Personality assessment

A Life Complexity Scale (LCS) and Life Diversity Scale (LDS) were developed to assess the richness and diversity of experiences in individuals. In study 1, three hundred and fifty mTurk workers completed the LCS and other standard measurements of personality to assess the scales validity and correlation. Exploratory Factor Analysis and Structural Equation Modeling were used to look into the structure of the scale. Four factors were selected according to Scree plot solution and theoretical framework including: complexity, basic, uncertainty, and complicated. In study 2, four hundred mTurk workers completed the LDS along with other measurements of personality, depression, and social support. Exploratory Factor Analysis and Structural Equation Modeling were used to explore the structure of the scale finding a single factor solution. The results indicate that both scales have good reliability LCS (Omega total = 1.02) and LDS (Omega total = .8). The associations with other personality traits are explored and recommendations for future research are signaled.

Academic integrity essentially centers on an individual’s ethical attitudes and behaviors as well as injunctive norms, or norms that dictate what is socially accepted and lauded. One key influence may be pluralistic ignorance; here arguments for cheating posit that students cheat because they perceive that others are “doing it” to a greater extent than is actually true and thus what they are doing is minimized in relation to others. Research indicates that students perceive cheating as more widespread than it actually is (Hard, Conway, & Moran, 2006). A considerable gap in the research is noted when looking at definitions of what constitutes academic fraud, research has indicated that when students are asked if they have cheated and then given a definition of cheating, their self-reports of cheating increase (Burrus et al., 2007). This indicates that students’ definition of cheating and a universities’ definition of cheating may be incongruent. Participants were 507 members of the Florida Atlantic University community during the 2012-2013 academic year who completed a survey that consisted of items, which centered on self-reported cheating, perceptions of what cheating constitutes, and estimates of cheating prevalence. Results indicate that students reported peer cheating to be higher then self reported cheating, that participants distinguished between five different forms of cheating, and that faculty and students hold differing definitions of cheating. The findings suggest a disconnect between faculty perceptions and definitions of academic integrity and students. This would suggest that greater efforts should to be taken to bring a more uniform operational definition of what constitutes academic dishonesty that universities, faculty, and students can rely on. Second, as a pluralist model of cheating was supported, universities could develop campaigns like those aimed at reducing drinking, hooking up, and increasing women in STEM fields (Lambert, Kahn & Apple, 2003; Mattern & Neighbors, 2004; Muldoon, 2002; Schroder & Prentice, 1998). Research has suggested social norm campaigns targeting pluralistic ignorance can be effective on college campuses. In educating students about what actually happens and the discrepancy between reality and perception, cases of academic dishonesty could be reduced.

Theoretical models posit that the perception of situations consists of two
components: an objective component attributable to the situation being perceived and a
subjective component attributable to the person doing the perceiving (Murray, 1938;
Rauthmann, 2012; Sherman, Nave & Funder, 2013; Wagerman & Funder, 2009). In this
study participants (N = 186) viewed three pictures from the Thematic Apperception Test
(TAT; Murray, 1938) and rated the situations contained therein using a new measure of
situations, the Riverside Situational Q-Sort (RSQ; Wagerman & Funder, 2009). The RSQ
was used to calculate the overall agreement among ratings of situations and to examine
the objective and subjective properties of the pictures. These results support a twocomponent
theory of situation perception. Both the objective situation and the person perceiving that situation contributed to overall perception. Further, distinctive perceptions of situations were consistent across pictures and were associated with the Big Five personality traits in a theoretically meaningful manner. For instance, individuals high in Openness indicated that these pictures contained comparatively more humor (r = .26), intellectual stimuli (r = .20), and raised moral or ethical issues (r = .19) than individuals low on this trait.

The fundamental attribution error (FAE) refers to the social perceiver's tendency to emphasize dispositional rather than situational information when determining the causes for an actor's behavior (Ross, 1977). The present study challenges previous FAE research by suggesting that highly constrained experimental circumstances, not representative of real-world occurrences in which self-selection variables play a major role, are perhaps responsible for these findings. Subjects were given behavioral information and asked to make attributions based on a target's level of agreeableness and predict their intentions concerning future interactions. The data indicates that limited information can still lead to accurate identification of true scores. Attributions for behaviors that were exhibited under both low and high situational constraint were useful in detecting a target's underlying trait. They also form a foundation for guiding future interactions. Together, these findings support the notion that the FAE serves as an adaptive and appropriate strategy.