Integr Psych Behav DOI 10.1007/s12124-016-9375-1 R E G U L A R A RT I C L E
Psychology is not primarily Empirical Science: A Comparison of Cultures in the Lexical Hypothesis Tradition as a Failure of Introspection Václav Linkov 1
# Springer Science+Business Media New York 2016
Abstract A large part of psychology has become an empirical science that assumes that there might exist one set of research methods suitable for psychological research in all human cultures. Research questions, methods, and theories formulated from one cultural perspective are not thoroughly introspectively examined when being used in another cultural environment. This leads to research that answers questions that are not meaningful in such environments. Research coming from the lexical hypothesis tradition is given as an example. The original research in English language decided that the lexicon was enough to represent language structures for the purpose of examining how language reflects personality; however, some languages might use specific grammatical structures to reflect personality, so the lexicon is not enough to adequately represent these languages. Despite this, researchers still follow the research method developed for the English language. The Czech and Korean languages are examples of this approach. A solution to this problem is the thorough use of introspection during the formulation of research questions. Keywords Lexical hypothesis . Big five . Introspection . Empirical research . Korean . Czech . Copypasting fallacy Psychological researchers differ in opinion as to whether humans should be studied from a first-person perspective or a third-person perspective (Watanabe 2010). A psychologist can either choose themself as the source of information about how to study people, or s/he can choose to watch and study others. When psychology adopted statistical and experimental techniques during the 19th and 20th centuries „objectivity as avowed in scientific method demanded either the total eradication or practical
* Václav Linkov
[email protected]
1
CDV - Transport Research Centre, Líšeňská 33a, 636 00 Brno, Czech Republic
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irrelevance of self-consciousnessB (Morawski 2005:6). The „ideology of empiricismB (Slife and Melling 2009) has caused current psychology and other human sciences to focus mainly on data-collecting research. The third-person perspective prevails (Corti et al. 2015), and data collecting dominates over introspection. This approach, however, ignores the fact that it is always the first-person perspective and the way the author understands the problem that is the foundation for every psychological theory. Psychologists use theory – often created by someone else – and base their research on this theory, but they often forget to consider that the author of the original theory did not know the subsequent environment1 in which their research would be conducted – and a new theory (and methods) should be created to match the actual environment. In this text, I will illustrate this style of research by describing how the lexical approach in personality psychology compares the image of personality in language across different languages and cultures, and how it ignores whether the lexicon fully represents the reflection of personality in the languages of these cultures. First, I will describe the lexical hypothesis and show that the research based on the lexical hypothesis ignores the non-lexical parts of language. In the second part, I will show that the Czech and Korean languages contain grammar that could be examined by lexical hypothesis research – but that lexical hypothesis researchers examining these two languages have ignored the opportunity. In the third part, I will show that the omission of personality-related grammar was due to the research approach, which did not employ thorough introspection and copied the operationalization of the problem by importing terms and statements defined in one particular cultural environment into a different cultural environment. Finally, fourth, I recommend that researchers should rethink the terms, statements, and hypotheses that they use in research so as to determine whether they are meaningful in the studied cultural environment. This reevaluation should be done with thorough introspection. Specifically, lexical hypothesis researchers should focus on the research of various languages in various stages of language development.
The Lexical Hypothesis and Its Failure to Include the Non-lexical Parts of Language The lexical hypothesis states that the important and useful personality characteristics of people are encoded in language. Research based on the lexical approach began with Allport and Odbert, who made a list of 18,000 English words that describe human personality. These words were later reduced by Cattell, who used factor analysis to determine which words are used together and reduced the list to 35 broader personality characteristics (John and Srivastava 1999). Subsequent researchers repeated factor analysis on words and came up with a smaller number of broader characteristics like the Big Five (e.g., McCrae and Costa 2008). The usage of factor analyses on data that describes others was repeated in many human languages and also with non-human animals (e.g., Gosling and John 1999). By the term „environmentB I mean the cultural or language environment in which the researched phenomena are constituted. In my view researched phenomena cannot be separated from the environment given by language and culture.
