Minitypologies from within-subjects designs: uncovering systematic individual differences in experiments

The present paper describes a bottom-up (data-driven) approach to the study of individual differences in experiments having a within-subjects design. The approach uses the similarities between the subjects' patterns of performance in the experiment as the basis for separating them into subgroups (labeled minitypes). It results in a breakdown of the hitherto undifferentiated lump of error variance into two components: systematic individual differences and residual error. When a minitypology is detected the experimenter is rewarded with: (a) finding out the different ways in which people respond in the experimental conditions under study and (b) an interesting set of questions concerning the variables which may account for the different performances. The paper discusses the technical questions involved in the application of the minitypologies technique and presents three examples of its use.

[1]  E. Hunt,et al.  Individual Differences in Cognition: A New Approach to Intelligence , 1973 .

[2]  R. Cattell.  The Description and Measurement of Personality , 1947, Mental Health.

[3]  Raymond B. Cattell,et al.  rp and other coefficients of pattern similarity , 1949, Psychometrika.

[4]  L. Cronbach.  Beyond the Two Disciplines of Scientific Psychology. , 1975 .

[5]  L. Cronbach,et al.  Psychological tests and personnel decisions , 1958 .

[6]  L. Guttman.  A general nonmetric technique for finding the smallest coordinate space for a configuration of points , 1968 .

[7]  D. Magnusson,et al.  Toward an interactional psychology of personality. , 1976, Psychological bulletin.

[8]  R. Shepard.  Representation of structure in similarity data: Problems and prospects , 1974 .

[9]  R. E. Warren,et al.  Stimulus encoding and memory. , 1972 .

[10]  Benton J. Underwood,et al.  Individual differences as a crucible in theory construction. , 1975 .

[11]  Paul Horst,et al.  Factor analysis of data matrices , 1965 .

[12]  K S Bowers,et al.  Situationism in psychology: an analysis and a critique. , 1973, Psychological review.

[13]  J. Kruskal.  Multidimensional scaling by optimizing goodness of fit to a nonmetric hypothesis , 1964 .

[14]  J. Carroll.  How shall we study individual differences in cognitive abilities?—Methodological and theoretical perspectives☆ , 1978 .

[15]  A. Tversky,et al.  Additive similarity trees , 1977 .

[16]  R. E. Warren,et al.  Association, directionality, and stimulus encoding. , 1974 .

[17]  J. Stroop,et al.  Factors affecting speed in serial verbal reactions. , 1938 .

[18]  H. Harman.  Modern factor analysis , 1961 .

[19]  C. Osgood,et al.  A measure of relation determined by both mean difference and profile information. , 1952, Psychological bulletin.

[20]  David C. Funder,et al.  Predicting more of the people more of the time: Assessing the personality of situations. , 1978 .

[21]  L. Cronbach.  The two disciplines of scientific psychology. , 1957 .

[22]  R. Cattell.  The three basic factor-analytic research designs-their interrelations and derivatives. , 1952, Psychological bulletin.

[23]  J. Miller,et al.  Multidimensional same--different judgments: evidence against independent comparisons of dimensions. , 1978, Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance.

[24]  E. Hunt.  Mechanics of Verbal Ability. , 1978 .

[25]  E. Diener,et al.  Personality research: components of variance attributable to the person and the situation. , 1975, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[26]  Hans J. Eysenck,et al.  The Measurement of personality , 1976 .