Week 12 — Five Dials or Two Boxes: Describing a Person Carefully — Traditional alternative (no AI)
Instructors: publish this instead of the adaptive version if you prefer, and unpublish or delete the adaptive one.
Assignment 11 of the term — count what a five-dial description of personality records, compare it with a two-box type quiz, judge which personality measures deserve trust, and advise a team leader who wants to sort people with a free quiz.
This week you met the four families of personality theory: psychodynamic, humanistic, trait, and social-cognitive. You read two roommates on the Big Five's five dials and compared well-tested inventories with projective tests. In Week 2 you learned that a measure must be reliable and valid; this assignment applies those two words to personality measures. You work two short problems, interpret each one, and explain to someone who has never studied psychology why a type quiz is a poor way to sort people. This week's lecture tutorial, quiz, discussion, and Analysis Workshop practise the same ideas from other angles.
The task
This week you read two roommates on the five Big Five dials, in OCEAN order: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Jonah read high, high, low, high, and middle; Noor read middle, low, high, high, and low. Each dial is continuous, and this week reads its position with three words: low, middle, or high.
Work these two problems, showing your arithmetic:
- Two roommates are each read on all five Big Five dials. How many dial readings does that make in total?
- Five Big Five dials, each read as low, middle, or high, give 3 × 3 × 3 × 3 × 3 = 243 possible profiles, and a two-type quiz gives 2 boxes. How many times as many profiles as boxes is that?
Beside each answer, add one brief interpretation and one limit. For problem 1, explain what a single dial reading says about a person, why it is a position on a continuum rather than a type, and what Jonah and Noor's readings show that an "introvert or extravert" quiz would miss. For problem 2, explain what your ratio says about how much a two-type quiz leaves out, then explain how you would judge any personality measure with reliability and validity, and why a well-tested self-report inventory such as the MMPI earns more trust than a projective test such as the Rorschach inkblots.
Explain it to a non-expert
A team leader at a community nonprofit who has never studied psychology wants every volunteer to take a free online quiz that sorts people into one of four "personality types," and then plans to assign jobs by type. Write a 3–5 sentence message that explains, in everyday words, what a type quiz leaves out, what a dial description records instead, and one limit of any personality measure. Explain any technical term in everyday words, and do not label or diagnose any real person.
For a different, ungraded example, imagine a store manager who decides a job applicant "has a nervous personality" after one shaky interview. Model answer: "A personality is a pattern that shows up again and again, across many situations and over time, not one moment. One shaky interview tells you how the person felt in that room on that day. If you want to know whether they are usually calm, you would need to see them in more than one setting. I can't tell you what the applicant is really like from one meeting, and neither can anyone else."
Use that pattern for the team leader, with your own explanation and evidence.
Show your arithmetic. A reader should be able to reproduce every number you report from the values above without guessing which values or steps you used.
Deliverables
Submit a single brief containing:
- the two answers, each with the arithmetic shown and a brief interpretation and one limit;
- your message to the team leader, explaining in everyday words what a type quiz leaves out, what a dial description records instead, and one limit of any personality measure; and
- a one-line restatement of the values you used, so your results are reproducible.
Keep it to roughly one page. Clear and correct beats long.
Choose how you show it. Present your brief as written text, or as a recorded audio or video explanation of about three minutes with a transcript, or as a labelled sketch of five dials beside two boxes with a short note. Every form is graded by the same scoring criteria. Submit in any accessible file type or as a link; a recorded response may be submitted as audio or video with a transcript, or as text.
How you'll be graded
The full analytic rubric is attached to this assignment in Canvas.
Academic integrity and AI use
This version is designed to be completed without AI: do the computations, the interpretations, and the writing yourself, without a chatbot or other AI tool. You may use a calculator or a spreadsheet for the arithmetic. Submitting AI-generated work as your own, or copying another student's numbers, is an integrity violation under the course policy.
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