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The lexical approach as it was practiced has been criticized by many scholars, who focused mainly on elaborating what the personality is (e.g., McAdams 1992; Epstein 2010; Uher 2013). In this text I focus on the image of personality in language (especially on researchers’ approaches to transferring research about personality image to different cultural environments), not on the personality itself. 2 How personality is mirrored in languages cannot be studied before it is understood what a language is. I accept the idea that studying language itself for the purpose of looking for personality as mirrored in a language is meaningful research.3 However, I will show that personality psychologists failed in doing this, because they did not thoroughly think about what the language was before studying it empirically. The common strategy for research based on the lexical hypothesis is to take a dictionary and select words for a lexical study. Words are rated by people and a factor analysis is performed on these ratings. The lexical hypothesis states 2
I do not discuss personality itself, many other texts have been written about that (see citations above). Instead I will discuss the research of the image of personality in language. It seems to me that lexical hypothesis researchers chose a part of language which is not very culturally variable (the lexicon), examined this part of the language to find terms which should describe personality, used instruments based on these terms in order to find that personality is not very culturally variable, and finally created theories based on these results in order to define personality as culturally invariant (e.g., McCrae and Costa 2008) – and this further justifies considering personality to be culturally invariant in psychological research (e.g. in Ng et al. 2016). When McCrae and Costa (2008) say that personality traits do not vary across cultures because Bthe same five factors were found in all cultures studies so far^ (p. 164), they use a statement that is based on circular logic: they choose something not very culturally variable in language for research; they define personality using the results of this research; and they end by stating that personality is not very culturally variable, which retroactively justifies the original choice. However, this approach explains nothing about what would be found if culturally variable parts of languages (and culturally variable methods) were chosen to research the personality image in it and whether the personality was defined through the results of such research. In this text I discuss the first step in this logical chain (or circle): what parts of language should be included to adequately study the image of personality in languages. Also, it should be noted that there might be many simultaneously valid definitions of personality. Markus and Kitayama (1998) propose the Binterdependent model of personality^, where the personality is dependent on the relationship context. A person, therefore, might have a different personality in every relationship. Because the way a person changes his self in relationships differs among different cultures (Choi and Han 2009), each culture may need its own definition of personality across relationships. Multiple valid definitions of personality might exist depending on the cultural context. This might need to move from the definition of personality as based on the indigenous western psychology (Bwestern^ here means an allegedly homogenous cultural entity) to definitions based on indigenized western (Bwestern^ here means many cultural entities) and non-western psychologies (Yang 2012). If personality is a culturally-based phenomena rooted in interindividual relationships, its research should leave objective research methodology towards an intersubjective methodology (Mascolo 2017). Imagine an article about the researchers’ approach to transferring methodology/terms concerning God’s representation in human languages between different cultural/language environments. Such an article would not need to prove (or postulate) God’s existence. If you replace BGod^ with Bpersonality^ in the previous two sentences, you can see that the example given in this text about researchers’ approach to mirroring personality in language is a valid example of transferring methodology between different cultural environments even if the personality does not actually exist and the research based on lexical hypothesis was just a kind of religious practice. That is also why I do not include any definition of personality here – discussing the definition of personality is not necessary to address the transfer of personality image research methodology between different cultural and language environments. Because personality can be anything in the context of this text (as long as it is seen as meaningful to study language to research at least the personality mirrored in language), if the reader needs some definition of personality to read this text, s/he can use any kind of definition based on their own preunderstanding. 3 In other words, I assume that there exists at least one human language and at least one research method, the implementation of which in that language might reveal something about personality. This is weaker assumption than the lexical hypothesis itself.
