Personality Diversity and Cognitive Modes in the Origins Debate: Part One

This is a guest-post by Marlowe C. Embree, and is the fifth installment in his series on “The social psychology of the origins debate”. Marlowe teaches psychology at the University of Wisconsin Colleges.

The fact that we differ from one another is such an obvious one that it hardly needs to be stated, yet much of academic psychology until recent decades has somewhat ignored that reality. The terms often used in scholarly discourse are “nomothetic” versus “idiographic” psychology. Nomothetic theorists focus on the similarities between persons (what we have in common, what makes us all alike) and, in the extreme, can mistakenly view human beings as entirely equivalent, so that understanding one of us generates a full understanding of any of us. Idiographic theorists, in contrast, focus on the differences between persons (what differentiates us, what makes us each unique) and, in the extreme, can mistakenly view each of us as so irreducibly unique as to render any general understanding of human psychology impossible.

As in most life situations, the truth likely lies somewhere in between. However, my personal bias is in favor of idiographic psychology. My favorite book on the subject is one whose title says it all (which conveniently absolves you of the responsibility of reading it): I’m Not Crazy, I’m Just Not You. The failure to identify and work within one’s own personal uniqueness is, from a counseling standpoint, a major challenge; as Lily Tomlin once self-mockingly put it, “I always wanted to be somebody, but now I see that I should have been more specific.”

In this article, and one to follow later this week, I will be examining the role of personality differences, as well as the related issue of diversity in how we think and process information (so-called “cognitive modes”), in influencing how we perceive questions relating to creation and evolution. I am currently in the early stages of conducting research directly addressing this question. While the canons of research ethics prohibit me from directly divulging the results of these early pilot studies, I will at a few points hide my light under a bushel in the hope that astute readers will be able to find the bushel and kick it to one side, thus revealing the illumination underneath.

Models of Personality Diversity: The Pioneering Work of William James
About a century ago, the early psychologist William James wrote and published his now-classic work The Varieties of Religious Experience, still considered among the “must-read” classic works on that topic. As part of that work, James introduced and elucidated the distinction between “tough-minded” and “tender-minded” individuals. The former, as the name implies, were no-nonsense types with their feet firmly planted on the ground, people who were most interested in hard-headed practical realities and not given to introspection, internal analysis, or self-doubt. By temperament, they were realists and empiricists who believed in the world presented to them through their five senses and in the role of impersonal, objective logic. By contrast, the latter inhabited a world in which compassion, connection to others (including, perhaps, an unseen and nonhuman world), hidden meanings, transcendent purposes, and the like took center stage. These individuals were prone to believe that “the unexamined life is not worth living” but, in their tendency to question themselves and to be harsh self-critics, may have been more prone to self-doubt, guilt, and personal recriminations. In his book, James explored possible connections between this personality characteristic and two contrasting forms of religion that he styled “once-born” versus “twice-born” religious experiences.

Models of Personality Diversity: Other Important Additions
Possibly influenced (at least indirectly) by James’ work, many subsequent personality theorists have developed this same theme. The great-grandfather of them all, Carl Jung, developed his famous theory of psychological types on the basis of the idea that people differ in three important ways: in their focus on the outer world of action and interaction versus the inner world of reflection and introspection (extraversion vs. introversion), in their emphasis on practical concrete realities or on imaginative abstract possibilities (sensing vs. intuition), and in their use of either impersonal logic or personal values to make important decisions (feeling vs. thinking). (Devotees of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator will know that later theorists added a fourth dimension to yield the famous sixteen psychological type designators.) Heather Cattell wrote extensively about these same notions using a different vocabulary and methodology, but also agreed that these fundamental differences largely reflected James’ original notion. Still more recently, McCrae and Costa developed and promoted their now influential Big Five model of personality diversity, again signifying that most if not all of these dimensions have at least implicit links to James’ formulation.

Can Personality Profiles Predict Views on the Origins Debate?
My research is focusing in part on the question of whether students’ personality profiles can statistically predict either their existing views on the origins debate (dividing students, by means of an original questionnaire, into creationist, theistic evolutionist, and secular evolutionist groups) and/or the likelihood that their views will change as the result of exposure to a secular education, either in general or specifically in terms of course content relating to evolutionary science. My original hypothesis was that secular evolutionists would be more “tough-minded” (prone to adopt a more reductionistic view of reality, in that only what can be scientifically established is real), while other groups would be more “tender-minded” (prone to view reality in less reductionistic terms that allowed for the possibility of nonempirical realities and nonscientific ways of knowing). Over time, students with different personality profiles might tend to diverge from one another in predictable ways even if they started their college experience with similar attitudes and beliefs about the origins debate.

In the next article, we’ll explore further implications of these differences with a more detailed emphasis on different modes of thinking.

Questions for Discussion
1. In your experience, do you agree with me that creationists and evolutionists (particularly reductionistic or secular evolutionists) differ in how they think as much as in what they think? In other words, to what extent is the dispute one about methodology or epistemology (what truth is and how it might best be determined or evaluated)?

2. If this is true, how might the gap best be bridged?