Another Dimension
Matt Asay has pointed me to another good one! [Link] This one, which he admits is off topic for him, but obviously understandable and supportable given his discussion. The reference is to a refereed article by Juan Francisco Diaz-Morales, "Morning and evening-types: Exploring their personality styles", Personality and Individual Differences 43 (2007) 769–778. (Note the citation style is a mixture of the journal’s and mine. Also, I haven’t linked to the article since it comes from Science Direct which is a subscription service. If you have a subscription you know how to get the article; if you don’t, then you can’t get it without being nice to a librarian or at least going to a real library.)
I have to warn you this is a psychology-type article so don’t expect too much in the way of rigor, at least with what you get used to in physics. The statistical correlations are not very strong, usually less than 0.5 and no where near the 0.9+ that we get used to in bouncing matter and forces about.
What Diaz-Morales did was to take 360 college students and subject them to two psychological tests: one a measurement of what time of day they relate to; and the other a sort of uber-Meyers-Briggs type trait test. We expect some skewing here. The sample population is about 3:1 women to men, and I have a bit of difficulty not disbelieving his claim that college students are representative of the species as a whole. Nonetheless its the only, so far, game in town and the results have a certain modicum of interest, which is probably why Matt got off task in the first place.
The assessment basically took the population and divided it into groups based on time preferences and gender, the obvious sorts of things that tend to be abided but bemoaned by the PC academics. Our interest here is in the distinction among morning, evening, and intermediate types, especially the first two.
- There did not appear to be any strong correlation chronology preference and intro/extroversion.
- Also everyone was about equally hedonistic, pain averse, and indulgent.
- The sort of key things like conservative/innovative, thinking/feeling, realistic/imaginative displayed only very weak differences.
So the differences dwelt on in the paper are based on some very small statistical differences that I haven’t see a good explanation of how they are different from experimental noise and error, especially given the obvious skewness issues mentioned. Its probably a good thing I don’t referee papers for this journal.
Just to titillate the reader however, I’ll reproduce some of those findings here, since I’m not a psychologist and only a mediocre statistician.
Morning types gather their knowledge from the tangible and concrete, trusting direct experience and observable phenomena(realistic/sensing), prefer to process knowledge using analysis and logic (thought-guided), and transform new knowledge according to what is known (conservation-seeking). Their behaviour style was upstanding and self-controlled; they relate to authority in a respectful and cooperative manner and tend to behave in a formal and proper manner in social situations (dutiful/conforming).Finally, morning-types care about giving a positive impression.
On the other hand, the thinking style of evening-types was based on the symbolical and unknown data more than on concrete and observable ones (imaginative/intuiting), they tend to be creative and to take risks, ready to transform and recast whatever they come upon (innovation seeking).As for behaving style, evening-types tend to act out in an independent and nonconforming manner and resist following traditional standards (unconventional/dissenting).