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that „important personality differences should be encoded into language [emphasized by author]B4 (Ashton and Lee 2005:8), and if the term Blanguage^ is replaced by its equivalent terms, then the lexical hypothesis states that „important personality differences should be encoded into lexicon, grammar, intonation, etc.^. However, when this hypothesis is extended to the statement „one might obtain a representative sample of personality characteristics by finding the set of familiar personality-descriptive terms of a languageB (p. 8), it misses an important point: the term „language^ does not equal the term Blexicon^. Language does not consist only of a lexicon, but it is also made up of grammatical rules, intonation, language customs, etc. The fact that the term Blexical hypothesis^ is used does not mean that the word Blanguage^ used in this hypothesis formulation refers only to the lexicon; nevertheless, lexical hypothesis researchers use the word Blanguage^ this way. This leads to results which do not really examine the role of languages in mirroring personality. To stress that the hypothesis called Blexical hypothesis^ actually concerns language, I will use term Blanguage hypothesis^ to denote this hypothesis in the rest of this text. The way that researchers using the language hypothesis came to the misunderstanding that Blanguage^ = Blexicon^ is well illustrated by Bkey premises of the lexical approach^ as referred to by Saucier and Goldberg (2001:848). The first four premises are: B1. Personality language refers to phenotypes and not genotypes. … 2. Important phenotypic attributes become encoded in the natural language. ... 3. The degree of representation of an attribute in language has some correspondence with the general importance of the attribute. … 4. The lexical perspective provides an unusually strong rationale for the selection of variables in personality research. ...^ (p. 848–849). While the term Blanguage^ used in the second and third premises might refer to the language as a whole, in the explanation of the third premise Saucier and Goldberg write: BAttributes that are represented by multiple terms in a language should appear as a factor in multivariate analyses...^ (p. 849). Here, they state that being represented in a language means being represented by a term in this language. They (perhaps unconsciously) assume that Blanguage^ = Blexicon^ and without noticing continue to use terms from the lexicon as the only representative of language in the rest of their article. The fourth premise then assumes that research should be made with the use of variables – a method appropriate only for studying something separated into its parts (and, therefore, not Blanguage as a whole^). The equation Battribute being represented in language^ = Battribute being represented in the lexicon^ might be true for English, because it does not have a lot of person-referring grammatical structures. As I will show in subsequent sections, this is not true for all languages. Nevertheless, the mainstream application of the language hypothesis does not research how personality is mirrored in the non-lexical structures of these languages, but only how it is mirrored by their lexicons. I will show two examples of this approach: the language hypothesis research of the Czech and Korean languages. 4
Note that here is nothing in this sentence which would imply that we are looking for traits when conducting research based on this hypothesis. If research based on the lexical hypothesis looks for personality traits, it has no root in the lexical hypothesis itself.
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Language Hypothesis Research in the Czech Republic and Korea Research based on the language hypothesis was done by Hřebíčková (1997, 2011) in the Czech language. She selected personality adjectives from Czech and ordered several judges to select those that were representative. This led to 366 adjectives which were used by subjects to rate personality. Subsequent factor analysis revealed a fivefactor solution similar to the English Big Five. Hřebíčková (1997, 2011) does not mention the possibility that it might be useful to examine the Czech language as a whole to find how it mirrors personality. Hahn et al. (1999) made a lexical-approach study of the Korean language. Korean personality adjectives were selected from student essays and the list of the most frequently used words. The resulting 406 adjectives were given to students to rate their personalities. This five factor solution given by factor analysis was also somehow similar to the English Big Five. Yet, Hahn et al. do not mention the possibility that it might be useful to examine other parts of Korean besides the lexicon when researching how the language reflects personality. The idea that personality is mirrored in vocabulary and not in other parts of the language might be true for English. When looking at the results of the Czech and Korean studies using the lexical approach, it might be concluded that these languages mirror personality in similar ways as English. However, both Czech and Korean language hypothesis research omitted the possibility that personality might be mirrored in some parts of the language other than vocabulary. In the next section I will show that there are grammatical structures that mirror personality in both the Czech and Korean languages.
Personality-Related Grammar in Czech and Korean Languages The Czech language has two styles for how to address people: formal (vykání) and more intimate (tykání – see Táhal 2010:25). (Similar structures also exist in German, Russian, and other languages.) The choice of form varies by generation. Children and young people always use the intimate style when speaking with each other. Older people usually use the formal style when speaking with strangers, and the intimate style when speaking with someone whom they know better and with whom they had previously agreed to speak intimately. This communication style is stable between two people: When meeting a stranger, people usually start in the formal style; when the relationship becomes less formal, they change to the intimate style. The change from formal to intimate is a sign of increasing intimacy. The key point is that when people do not want to become more intimate, they will not change their communication style even with someone whom they have known for a long time. To become more intimate in a one-to-one conversation depends on the personality of the communication partner. This is how the partner’s personality is mirrored in the speech style and related grammatical structures used by a Czech speaker. The Korean language distinguishes several speech levels, among them polite (ending with -요) and deferential (ending with -읍니다). Strauss and Jong (2005) show that
