ABSTRACT
IN the previous two chapters the reader may have noticed one peculiarity which appears particularly clearly in Figures 23 and 27. It will be seen there that not a single attitude statement can be found which measures the T-factor without any admixture of Radical or Conservative content. This tendency is very striking in both figures; the whole quadrants centring around the T-axis in both its positive and its negative aspects are quite empty of any attitude statement whatever.Such a phenomenon is certainly strange, particularly as it appears in two quite different sets of investigations, namely those carried out by Ferguson and by workers in the Maudsley laboratories. It might of course be ascribed entirely to chance, but in science it is often rewarding to pay attention to unexpected and unpredicted features of the record, and an explanation might appear to be called for.The clue to a possible explanation has already been given in our first discussion of the T-factor, and indeed is adumbrated in the very terms ‘tough-minded5 and ‘tender-minded5 used to describe this factor. It will be remembered that William James used these terms essentially to denote qualities of character and personality which exert their influence on a person’s philosophy and presumably on his social attitudes also. We might therefore frame an hypothesis to the effect that there is in truth only one ideological factor present in the attitude field, namely that of Radicalism-Conservatism. The T-factor itself does not constitute an alternative ideological system but is rather the projection on to the social attitude field of a set of personality variables.Thus, according to this hypothesis individuals would be distri-
buted along the Radicalism-Conservatism continuum in line with their social attitudes; the way in which these social attitudes are expressed, whether in a religious or semi-Fascist way on the right, or in a Pacifist or Communist way on the left, would depend on the temperamental peculiarities of the people holding these views.It need hardly be said that the data which we have collected so far do not prove this hypothesis; they merely suggest that the rather extraordinary phenomenon noted at the beginning of this chapter might find a common-sense and reasonable explanation along these lines. In this chapter we shall be concerned mainly with an attempt to prove the correctness of this hypothesis and to show in some detail what are the personality variables concerned.Before we can answer this question, however, it will obviously be essential to decide the terms in which we can phrase such an answer. The description of personality is a very thorny problem in psychology. It has been dealt with in great detail in the author’s book The Structure of Human Personality, and there is no intention here of repeating the arguments set down there, or quoting the large number of books and papers surveyed. Instead, only a brief dogmatic statement of the main conclusions will be given.The man in the street, when asked to describe someone’s personality, will almost invariably do so in terms of either traits or types. He may say that his friend is courageous, has a sense of humour, is somewhat rigid and tends to be talkative. He would thus be positing traits of humorousness, rigidity, talkativeness and courage, and he would further assert that his friend had a more than average endowment with respect to these traits.Alternatively the description might be in terms of types. He might describe his friend as being a sociable type, or a talkative type, and so forth. As used in common parlance then, the words trait and type would be almost synonymous. Scientists prefer not to waste useful terms in order to denote something already denoted by another term, and consequently in technical psychology the two terms are used in a rather different way. The term trait is used in much the same way as it is in common parlance; the term type, however, is used as denoting a whole system of traits. Thus, for instance, Jung’s famous introverted type would be characterized by a set of traits such as persistence, subjectivity, shyness, irritability, introspectiveness, and so forth. The term type, therefore,
is more inclusive than the term trait, and indeed it is defined by the observed correlation of a number of traits.This difference in verbal usage, however, is not the only difference between the way in which psychologists and laymen use these terms. The layman is quite happy to invent new traits to cover any observed behaviour whatever, and feels under no obligation to prove that the hypothetical traits which he is invoking can in any reasonable sense be said to exist. Occasionally the difficulties which arise in this common sense use of the terms becomes obvious, and then finer distinctions may be made. Thus the trait ‘courageous’ may be split up when it is found that people who are courageous in one situation may not be so in another. The person who shows a great deal of military courage in the field of battle may show very little civil courage in standing up for his democratic rights. The V.C. may faint at the sight of the dentist’s drill. These exceptions to the assumed universality of a trait are very serious as they obviously cast doubts on the existence of the traits hypothesized and as they make difficult, if not impossible, any kind of accurate prediction. The term ‘courageous’ is useful only if it can be taken to mean (a) that the courageous person has always behaved in a certain fashion when confronted with threatening situations, and (b) that the courageous person will continue to behave in this manner when confronted with similar situations. Admit once that he may not always behave in such a fashion, and the whole usefulness of the concept disappears as we can never be sure to what precise situation our predictions will apply.Much the same must be said about the use of the term type. The concept of type is useful only if it enables us to create some kind of order out of the vast multiplicity of actions in which people indulge; the moment we find that exceptions to such generally consistent behaviour are more frequent than adherence to the rules, the concept begins to lose its value. It is for this reason that psychologists have laid down certain rules which must be fulfilled if the terms trait and type are to be employed in any useful fashion.The first of these rules is that the conduct in question should be measurable. In the early parts of the century much reliance was placed on ratings in which a given judge would rate a number of people, whom he knew well, with respect to the degree to which they possessed certain traits. It was very soon found, however, that this method possessed many disadvantages. The judges did not
