No one has time to read every new piece of research that could impact our field. As a result, it is hard to know what important new findings might pass us by. Luckily, the Hogan Research Division is here to help (and we welcome your contributions in return). Below are a handful of articles we found interesting.
- Helping others might make us feel better about ourselves, but is this a universal phenomenon? Akin et al. found that spending money to help others makes people happy regardless of whether they live in rich or poor countries. They argue that the positive feelings we get from helping others might be ingrained in human nature regardless of country or culture.
- Jansen et al. examined the validity of structure interviews and assessment centers with a unique twist. They found that individuals who were better at identifying what was being measured (e.g., Communication, Problem Solving, etc.) not only did better but their scores were more predictive of job performance. They call this ability the assessment of situational demands. Why, then, is it called faking in the personality literature?
- The debate over bandwidth in personality continues with recent work from Salgado et al. In a large sample of police officers, they found that individual facets of Conscientiousness did not show incremental validity over the scale-level measure, thereby supporting the notion that broad scales work just as well as facets. Why, then, have so many researchers over the years found that facets are often more predictive? Perhaps it has something to do with all of the different samples and/or measures that have been used over the years to example this issue.
- McAbee & Oswald reported meta-analytic results examining relationships between personality and GPA. But perhaps more importantly, the compared results aggregated across different personality instruments to those when treating each personality instrument separately. With Conscientiousness, results were fairly consistent across measures, but results varied for other FFM personality measures. So, when reviewing research examining relationships between personality and other outcomes of interest, keep in mind that all personality assessments cannot be treated equally.
Be sure to check out Part 1 and Part 2 of our review in case you missed them.
And again, we invite you to provide information relating to any other articles from the first three months of 2013 that we failed to include here.