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changes between these two levels of speech are not that common due to the status difference between the speaker and the addressee, and they are mainly a sign of the exclusion (deferential) and the inclusion (polite) of the addressee into the speaker’s social domain. Deferential speech symbolizes/represents a larger distance between the speaker and the addressee and enlarges the boundary between them. Switching between the polite and deferential styles might be dependent on the speaker’s actual perception of the addressee’s personality. And research aiming to find how the personality is reflected in language might examine these changes. Korean has a large amount of honorific grammar. Sentences can have multiple honorific markers, which have a cumulative effect on the meaning — the more markers, the more the honorific effect of upon the sentence (Kim and Sells 2007). Korean speech levels differ by the amount of honorification given to the addressee by using these levels. The usage of these levels differs according to the age and social status of the speaker and the addressee. Two levels that provide a different level of honorification to the hearer are casual speech (반말) and polite speech (존댓말). When people of the same age and social status meet for the first time, they begin with polite speech; after a while, they might change to casual speech. This change signals the increase of intimacy between the communication partners. They might choose the speech level, but it is unnecessary. Such a change might be dependent on the opinion of the second person’s personality. In both the Czech and Korean languages, it is not necessary to use a personal pronoun to mark the speaker or the listener, but it is possible to do so (e.g., sentences with the literal translation „I drink teaB and „drink teaB have the same meaning). Oh (2007) found that, for Korean, the presence and absence of overt self- or other-references accomplishes various interactional objectives — B(self-)praising/blaming, responsibility-attribution, disagreement, projecting further talk by the current speaker...B (p. 462). It is likely that such explicit marking of the self/other would also reflect the speaker’s opinion about the other’s personality, so this is another way how the language mirrors personality. A similar connection between language and personality is also possible in Czech. A specific example of the connection between personality and grammar will help. Imagine the following situation: Person A parks a car. Person B parks another car so that it blocks A from leaving. A tells B that he will have a problem when he wants to leave. B has an unkind personality so, despite the fact that he clearly apparently heard and understood the problem, he ignores A. This forces A to stress his request. In Korean this might look as follows: A: 먼저 가주세요! (Meonjeo kajuseyo. – Go first. (Polite speech.)) B: (Does nothing.) A: 먼저 가! (or 먼저 가라니까!) (Meonjeo ka. Meonjeo karanikka. – Go first. (Casualspeech.)) In Czech it might look like this: A: Potřebuji odjet. (I need to leave. (literally: „Need to leave.B))
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B: (Does nothing.) A: Já potřebuji odjet. (I need to leave. (literally: „I need to leave.B)) In this example, B has some kind of personality. This personality is shown in his behavior. A sees this behavior and uses language to mark it. A usual study based on language hypothesis would look for a word used by A („unkindB, BunagreeableB). Yet, the part of the language used to mark B’s personality was not a word, but the grammar that was used. In Korean it was the usage of casual speech (instead of polite speech); in Czech it was the addition of the personal pronoun (instead of omitting the pronoun). Now imagine another situation: A and B argue on the street and C passes by. C has the kind of personality that makes him care about others and want to help when possible. He interrupts A and B: C: 무슨 일 있어요? (Museun il isseoyo? – What happened?) B: 아니에요. 신경 쓰지마세요. (Anieyo. Sinkyeong sseujimaseyo. – Nothing. Don’t care about us. (lit.: Don’t care about us.) ) C: 에이. 무슨 일 있는거 같은데요. (Ei. Museun il issneunko kateundeyo. – Well, I think something happens here.) B: 아니라니까요. 그쪽은 신경쓰지마세요. (Aniranikkayo. Keujjokeun sinkyeong sseujimaseyo. – Nothing. Don’t care about us. (lit.: You don’t care about us.) ) Here, C’s personality caused him to continue to interrupt A and B even after he was initially rebuffed. B reacted by repeating the sentence and using a personal pronoun (you) to stress his request. C’s personality caused him to use a behavior and this behavior was marked by the grammar used by B (the usage of a personal pronoun).5 As shown above, both the Czech and Korean languages might mirror personality not only by their lexicons, but also by their grammatical structures.6 Research examining how these languages mirror personality should first acknowledge this and then choose 5
People cannot watch personality directly, so they assess it according to their experience with the behavior of others. In language hypothesis research as it was practiced by researchers cited in this text, people conduct some language behavior (choosing a word from the lexicon) after having some experience with the behavior of others (in person perception accuracy studies it could be a very short-term experience; in studies of closed others’ perception it is a long-term experience). In the examples provided, people conduct some language behavior (grammar change) after having a short-term experience with others. People might also use some types of grammar in long-term relationships depending on the behavior (and personality) of the partners in these long-term relationships. If terms denoting personality in language hypothesis research were created by watching different types of grammatical behavior, they might be different from those terms created by watching how people choose words from a lexicon. 6 Another example of grammar serving as a mirror for personality in language is the Chinese sentence-ending particle LE, which serves as a marker that the speaker has ended his conversation turn and that it is time for the addressee to react (Lu and Su 2009). Linkov et al. (2014) have shown that the usage of LE in communication to address another person is related to the opinion that the addressee develops about a speaker. The frequency of the usage of LE might be related to the speaker’s opinion about the addressee as well. The speaker likely cuts his or her speech utterances depending on the personality of the addressee — with some addressees the speaker would use LE more often, with others less often.
