Raymond Cattel

Because of his history and interests in the more structured Sciences, Cattell’s approach to Psychology was more attuned to empirical understanding then the Philosophically based theories such as Freud, Jung etc. During the 1940’s, Cattell allied with Edward Thorndike, a behavioural Psychologist whom did numerous studies into the arena of operant conditioning, and operant learning. Like the behaviouralists, Cattell shared an approach that the unconscio

usly dominated inner world of Freud, dominated by conflicting drives and misplaced sexual urges was not the motivation of individual human behaviour. However, Cattell did not go so far as to state that the only behaviour that was relevant to scientific studies was that which was observable visually. Cattell postulated the idea originated under Gordon Allport that there are complementary elements to a human personality, in which an individual has an inclination, moulded by environmental, social and hereditary forces, to hold dominant traits. These traits were the inner building blocks of personality, but these fundamental traits were not merely visible in the persons outward behaviour, they are masked in numerous surface traits that can all be equally described under one fundamental, or core trait. A person’s behaviour is motivated by these core traits. Allport had, in his original study, filtered the Dictionary and removed all words that described in some way human behaviour. Cattell found that most of these words were similar, if not identical in their meaning. Cattell’s list of core traits consisted of a collect trait to describe a surface manifestation. For example, the Core trait of Ego Strength can be used to describe various surface attributes a person might be stated as having, such as honesty, self-discipline and thoughtfulness (Engler.B, 1999). Knowledge of source traits, i.e. the motivating forces of an individual’s behaviour, Cattell hypothesized, could therefore lead to predictions into the likelihood an individual would act in a certain way due to their personality disposition, thus Cattell thought that an individuals behaviour could be predicted by their

Some topics in this essay:
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