Dr. S Brian Hood

When personality psychologists examine political behaviour, including voting, they usually focus on a narrow range of variables, thereby undermining the breadth of our knowledge. We asked 280 participants who they voted for (or would have) in the 2020 US presidential election and inquired as to their 'dark' personality (i.e., psychopathy, sadism, narcissism, and Machiavellianism) and 'light' (i.e., Kantianism, humanism, and faith in humanity) personality traits, political attitudes (i.e., social dominance orientation, right-wing authoritarianism, and left-wing authoritarianism), and how many times people chose each of the six moral foundations (i.e., care, fairness, loyalty, purity, liberty, and hierarchy). We found that personality traits (as distal systems) were negligibly important in presidential choice, moral choices (as parallel-yet-related choices) had some utility especially in relation to voting for a third-party candidate, and political attitudes (as proximal predictors) had the broadest and strongest associations. In addition, we found that third-party voters showed stronger concerns for purity than Biden supporters, and greater concerns for fairness than Trump supporters. Our results focus on how dispositional measures can add to standard sociodemographic predictors used by pollsters, politicians, and pundits.

Ivane Beritashvili has been regarded as an "anti-Pavlovian" for nearly a century. One respect in which Beritashvili is said to be anti-Pavlovian is in granting an explanatory role to subjective mental states in his doctrine of image-driven behavior. In this article, I aim to problematize the anti-Pavlovian assessment and argue that Beritashvili did not deviate from Pavlovian scientific norms, minor points of theoretical and methodological differences between them notwithstanding. Furthermore, several respects in which Beritashvili is claimed to be anti-Pavlovian are ways in which he resembles Pavlov. Turning my attention to Beritashvili's critics in the Soviet Union, those responsible for his censure, I argue that it is the critique of Beritashvili that runs counter to the norms Pavlov embraced. I contest the claim that his alleged deviations from Pavlovian orthodoxy justify classification as anti-Pavlovian in a sense that is either historically accurate or philosophically interesting, and submit that the grounds on which Beritashvili is derided as anti-Pavlovian would also justify labeling Pavlov himself as anti-Pavlovian. Informed by the case of Beritashvili and others who were politically persecuted for their scientific work in the Soviet Union, I conclude with reflections on science, politics, and the intrusion of the latter in the former.

Objective This essay aims to explain the impasse in debates concerning Confederate monuments in public spaces by noting a difference in unstated philosophical assumptions.
Method I examine two positions in this debate, offering an explanation for the inability for opposing sides to engage. The analytical framework has its basis in philosophical debates regarding objectivity in scientific theory selection.
Results Arguably, the impasse in this debate concerns underlying ethical principles: one that assesses morality based on intentions that motivate actions (namely, the motivation for erecting a monument) and one that assesses morality based on consequences of actions (namely, the consequences of removing monuments).
Conclusions The locus of discussion can shift to these philosophical principles, offering a novel avenue for discussion and, hence, reconciliation. I suggest a fate for Confederate monuments that is responsive to both sides' concerns and is informed by another country's attempt to reconcile with its troubled past.

Identifying specific traits to justify according differential moral status to humans and non-human animals may be more challenging than Chapman & Huffman suggest. The reasons for this also go against their recommendation that we ought to attend to how humans and non-humans are similar. The problem lies in identifying the moral relevance of biological characteristics. There are, however, other reasons for treating non-human animals as worthy of
moral consideration, such as the Precautionary Principle.

Within the context of psychological measurement, realist commitments pervade methodology. Further, there are instances where particular scientific practices and decisions are explicable most plausibly against a background assumption of epistemic realism. That psychometrics is a realist enterprise provides a possible toehold for Stephen Jay Gould’s objections to psychometrics in
The Mismeasure of Man
and Joel Michell’s charges that psychometrics is a “pathological science.” These objections do not withstand scrutiny. There are no fewer than three activities in ongoing psychometric research which presuppose a commitment to a minimal epistemic realism. Those activities include selecting between different models for representing data, estimating ability in the context of item response theory, and the move to make the individual the fundamental unit of analysis in psychometrics thereby calling for a shift in what sorts of data are evidentially relevant. In none of these activities are the commitments and disregard for evidence that Gould and Michell find objectionable or “pathological.”