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appropriate methods to study the image of personality in such language environments (since the usage of grammar is dynamic, proper research might need to observe the language behavior of people and the interactions among them). Nevertheless, this has not happened: Researchers in both environments chose to study only the lexicons and use a static method for the examination of the personality’s image in that lexicon. They did not research how personality is mirrored in the grammars of their languages. I will show some reasons why this did not happen.
Why Language Hypothesis Researchers Failed to Include Personality-Related Grammar in their Research: Copypasting Fallacy and the Omission of Thorough Introspection Personality-related grammar was not included in the language hypothesis research in the Czech and Korean cases because of something which might be called the copypasting fallacy. The copypasting fallacy occurs when a researcher takes the definitions of objects and the relations between these objects in one cultural environment and uses them in a new environment in which the research is conducted. New objects may exist in the new environment. Or objects from the old environment might exist in a different form. These original objects might not exist at all. The relations between objects might be different. Nevertheless, the researcher believes that these objects and their place in the structures of the new environment are similar to that in the old environment – and this false belief is the copypasting fallacy. Researchers in the Czech and Korean cases did not think about the research process and just copied and pasted an algorithm from another cultural environment – and they forgot to check if the objects to be researched had similar meanings in the new environment (and if they were organized in the same way). Specifically, they assumed that the term Bgrammar^ has the same role/meaning in the Czech and Korean languages as it has in English, and that the grammatical structure plays the same role in mirroring personality. The copypasting fallacy – the absence of considering a research question and the appropriate methods before applying them – is connected to the belief that psychology is mainly an empirical science and that it progresses mainly by collecting data and testing hypotheses. Scientists, therefore, follow the empirical data collecting process without deeper thought. However, psychology is also an introspective science that requires the contemplation of one’s own intuitions. The research process in psychology works in two steps. First, the scientist has to develop an intuitive understanding of the phenomenon, which is only introspectively available. Such an intuitive understanding is based on the personal and cultural history of the scientist (Valsiner 2006) and serves Bas an epistemological tool to which one should appeal in the development … of science in general^ (MacDougall 2010:145). Second, when the scientist reaches an intuitive understanding of the problem through introspection, he or she moves to extrospection and the collection of empirical data about other subjects (Valsiner 2006). Psychology as a science is not primarily empirical, but the first part of its research process should be realized through introspection which describes the researcher’s intuitive understanding of the problem. This intuition is Bthat which establishes the very basis on which reasoning can proceed^ (Osbeck 2001:120).
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When thorough introspection is omitted, the research lacks quality. What happened in both the Czech and Korean cases of research based on the language hypothesis was that the researchers did not undertake a thorough introspective analysis and they did not think about what the language meant for them – the introspective part of their research was reduced to the mere control for whether it is possible to copy an approach from another cultural environment without thinking about it more deeply. What constitutes these languages is different from that which constitutes English; this would have been revealed if the researchers had done more introspective thinking about what their language was composed of and how it might mirror personality.
Feelings as Necessary for Rethinking Terms and Methods in a New Cultural Environment Psychological research which proceeds on purely empirical standards where the same terms and methods are used regardless of the eventual research environment would hardly lead to significant scientific progress. This progress is marked by the explanatory power of scientific theories (Brinkmann and Eronen 2016) – in the case of psychology by their ability to make people in some environment understandable and explain the logic for their thinking and behavior. A theory using terms and methods that ignore the cultural environment where they are used (like standard research based on language hypothesis) would not explain people’s behavior as well as a theory rooted in the environment in question (e.g., like Shimcheong psychology in Korea, see Choi and Han 2008). Brinkmann and Eronen (2016:37) note that Btheoretical development in psychology is hampered by the implicit assumption that theories are simply better the more general they are^ and recommend that scientific progress might be realized by focusing more on local mechanisms. An attempt to reach consensus between general theories and the specific cultural environment was made by Sundararajan (2015), who recommends using indigenous categories as criteria to determine the adequacy of the scientific models developed in another cultural environment. She tries to map a theory that comes from an old cultural environment to a theory that had already been developed in the new environment. Such an approach might be successful if a comparable local theory had already been developed. Unfortunately, this is rarely the case – more likely, there would be no local theory developed for a phenomenon compatible with the imported one. The researcher would need to rely on less clear cues than a fully-developed local theory when rethinking whether the terms and methods s/he is going to use fit the local environment. A historical example of the development of an idea in mathematics may help. Fermat’s Last Theorem was formulated in 1637 by Pierre de Fermat. It waited until 1994 to be proven by Andrew Wiles. During this time it was uncertain whether the theorem was true. The degree of certainty grew when special cases were proven, but it was not completely certain for more than 300 years. The same exists with the development of the terms and methods that lead to the formulation of a theory. At the beginning, these terms and methods
