Psychologist logo
Year 2004 graphic
Personality and self

Personality - two ways of thinking about it

In his Hans Eysenck Lecture, Martin Davies describes how he has continued to integrate the correlational and experimental in the study of personality and cognition.

18 November 2004

Eysenck was one of the first people to combine what Cronbach (1957) called the two disciplines of scientific psychology – the correlational and the experimental. In this article I'll describe my own correlational and experimental research into the role of confirmatory processing in personality questionnaire responding, and how cognitive styles such as dogmatism influence confirmatory processing. I aim to show why I believe Eysenck was right – the two disciplines need to be unified before psychology becomes a truly scientific paradigm.

Download PDF for article.