Measuring thinking styles in addition to measuring personality traits?

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Abstract

This paper intends to join the long-standing debate regarding thinking styles and personality traits—should thinking styles be measured in addition to the measurement of personality traits? The means to achieve this goal was to provide empirical evidence as well as to review other studies in the literature. The Thinking Styles Inventory and the NEO Five-Factor Inventory were administered to 267 (67 male and 200 female) students from a large research university in Beijing, People's Republic of China. Results showed that thinking styles and personality traits statistically overlap. However, this overlap is limited. Two major arguments are made. First, thinking styles make a unique contribution to the understanding of human individual differences. Second, the necessity for measuring thinking styles apart from measuring personality traits depends on who uses the inventories and for what purposes.

Introduction

The period between the late 1950s and the early 1970s saw a proliferation of theories of and research on styles that are most often termed variously as cognitive, learning, and thinking styles. Recently, there has been a resurgence of interest in the work on styles. Being dissatisfied with the old theoretical models of styles that mostly address one style dimension with bipolar styles (e.g. field-dependence versus field independence, and reflectivity versus impulsivity), Sternberg, 1988, Sternberg, 1997 proposed a theory of thinking styles.

In Sternberg's theory, the metaphor “mental self-government” is used to portray how the human mind works. Just like there are different ways of governing a society, there are different ways of managing people's daily activities. These different ways of managing our activities are construed as “thinking styles”. The theory proposed 13 thinking styles that fall along five dimensions. These are functions (including the legislative, executive, and judicial thinking styles), forms (including the hierarchical, oligarchic, monarchic, and anarchic styles), levels (including the global and local styles), scopes (including the internal and external styles), and leaning (including the liberal and conservative styles) of the mental self-government. A brief description of the key characteristics of each style is provided in Appendix A.

The theory of mental self-government has been operationalized through several inventories, including the Thinking Styles Inventory (TSI, Sternberg & Wagner, 1992). The TSI has been tested among many samples in a few different cultures, including mainland China, Hong Kong, the Philippines, and the United States. With the majority of research participants being university students, these studies have obtained good reliability data, given the heterogeneity of the test items in the inventory. Internal validity data have been obtained through both Pearson's correlations among the 13 scales and exploratory factor analysis. Furthermore, external validity of the theory has been obtained by testing the scales in the TSI against other constructs such as Biggs's learning approaches (Zhang, 2000c, Zhang and Sternberg, 2000) and Holland's personality types (Zhang, 2000a, Zhang, 2001a) that are in the family of styles work. In addition, the nature of thinking styles also have been examined by investigations of the relationships of thinking styles to such variables as the research participants' personal characteristics (e.g. age, gender, birth-order, socio-economic status), their situational characteristics (e.g. leadership experience and travel experience), academic achievement, and self-esteem. Detailed findings of this research can be found in Zhang and her colleagues' previous studies (e.g. Zhang, 2001b, Zhang and Postiglione, 2001, Zhang and Sachs, 1997).

However, nothing is known about the relationships of thinking styles to the five-factor personality model, one of the most prominent and heuristic models of personality in psychology. For the TSI, no published work exists that deals specifically with the relationship between the thinking styles as described in the theory of mental self-government and the big five personality traits.

For a relatively young science like psychology, there is a somewhat unique consensus about the description of personality based on five universal traits (e.g. Busato et al., 1999, Costa and McCrae, 1992, Digman, 1990). Some scholars (e.g. Goldberg, 1993, Taylor and MacDonald, 1999) asserted that the big five personality traits model accounts for most of the variability in personality.

The five factor model (FFM) is the product of several decades of factor analytic research centering around trait personality. According to Taylor and MacDonald (1999), the model was originally proposed by Galton (1884) and empirically followed up by Allport and Odbert, 1936, Normand, 1963 among many other scholars. The FFM can be understood as a theory of normal personality traits which is composed of five essentially independent dimensions that have been reliably obtained across extensive investigations. The five personality dimensions are Neuroticism (N), Extraversion (E), Openness to Experience (O), Agreeableness (A), and Conscientiousness (C). The following paragraph is a brief introduction of each of the five personality dimensions as illustrated in Costa and McCrae's (1992) work.

Neuroticism is the opposite of emotional stability. People high on the N scale tend to experience such negative feelings as emotional instability, embarrassment, guilt, pessimism, and low self-esteem. People scoring high on the E scale tend to be sociable and assertive, and they prefer to work with other people. Openness to Experience is characterized by such attributes as open-mindedness, active imagination, preference for variety, and independence of judgment. In addition, people who score high on the O scale tend to be less conservative and traditional. People high on the A scale tend to be tolerant, trusting, accepting, and easily moved. Furthermore, they value and respect other people's beliefs and conventions. People high on the C scale are characterized as being organized, purposeful, strong-willed, responsible, and trustworthy. Also, they tend to be task-focused and achievement-oriented.

