressivity (high-low). Intelligence (high-low). Stability (Ego strength-Ego weakness). group (strong superego-weak superego). Daring (parmia/daring-trectia/timidity) Sensitivity (premsia/sensitivity-harria/hardness). Suspicion (alexia/confidence-protension/mistrust).Imagination (praxemia/pragmatism-autia/imagination ).Cunning (subtlety/naivety).Guilt (conscience-imperturbability).Rebellion (radicalism-conservatism).Self-sufficiency (self-sufficiency/dependence).Self-control (self-esteem/indifference).Tension (tension-tranquility).

Second order factors in the 16 PF

The personality factors that we have listed would not be independent (orthogonal), but would present positive and negative correlations, giving rise to other basic factors (second-order factors):

QS1. Introversion Vs Extraversion.QS2. Little anxiety Vs Much anxiety (tranquility).QS3. Susceptibility Vs Tenacity.QS4. Dependence Vs Independence.

From these first and second order factors referring to personality, Cattell created one of the most famous and longest-running questionnaires in history. On the other hand, Cattell classifies these personality traits by two dimensions:

Its origin: hereditary Vs environmental.Your content: temperamental, motivational and interests.

Thus, this author and researcher already defended an idea that today continues to be accepted by the majority of specialists in the study of personality. This idea is what states that The composition of an individual’s personality is the product of their genetics and the environment in which they have developed it..

Finally, note that for control possible anomalies in responsesthe 16 PF uses four scales: response style scale (reliability and validity), image manipulation (to control social desirability), acquiescence (to control the tendency to give the same answer regardless of the question) , infrequency index or chance index (to detect those questionnaires that have been answered at random and invalidate them: it is based on the consistency of the responses within each factor).

Cattell’s Merits

We can divide Cattell’s merits into two large branches, linked almost intimately. On the one hand there is his intention to measure precisely or give mathematical form to a model, in this case of personality. An undoubtedly difficult task, since we are talking about a construct that can only be measured indirectly.

Furthermore, in these measurements there is almost always a polluting variable: in the majority of questionnaires or psychometric tests (with acceptable validity and reliability, as in the case of the 16 PF) it is the subject who makes a judgment to answer what is asked. In this sense, let us think that self-perception often has little to do with reality.

To explain this I have in my memory an example that, apart from being ironic, is as clear as it is human. It is a memory: of walking down the street and listening to two ladies call each other stubborn, repeatedly and incessantly, without either of them recognizing this trait in themselves. Paradoxical right? Well, this same paradox also appears when we answer many personality tests.

Cattell’s second great merit has to do with the articulation of his model.. History, although it is sometimes wrong, is usually a good filter for humanity to leave behind all those useless ideas or crazy ideas that constitute a dead end. This has not happened with the Cattell model and the best proof of this is that, to pay a small tribute to it, today we wanted to dedicate this article to it.

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