The survey is over, but I reopened it if you still want to see what it's all about.
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/YJYJKWY
Here are some results:
The proposed purpose of the survey was to examine relationships between personality traits.
The real purpose of the survey was to look for signs of the Fundamental Attribution Error and Actor-Observer Bias. As we learned it, the actor-observer bias claims that we attribute the behaviors of others to personality, and we attribute our own behavior to the situation. In other words, other people are more static than we are, and their actions aren't as flexible depending on the situation.
I don't think I'm supposed to expect a huge difference in how everyone rated others and themselves, and lo and behold I didn't find one! I don't know that values would be statistically significant, but there are minor differences that point toward actor-observer bias. For simplicity, I punched all the data into a spreadsheet and found the percentage of times the whole group chose Yes, No, and most importantly It Depends, for all the traits combined. What I found was that you guys chose "It depends":
- 25.14% of the time for the people you liked
- 19.58% of the time for the people you didn't like
- 31.53% of the time for yourselves
So yes, you guys did rate yourselves more flexible than the people you liked, and especially the people you didn't like! Not a lot more, but that's to be expected with a big sample.
I also caught what I think is a glimpse of the Ultimate Attribution Error, which I was hoping to see. The test methodology was made by the professor (but I wasn't supposed to do it online ), so it wasn't designed to look for UAE.
The only trait in the survey that could be argued as always positive was Kind. For the disliked people, you guys chose "It depends" for Kindness 31.11% of the time. That's the second highest "It depends" for the disliked people, 2% less than Optimistic (another relatively positive trait) and a significant 8% above the next highest (Cynical). This was also a considerably higher value than the one in liked people and yourselves, and much higher than the 7.78% of you who chose "Yes" for the people you didn't like. I think it suggests that, when you're willing to admit the people you don't like are kind, you're still more willing to admit it's dependent on the situation than it is on the person. Of course, it makes perfect sense that you'd dislike people who aren't kind, so it's correlative at best.
Questions or comments are welcome, this isn't due until Friday.
Edited by Head Injury - 10/10/11 at 6:22pm