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are uncertain and come mostly as mere feelings. Methods and terms that are already fully developed in the original cultural environment would be much more certain – and look more scientific – than terms and methods that would be more suitable for the new environment, which would likely not have yet been developed and which would eventually have better explanatory power once they were fully developed. The researcher should keep in mind that it is uncertainty which leads to scientific progress (Clegg 2010) and that mere feelings coming to his or her mind while thinking about the research question s/he will implement in the new cultural environment might eventually prove better than more scientific-looking terms and methods from an old environment. S/he should not insist on the old environment terms — the terms should be stabilized only after they reach the point where they sufficiently describe reality. Brown (1998:129) says: BTheorizing actually changes our concepts. No concept is static, we shall always have to modify our existing definitions^. Rethinking an old environment’s terms and methods might come through thoughts and feelings originating from thorough introspection.7
The Role of Introspection in the Implementation of Research Questions and Terminology in a New Cultural Environment Important insights are missed when an algorithm developed in one language/ cultural environment is copy-pasted and reused in another language/cultural environment. When comparing different cultural environments, one needs to think about the meaning of the research question in both environments. The decision for a specific method should follow the understanding of the research problem – Balready existing methods can be used only when there is clear theoretical ground for demonstrating that the methods chosen correspond to the question^ (Toomela 2011:28). Concepts and methods built on an intuitive understanding of one culture cannot be reused in another culture without determining if they are really appropriate. And rethinking these concepts and methods needs introspection (Locke 2009).8
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Some scholars might think that such thorough rethinking of terms and methods used in research is a necessary part of a valid research. For example, Sages (2003:59) notes: „A valid research should be one, which radically modifies the pre-understanding, almost the sheer perception of the intentional object. I would like to name this aspect of validity horizon-opening validity.B 8 Linguistics has a similar problem as psychology: What is the place of introspection in research. Some linguists assume that Bobservational/experimental sciences like socio- and psycholinguistics necessarily presuppose an intuitional science^ (Itkonen 1981:129). Autonomous linguistics is such a science: „Autonomous linguistics rests on the use of intuition, and therefore its methodology is a particular case of general methodology of the intuitional sciences. … however, no such methodology has yet been formulated. Therefore the practitioners of autonomous linguistics, in order not to loose their methodological self-respect, have been forced to accept the methodology of the observational/experimental sciences, which culminates in the methodology of physics. But this requires that although they in fact use intuition, they must deny doing soB (p. 130). This is something which has happened to psychology as well. Despite many psychological articles beginning with some intuitive understanding of some phenomenon and ending with a different intuitive understanding of that phenomenon — and researchers might omit the number-magic in between — they must pretend to follow the methodology of empirical sciences.
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Every researcher does some kind of introspective thinking 9 when s/he thinks whether and how s/he can implement a theory or method. When moving some research question from one cultural environment to another, more than just thinking about whether it is possible to translate terms and methods from another environment is required. Such partial introspection is not enough; the researcher should thoroughly contemplate the meanings of the terms in the new environment, and especially about whether something exists in the new environment which did not exist in the old one and which is relevant to the research question being introspectively rethought. A thorough introspection is necessary to proceed research well. The role of introspection is in redirecting attention, changing its span, exploring what is usually neglected, and (re) establishing Ban intimate and close contact with what is to be explored (to fit the field of lived experience)^ (Bitbol and Petitmengin 2013b:181). Introspection is not a very reliable source of information if it is not well rethought by the person who tries to describe his or her intuitions. To describe one’s lived experience is not an easy process and it requires checking one’s description several times before it may be recognized as accurate. Bitbol and Petitmengin (2013a) asked subjects to check the accuracy of their introspective descriptions before they finally used them. This technique might also be used for checking the introspections of researchers from other cultural environments when the researcher wants to use their theories and methods in his or her own environment. The researcher should ask two questions: 1. BDo I have the feeling that the theory/method satisfactorily describes/ assesses the experience we are living here?^ 2. BDo I have the feeling that the theory/ method completely describes the experience we are living here?^ Language hypothesis researchers cited in this article did not, at least, ask themselves the second question when they were preparing to adapt the language hypothesis approach from English to their actual research environments. Using introspection in this way would, however, allow comparative cultural research to produce meaningful results. The main role of introspection in cultural-comparative psychology is to decide if some statement formulated from the perspective of one environment is meaningful in the environment where it will be used for comparison. The researcher should first think if the terms used in a statement are meaningful in the environment in question. After that, there should be a reexamination of the meaningfulness of the statement as formulated with the usage of these terms (terms might be meaningful, but they might be in different relation to one another as compared to the original environment). Then, the researcher should think about whether something is not missing in the statement and if s/he could define some terms which were not meaningful in the original environment, but which are meaningful in the new environment. Finally, the researcher should rethink whether the proposed methods are meaningful to be used with the statement that emerged in the previous steps. This process should lead to the formulation of a hypothesis or statement which is meaningful in the current research environment. 9
Introspection may not be a single process. It might be the plurality of different processes (Schwitzgebel 2012). It might be that introspection means different things in the context of researching different psychological phenomena. One kind of introspection might be useful in one type of research, an other kind in another type of research. If this is the case, the kind of introspection I write about in this text is an introspection for thinking about personality image in language.