In literature, the relationships between the style construct and the personality construct have been explicitly dealt with at both the conceptual level (e.g. Adorno et al., 1950, Eysenck, 1978, Hashway, 1998, Messick, 1996) and the empirical level (e.g. Busato et al., 1999, Furnham, 1992, Furnham, 1996a, Furnham, 1996b, Furnham et al., 1999, Gadzella, 1999, Jackson and Lawty-Jones, 1996, Pacini and Epstein, 1999, Riding and Wigley, 1997). However, in the realm of empirical research, two different conclusions have been drawn regarding the necessity of the assessment of styles. Some scholars (e.g. Busato et al., 1999, Pacini and Epstein, 1999, Riding and Wigley, 1997) concluded that although there was some systematic overlap between cognitive/learning styles and personality, it certainly makes sense to mention cognitive/learning styles and personality separately in educational settings. On the contrary, other scholars (e.g. Furnham, 1992, Furnham, 1996a, Furnham, 1996b, Furnham et al., 1999, Jackson and Lawty-Jones, 1996) argued that since cognitive/learning style is a sub-set of personality, there is no need to measure cognitive/learning styles independently, unless when cognitive/learning style is of interest in its own right.

The present study aims at investigating the relationships between thinking styles as measured by Sternberg and Wagner's (1992) Thinking Styles Inventory and the five personality dimensions as measured by the NEO Five-Factor Inventory (Costa & McCrae, 1992). Based on the empirical findings from this research, the author will present her own view regarding the necessity of assessing thinking styles in addition to assessing personality traits.

Based on the definition of each of the 13 thinking styles and of the personality dimensions, the following predictions were made. First, Neuroticism should be positively related to the executive and conservative thinking styles, but negatively related to the legislative, hierarchical, and liberal thinking styles. Second, Extraversion should be positively related to the external style, but negatively to the internal style. Third, the Openness dimension should be positively correlated with the legislative, judicial, and the liberal thinking styles, but negatively correlated with the executive and conservative thinking styles. Fourth, the Agreeableness dimension should be positively correlated with the external style, but negatively with the legislative, judicial, liberal, and internal styles. Fifth, the Conscientiousness dimension should be positively related to the majority of the thinking styles, especially to the hierarchical style.

Section snippets

Sample

The sample comprised 267 students (67 males and 200 females) from a large research university in Beijing, People's Republic of China. The participants' ages ranged from 17 to 29 years, with 93.2% of the participants falling between 19 and 22 years—the ages for traditional university students in mainland China. The participants were studying in the areas of biology, education, and geography.

Materials

All research participants responded to the TSI (Sternberg & Wagner, 1992) and the NEO Five-Factor

Results

By visual inspection, the patterns of the relationships resulted from the gender-separated and gender-combined analyses are similar. Therefore, only results from the gender-combined analyses are reported later.

Discussion

The present study aimed at answering the question about the necessity for measuring thinking styles in addition to measuring personality traits by exploring the relationships between the thinking styles proposed in Sternberg's theory of mental self-government and the big five personality traits. The hypothesized relationships were tested by three statistical procedures. As presented above, results from both the zero-order correlation matrix and the exploratory factor analysis suggested fairly

Conclusion

Through an empirical investigation, the present study attempted to join the debate on whether or not it would be necessary to assess styles (cognitive/learning/thinking) in addition to assessing personality. Substantial overlap was identified between a thinking styles measure and a measure of the big five personality dimensions. This substantial overlap supported both the conceptual argument for (e.g. Adorno et al., 1950, Eysenck, 1978, Hashway, 1998, Messick, 1996) and the empirical support to

Future directions

The present study, like many other studies in the literature, has demonstrated clearly that styles and personality traits are strongly related. It also seems to be fair to say that styles have their unique value in explaining human behavior. This conclusion is supportive of Busato, Prins, Elshout, and Hamaker (2000) assertion that a styles inventory has a diagnostic value for students at an individual level for identifying both strengths and weaknesses in, say, their individual study behavior.

Acknowledgments

I want to thank the Committee on Research and Conference Grants at The university of Hong Kong for having made this research possible. My sincere thanks go to L. L. Zhang for her kind assistance in the data collection and to all those anonymous students whose participation is indispensable to this research.

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