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A big concern in personality psychology today is how to integrate the different components of the person into a unified theory. Older approaches have tended to focus on understanding particular components rather than the whole person. Trait theories for example have focused on describing relatively stable characteristics of a person such as how they typically think, feel and behave. Theories focusing on personal values on the other hand stress the guiding principles that influence what goals a person regards as important to strive for in life. Recent theories have attempted to understand how both traits and values fit into a broader model of personality, and hence have looked at how particular traits, e.g. those in the Big Five, are related to particular values. An even more ambitious approach to personality called Life History Theory (that I discussed in a previous post) is based on the notion that a whole range of human characteristics, including personality traits, intelligence, … [Read more...] about Do Personality Traits and Values Form a Coherent Whole?

Update (September 16, 2017): Recently it came to my attention that the paper discussed in this article has been retracted, and so its findings may not be valid. I am leaving this article as is, as a record of my thoughts at the time, but the contents should be regarded as highly speculative. An interesting research study (Förster, Epstude, & Özelsel, 2009) found that asking people to think about sex subsequently improved their performance on analytical tasks requiring attention to detail. Getting them to think about love improved their performance on creative tasks. The underlying theory is that people think about sex in concrete and specific ways involving the present moment which facilitates analytical thinking. On the other hand, people tend to think of love in a more abstract and global way that involves thoughts about the long-term future, which facilitates creativity. Previous studies have found that priming tasks that activate analytical thinking tend to … [Read more...] about Are Sex And Religion Natural Enemies?

Niche-bike maker Royal Enfield has tasted success with its experiment of opening micro stores, most of which are focused on the hinterland market, in the hope to reverse the overall downward sales trend.It has so far opened 500 studio stores across the country, and another 300 of them will become operational by the end of the year.Lower cost of setting up and operating a store is the main reason behind the Eicher Motors-controlled company is banking hugely on them. It also has 932 full-sized operational stores that are concentrated heavily in cities.Close "We have 932 large-format stores including the four that were opened in the last quarter. But we said that we need to get into a lot more into the rural areas and thus we came up with this unique concept called the Studio Store. It was so successful in a few areas that by August we added 250 of them and by October, we launched another 250. We have now 500 of them, fantastic response for these," said Vinod … [Read more...] about Royal Enfield takes hinterland route to fight slowdown, opens micro stores

In a previous post, I discussed a number of differences concerning the relationship between personality and objective measures of intelligence compared to how lay people perceive this relationship. In particular, I noted that the personality trait of agreeableness is unrelated to performance on intelligence tests, yet there are some indications that lay people tend to associate high agreeableness with lower intelligence, even though agreeableness is a socially valued characteristic. The reasons for this are not well understood. However, although there are important advantages to agreeableness, high agreeableness may also be associated with a number of costs, such as in regards to career advancement. Additionally, a recent study found that highly agreeable people are prone to choking under pressure. Perhaps there are some ways in which being too agreeable might lead to behavior that could be regarded as less intelligent. There is something puzzling about the relationship between … [Read more...] about When Being Nice Gets in the Way of Being Smart

A recent review of studies found that religious belief is inversely associated with intelligence. That is, more intelligent people are generally less likely to be religious. The reasons for this are not fully understood, although some of the main theories were discussed in Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic’s article. Dr Chamorro-Premuzic also made the intriguing suggestion that the relationship between religiosity and intelligence might be mediated by the personality trait known as openness to experience. A related possibility is that greater knowledge about religion and the world in general might play some role in explaining why more intelligent people tend to be less religious. To summarise briefly, a recent review of 63 studies showed that there is a moderate negative relationship between intelligence and religiosity (Zuckerman, Silberman, & Hall, 2013). The review found that religious beliefs, such as belief in God, are somewhat more strongly related to lower intelligence than … [Read more...] about More Knowledge, Less Belief in Religion?