Individual attempts to define the concept of ‘personality’ and the concept of ‘character’ have generated confusion in almost all psychological endeavors. Everyone instinctively knows that they are different, yet we also know that they are intertwined and interdependent.
The concept of personality has many meanings to various people. In an attempt to be able to more accurately describe what MindsIView does, we are going to define an individual’s personality as ‘the social and emotional characteristics displayed by a person when dealing with another person, the interactive traits that give an individual a unique social identity.’
Listed here are but a few examples of personality traits that a person could display when interacting with another person.
A person might be friendly, amiable, affectionate, sociable, benevolent, loving, gregarious, congenial, jovial, merry, affable, have a good sense of humor, be pleasant, agreeable, enjoyable, a pleasure to be around, cheerful, happy, jolly, merry, spirited, lively, light-hearted, giving, loving, tender, affectionate or they could be jealous, envious, grudging, resentful, suspicious, unfriendly, hostile, antagonistic, unkind, secluded, private, aloof, recluse, withdrawn, formal, conformist, hard, unyeilding, ugly, surly, threatening, unpleasant, offensive, repulsive, a pain to be around, depressed, miserable, sad, gloomy, grumpy, grouchy, sullen, cantankerous, cross, crabby, and irritable.
These are not traits or characteristics we would use if we were describing the way a person executes professional responsibilities or pursues the activities of a career. Some traits or characteristics we would use to describe these activities could be:
Respect for individuals, Honesty, Ambition, Problem solving ability, Proactive thinking, Self confidence, Goal focus, Persistence, Planning ability, Integrity, Attention to details, Seeing the ‘big picture’, etc.
However, we know that the execution of life activities, whether personal or professional, involves a combination of ‘personality’ and ‘character’ traits and this blending of traits produces the unique individual.
The American Heritage English Dictionary defines culture as, “the totality of socially transmitted behavior patterns, arts, beliefs, institutions and all other products of human work or thought.” Alvin Toffler, author of The Third Wave, gives a very simplistic definition of culture by defining it as ‘how’ an organism or organization ‘does things’. Peter Drucker defines culture as, “the manner in which an organization conducts itself in order to accomplish its desired goals”.
Since the attributes/characteristics measured by MindsIView cannot be clearly defined as ‘personality’ or ‘character’, MindsIView has looked to other headings to define the attributes that belong to an individual’s cognitive structure. MindsIView defines this collection of the attributes in an individual’s cognitive structure as an individual’s ‘personal culture’. That is, the application of an individual’s cognitive structure against the activities of life result in the development of an individual’s ‘person culture’ or ‘how they do things’.
Listed below are a few examples of cognitive structure traits evaluated by MindsIView. As you will notice, these characteristics tend to be more closely identified with the concept that we call ‘character’, yet it is intuitively obvious that traits the world defines as ‘character’ are significantly impacted by the traits that are often defined as ‘personality’. Some examples are:
Attitude toward others, Goal focus, Long range planning, Problem solving, Relating with others, Seeing potential problems, Results oriented, Short range planning, Role confidence, Concrete organization, Persistence, Handling Stress, etc.
Wednesday, December 12, 2007
Tuesday, December 11, 2007
What Makes Us Unique?
According to our market research, all other psychological assessment instruments are designed to measure the behavioral preferences of a particular sample of people. That is, other instruments are developed by a group of individuals who; Invent a pool of items, transfer them into an assessment format, administer the formatted items to a sample of people, perform a statistical analysis to determine the items that cluster together or factor out, validate statistically the items that factor out, and use those conclusions to make predictive statements about the behavior of people.
There are several inherent problems with the development of instruments in this fashion. This procedure of empirical construction cannot prevent personal prejudices and biases from entering into the `invention` of items, the selection of `items' to support predisposed hunches and the process of human error in overlooking key components. Assessments developed under these criteria should be suspect, not from the procedures that are used in the evaluation, but from the basis of their development.
In addition to the potential problems and distortions that can exist in an empirically based evaluation, it is very difficult to keep the desired goals of the assessment from affecting the results. Most instruments claim that the identification and definition of the items that `cluster' together is entirely a statistical matter, yet they often `find' a basis for including items in the assessment that do not factor out or are not statistically valid.
The instruments used by MindsIView are not subject to this type of error since the relationships and comparisons used in the evaluation of an instrument are based in the axioms and theorems of transfinite mathematics. This mathematical base is the reason that we can now refer to the analysis of cognitive structures as a pure science and not the philosophical science that applies to the remainder of the psychological field.