always agree on the meaning of the terms employed, for instance. Thus when asked to rate people on their possession of ‘sense of humour5 some judges might understand this to mean ‘ability to make jokes spontaneously5. Others might take it to mean ‘ability to understand jokes and laugh in the right place5. Others yet might take it to mean ‘being always in a good humour and not minding jokes being played on one5. There is no reason to assume that a person showing one of these qualities would also show the others, and consequently judges apparently judging the same quality might in reality be judging entirely different things. Even when verbal agreement on the meaning of the terms used was insisted on, it was soon found that judges tended to invest the subjects with a ‘halo5; in other words, they tended to like some and dislike others, and to attribute all the good qualities to those they liked, and all the bad qualities to those they disliked. These and many other difficulties soon made it clear that human beings are not very good judges of personal qualities, and consequently interest became centred on more objective and reliable methods of measurement.The second way in which psychologists differ from laymen in their approach is in their insistence on obtaining some numerical estimate of the degree to which people tend to manifest the same trait in different circumstances. As an example let us take the hypothetical trait of ‘persistence5. If we wanted to measure this trait we would first of all design a number of objective situations in which our subjects could demonstrate their persistence. Thus as our first test we might ask them to pick up a dumb-bell and hold it out sideways as long as they could, the time being a measure of their degree of persistence. As a second test we might give them a jigsaw puzzle from which some of the pieces had been removed and others substituted, so as to make the task impossible of solution; the length of time during which they continued with this activity would be taken as a measure of their persistence. As a third test we might give them the word ‘generations5 and ask them to use the letters in this word to make up as many new words as they could, again using the time as a measure of persistence.When 20 or 30 tests of this type are administered to large groups of subjects it is found that the original hypothesis, namely that all these tests measure the same trait o f‘persistence5 is indeed verified; all the tests correlate positively with each other, thus showing that a person who is persistent in one test also tends to be persistent in
the other tests, and conversely that a person lacking in persistence in one test will also be lacking in persistence in the others.As a third and last step in our procedure, we should require some evidence of the validity of our particular set of tests. In the case of persistence we should find, for instance, that ratings by teachers, school friends, and others show relatively high correlations with our objective tests; that observations of high scorers and low scorers in live situations involving persistence show their behaviour to be congruent with their test scores; and lastly, that the test scores would enable us to predict with a certain amount of success the ability of our subjects to reach their goals in school and university, even after the influence of intelligence had been eliminated. Without such evidence of validity, few psychologists would regard the alleged trait of persistence as being reasonably well established.*Similarly, in positing a personality type psychologists look for definite proof that the traits which are supposed to characterize the particular type in question are actually correlated. Thus in our example of the introverted type we would ask for direct evidence that tests of persistence, subjectivity, shyness, irritability, and so on, intercorrelate with each other at a reasonable level. Without such proofs the alleged ‘type5 remains entirely at a theoretical level and lacks any real proof for its existence.We are now in a position to state in somewhat more detail the exact hypothesis which we shall be investigating. We shall suggest that ‘tough-mindedness5 is a projection on to the field of social attitudes of the extraverted personality type, while ‘tender-minded-ness5 is a projection of the introverted personality type. Before turning to a proof of this hypothesis let us first briefly discuss this concept of extraversion-introversion. Unfortunately these terms have been used so widely by non-psychological writers and by the man in the street that they have lost almost entirely the meaning which they originally carried, and to which we must revert here. The terms extravert and introvert were used by the psychiatrist Jung to refer to two types of personality which are antithetical to each other and which had in essence been described by several other writers before him, notably by the English psychologist Furneaux Jordan and by the Austrian psychiatrist Otto Gross.