Paul E. Newton (this issue) argues in favor of a conception of validity, viz, “the consensus definition of validity,” according to which the extension of the predicate “is valid” is a subset of “assessment-based decision-making procedure[s], which [are] underwritten by an argument that the assessment procedure can be used to measure the attribute entailed by that decision,” (Newton, this issue). Standing in contrast to this conception of validity is Borsboom's (2005) account, according to which the extension of the predicate “is valid” is a subset of psychological tests. In Borsboom's own words, “a test is valid for measuring an attribute if and only if (a) the attribute exists and (b) variations in the attribute causally produce variations in the outcomes of the measurement procedure,” (Borsboom, 2005, p. 150).1 The consensus definition of validity and Borsboom's instrument-based accounts are clearly incompatible, and in the course of defending the former, Newton argues against the latter in an effort to motivate his own account. In what follows I assess the two principal reasons Newton gives for rejecting Borsboom's analysis. The first pertains to differential measurement quality in light of four considerations: adherence to proper measurement procedures and guidelines, the context of the measurement, characteristics of the group being assessed, and the use of measurement outcomes. The second objection is, in effect, the charge that Borsboom's account (and the instrument-based account in general) underrepresents the concept of validity. I will argue that Newton's objections to the instrument-based account either constitute no serious objection to the instrument-based account or they are question begging.

In the context of psychiatric diagnosis, operationists claim that mental disorders are nothing more than the satisfying of objective diagnostic criteria, whereas realists claim that mental disorders are latent entities that are detected by applying those criteria. The implications of this distinction are substantial in actual clinical situations, such as in the co-occurrence of disorders that may interfere with one another's detection, or when patients falsify their symptoms. Realist and operationist conceptions of diagnosis may lead to different clinical decisions in these situations, affecting treatment efficacy and ultimate patient outcomes.

Cramer et al.'s account of comorbidity comes with a substantive philosophical view concerning the nature of psychological disorders. Although the network account is responsive to problems with extant approaches, it faces several practical and conceptual challenges of its own, especially in cases where the individual differences in network structures require the analysis of intra-individual time-series data.

Recent work in the conceptual foundations of psychometrics has concerned the question of validity. Borsboom and colleagues have challenged what they claim is the dominant theory of validity, that of Samuel Messick. In this paper I present Borsboom et al.’s concept of validity as a property of measurement instruments as well as Messick’s concept of validity as a property of interpretive inferences. I then relate their concepts of validity to scientific realism in the philosophy of science. I argue that there can be valid psychometric tests, in Borsboom et al.’s sense, only if some version of scientific realism is true. I argue that in Borsboom et al.’s and Messick’s approaches to validity, one finds the essential ingredients for a realist philosophy of science in psychological assessment. Borsboom et al. contribute semantic and ontological components while Messick provides the methodological tools for constructing an epistemology of psychological measurement. Though Borsboom et al. present their approach as an alternative to Messick’s, these two approaches to validity are potentially complementary.

excerpt - There is a cloud of irony that looms over Denny Borsboom's contribution to the current volume. It draws the reader's attention to the many conceptual complexities with which latent variable modeling is fraught and yet also expresses surprise that more psychologists do not engage in latent variable analysis. Conceptually rich and responsive to the demand for rigorous philosophical and methodological investigation into the foundations of psychological measurement, Borsboom's piece leaves the reader thinking that it is no wonder psychologists do not use latent variable modeling “to get at least some grip on the relation between the data and the variables one intends to measure.” Nevertheless, his contribution is a valuable step forward in coming to an understanding of this relation.