If you have taken or examined the MindsIView instruments, it is obvious that it is different from other evaluation instruments. Each and every person will have ideas about which statements are ‘good’ and which are ‘bad’, and each person will have their reasons why they think the way they do. In an open discussion concerning the ranking of statements, the disagreements will eventually be based in an ‘I think . . .’ logic. If you were asked to rank the numbers ‘3,2,4,1’ in ascending sequence, you would order them ‘1,2,3,4’ because in the abstract world of numerical representation, ‘1’ is always greater than ‘2’, etc. However, in the world of cognitive structures, each item or situation has multiple dimensions and the value an individual places on an object or statement depends on how they value the dimensions of that object/statement. This makes it possible for the individual to establish logical relationships, in their mind, between the statements of the instruments, but it makes it impossible for an individual to establish universally accepted logical relationships between the statements.
The science of transfinite mathematics establishes the order of relationships between the mathematical functions representing the number of permutations possible within the parameters of those functions. This ‘ordering of relationships’ is the same to the science of cognitive analysis as digital numbers are to real, finite mathematics. If, in the process of completing an instrument, an individual ordered the functions (i.e. – statements) in exactly the same order as the norm established in transfinite mathematics, that person would have a clear or ‘balanced’ view of events, objects, etc. In the process of evaluating an individual’s cognitive structure, MindsIView measures and calculates the distortions that occur between the individual’s ranking of the statements and the norm established in transfinite mathematics. If MindsIView operates under the assumption that an individual will order the statements as an honest representation of their beliefs then any attempt to logically impact the results of the test can only be achieved by ordering the statements in a fashion that is a distortion of how they actually think. If, in an honest representation, MindsIView is measuring perceptive distortions, then an attempt by an individual to distort the measurements will result in the distortion of pre-existing distortions. In other words, manipulations of the instrument produce badly skewed patterns.
There are several inherent problems with the development of instruments in this fashion. This procedure of empirical construction cannot prevent personal prejudices and biases from entering into the `invention` of items, the selection of `items' to support predisposed hunches and the process of human error in overlooking key components. Assessments developed under these criteria should be suspect, not from the procedures that are used in the evaluation, but from the basis of their development.
In addition to the potential problems and distortions that can exist in an empirically based evaluation, it is very difficult to keep the desired goals of the assessment from affecting the results. Most instruments claim that the identification and definition of the items that `cluster' together is entirely a statistical matter, yet they often `find' a basis for including items in the assessment that do not factor out or are not statistically valid.
The instruments used by MindsIView are not subject to this type of error since the relationships and comparisons used in the evaluation of an instrument are based in the axioms and theorems of transfinite mathematics. This mathematical base is the reason that we can now refer to the analysis of cognitive structures as a pure science and not the philosophical science that applies to the remainder of the psychological field.
If you have taken or examined the MindsIView instruments, it is obvious that it is different from other evaluation instruments. Each and every person will have ideas about which statements are ‘good’ and which are ‘bad’, and each person will have their reasons why they think the way they do. In an open discussion concerning the ranking of statements, the disagreements will eventually be based in an ‘I think . . .’ logic. If you were asked to rank the numbers ‘3,2,4,1’ in ascending sequence, you would order them ‘1,2,3,4’ because in the abstract world of numerical representation, ‘1’ is always greater than ‘2’, etc. However, in the world of cognitive structures, each item or situation has multiple dimensions and the value an individual places on an object or statement depends on how they value the dimensions of that object/statement. This makes it possible for the individual to establish logical relationships, in their mind, between the statements of the instruments, but it makes it impossible for an individual to establish universally accepted logical relationships between the statements.
The science of transfinite mathematics establishes the order of relationships between the mathematical functions representing the number of permutations possible within the parameters of those functions. This ‘ordering of relationships’ is the same to the science of cognitive analysis as digital numbers are to real, finite mathematics. If, in the process of completing an instrument, an individual ordered the functions (i.e. – statements) in exactly the same order as the norm established in transfinite mathematics, that person would have a clear or ‘balanced’ view of events, objects, etc. In the process of evaluating an individual’s cognitive structure, MindsIView measures and calculates the distortions that occur between the individual’s ranking of the statements and the norm established in transfinite mathematics. If MindsIView operates under the assumption that an individual will order the statements as an honest representation of their beliefs then any attempt to logically impact the results of the test can only be achieved by ordering the statements in a fashion that is a distortion of how they actually think. If, in an honest representation, MindsIView is measuring perceptive distortions, then an attempt by an individual to distort the measurements will result in the distortion of pre-existing distortions. In other words, manipulations of the instrument produce badly skewed patterns.
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