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A researcher using introspection in cultural-comparative psychology might get inspiration from Husserl’s method of eidetic analysis (Wertz 2010). Eidos is the essential quality of an object. To reach this essence of an individual, the researcher should use free imaginative variation for what is possible and impossible regarding the essence. This free imagination differs from empirical generalization by its use of fantasy and the inclusion of an infinity of possible variations. Such a process is not automatic or easy, but very labor intensive. Essence is approached by eidetic intuition, which departs from a perception, a recollection, a judgment, or an imagination. The researcher might begin with investigating his own personal life, but the imaginative variation requires seeking the examples of other people living through the subject matters under investigation. This means that the psychological investigator should understand the lives of the people whom he researches. This requires the cultural competence of the researcher: Bwhat something is psychologically is culturally constituted and may be essentially limited to the human life in one or more cultures. A culture-bound psychological phenomenon is unimaginable, inconceivable, and impossible in other cultural contexts, for it is incompossible with the communal lifeworld and institutions of other cultures. Therefore, knowledge of culture-bound psychological structures requires comparative understanding and knowledge of cultures^ (Wertz 2010:293). 10 Such eidetic psychology Bis an indispensable methodological and conceptual foundation for empirical psychological investigations, just as mathematics has been for physics^ (Wertz 2010:297).11
How to Improve Cultural-Comparative Psychological Research about How Natural Language Reflects Personality Introspection in language hypothesis research might be used in the following way. Researchers in the language hypothesis tradition need to realize that Blanguage consists of components with relatively distinct principles of organization, perhaps even distinct principles for different subcomponents within phonology, morphosyntax, and semantics. Each of these sets of organizational principles — besides their necessity in understanding language as a cognitive system — needs to be compared for similarities and differences against the principles found in other cognitive systemsB (Ibarretxe-Antuñano 2005:253). One needs to study which subcomponents are contained in each language separately and only then decide which subcomponents might serve for some comparison (and not to take a subcomponent Psychological processes cannot be abstracted from culture, because they „are inherently social, in the sense that they are the outcome of a prolonged process of interacting with other persons^ (Smedslund 2016b:52). 11 Devlin (2008) doubts why mathematics is the same for all humans. It might be so, because mathematicians derive their concepts from intuitions coming from the physical world: Bsince the metaphor-iteration process begins in the physical world, which is the same for all of us, we all end up with the same mathematical domain^ (p. 365). However, intuitions in psychology come from the psychical world, which is not the same for all of us. Given that the psychical world is different for different people, psychological research could not be based on following any kind of algorithm for researching all of humanity. Coming up with additional research methods might show the need for the alternative mathematization (Linkov 2014a) of related phenomena. 10
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from one language and then look for the same subcomponent in other languages as in the language hypothesis tradition). There might also exist other parts of language — besides the lexicon and grammar — that reflect the personality of other people.12 These might be prosody, phonetics (like in reflecting emotions, see Majid 2012), intonation, frequency of gazes, etc. Research on how language mirrors personality should begin with an examination — by the introspection of the researcher and other speakers of the language in question — of which parts of the language might be used for this purpose. A collection of empirical data about the usage of some specific parts of the language should follow.13 If we return to the Czech and Korean languages cases referred to above, the research process would change the following way if researchers used thorough introspection before selecting methods and starting to collect data: the researcher of the Czech language would find that formal and intimate speech and the possible omission of personal pronouns exist in the Czech language and that both might mirror the personality of the people involved in the conversation; and the researcher examining the Korean language would find that casual and polite (and other) speech style and the possible omission of personal pronouns exist in the Korean language and all might mirror the personality of the people involved in the conversation. Both researchers would conduct and publish research and then they would find that someone in the other language had examined similar things when researching the image of personality in that language. Some comparative research might start and the understanding of the language images of human personality might improve. If all research of the image of personality in a language starts with the researcher’s thorough introspection and specific research questions follow, many possible similarities between different pairs of languages might appear and our understanding of mirroring personality in languages might improve. Such research should focus not only on the most average speakers of languages, but it might include those who speak less Bstandard^ versions of the languages in question. All native speakers do not use the grammar of their native language in the same way. Different speakers use different grammars (Dąbrowska 2012), so research needs to sample different populations to observe how the usage of different grammar reflects personality. Pidgins developed by those who have limited access to a standard language might resemble the earlier stages of the development of that language (Botha 2006), which might allow researchers to study how simpler versions of grammatical structures 12
