The Personality Meta-Blog

This brief essay was stimulated by a chapter by Baumeister (2019), which can be accessed at https://psyarxiv.com/uf3cn/.  “Fatigue,” though a common word, is far from being a boring or neglected concept. A quick search on PsychInfo reveals thousands of published articles on the subject (14,892, to be exact). A lot of this work is theoretical, more of it is applied, and all of it focuses on an experience that is common to everybody. I was particularly impressed by an article by Evans, Boggero, and Segerstrom (2016) that illuminates the connections between physical and psychological factors, and specifically addresses “how fatigue can occur even in the presence of sufficient resources.”  In fact, I read their article as providing evidence that fatigue usually occurs in the presence of sufficient resources – it’s not primarily a physical phenomenon at all; it’s a psychological one. This fact has many important implications. Fascinating stuff. The related phenomena demonstrated by many, many studies of “ego depletion” are real, and important, and I personally have no doubt whatsoever about that. When people are tired, including psychologically tired (an interesting concept in its own right), their self-control abilities wane, prepotent responses (such as emotional lashing out, simplistic thinking, overlearned habits, selfish impulses) tend to take over as conscious control weakens. Isn’t that pretty much what the studies show, in the aggregate? Does anybody doubt that really happens? Continue reading →

As a newcomer to cross-cultural research a few years ago, I soon became aware of the term “measurement invariance,” which typically is given as a necessary condition for using a psychological measurement instrument, such as a personality inventory, in more than one cultural context[1]. At one of the first talks where I presented some then-new data gathered in 20 different countries, using a new instrument developed in our lab (the Riverside Situational Q-sort) a member of the audience asked “what did you do to assess measurement invariance.”  I had no real answer, and my questioner shook his head sadly. Which, I started to realize, is kind of the generic response when these issues come up. If a researcher gathers data in multiple cultures and doesn’t assess measurement invariance, then the researcher earns scorn – from certain kinds of critics – for ignoring the issue. If the researcher does do the conventional kinds of analyses recommended to assess measurement invariance, the results are often discouraging. The RMSEA’s are out of whack, Delta CFI’s are bigger than .01, and oh my goodness, the item intercepts are not even close to equivalent so scalar invariance is a total joke, not to mention the forlorn hope of attaining “strict” invariance (which sounds harsh, because it is) . A member of a symposium I recently attended exclaimed, “If you can show me some real data where strict measurement invariance was achieved across cultures, I shall buy you a beer!” He had no takers. The following message is approaching the status of conventional wisdom: the lack of equivalence in the properties of psychological measures across cultures means that they cannot be used for cross-cultural comparison and attempts to do so are not just psychometrically ignorant, they are fatally flawed. As I have become a bit more experienced, however, I have begun to develop some misgivings about this conclusion, and the whole business of “measurement invariance,” which I put in scare quotes because I suspect there is less there, than meets the eye. Below, I shall refer to it simply as MI. Continue reading →