The misconception that language consists only of words does not exist only in lexical hypothesis research in personality psychology. Ochs (2012:147-148) notes: BThe emphasis on language as words in psycho-cultural anthropology means that there is a heavy reliance on only one linguistic unit to capture relevant meanings. … Language, of course, is more than words.... as a linguistic anthropologist I am under the thrall of how morphosyntactic forms encode all-important temporal, epistemic, affective, modal, actional, stative, attributive, and locative meanings. … And I am baffled why psychological anthropology so often does not insist on finer linguistic discriminations in fathoming the socio-cultural and individual architecture of mental processes, states, and conditions.^ 13 Factor analysis is likely not a suitable method to accomplish this, because it requires data to be of a similar kind (different grammatical systems inside a language are not of a similar kind). There is likely no universal method for lexical hypothesis research (Linkov 2014b), so a successful approach must not strive for universality. This might require the employment of different approaches for different language environments; nevertheless, psychology is a multi-paradigmatic science (Marček and Urbánek 2011), so it might benefit from employing multiple views.
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reflect personality. Pidginization also occurs during the learning of the language by its non-native speakers (Al-Jasser 2012). Different stages of second language acquisition allow one to understand the second language environment itself (Schrauf 2002). How personality is mirrored by language in different stages of language acquisition could be studied. It is also possible to study which different parts of grammar are used by native speakers of different languages when mirroring personality with the second language. Such dynamic processes — and not dictionaries — are a real laboratory for psychologists to study how language reflects personality. I don’t know what might come from the comparison of many language environments and many different cultures. I also don’t know which methods might be suitable for comparison of specific language environments. It could not be a standard questionnaire method, because Binformation about complex interaction patterns and responserepertories is lost if one merely studies first responses to standardized questions or static situations^ (Smedslund 2016a). Methods should be chosen with respect to the specific environment and not by any kind of methodological bureaucracy characterized by standardized procedures and methods (Brinkmann 2015). What is and how it is researched in the language environment where a researcher wants to search for an image of personality in the language should be based on that researcher’s introspective insight into the environment.
Conclusion Language hypothesis researchers look for a mirror of personality in language. They, however, forget to include grammar in their research. This leads to a situation where researchers in language environments that contain person-related grammar fail to research this grammar when conducting language hypothesis research, like in the Czech and Korean languages. Such an approach is an example of the copypasting fallacy — the usage of a research approach from another cultural environment that does not fit the current research environment. Researchers doing cultural-comparative research should use thorough introspection to recognize whether theories from one cultural environment are meaningful in the new environment. Specifically, language hypothesis research should include various parts of languages in various stages of the development of language skills – and researchers should use thorough introspection to recognize which parts of the languages and which stages of their development are meaningful to their research. If language hypothesis research includes these changes, it does not mean that it would help to clear up all of the possible questions about personality. Such research examines only the images of personality in different human languages, so it might reveal only what is reflected in some human languages. Nevertheless, among the many languages being used around the globe, there might be some which would allow us to discover something about personality that we do not yet know. I have shown that thorough introspection is necessary for the implementation of a research question in a new cultural environment. Such introspection should not copy and paste the research algorithm from the original environment, but it should rethink the terms and methods used in the original environment from the point of view of the new environment. There might be no well-developed terms for describing the
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phenomenon in question in the new environment, so the researcher should include mere feelings into his or her thoughts even if these feelings cannot compete with the welldeveloped terms from the original environment. The terms and methods used might, in the end, be very different from those used in the original environment. This approach would create terms and theories with a better ability to explain and understand people’s lives in particular cultural environments. Cultural-comparative language hypothesis research is an example of looking for one universal method and one universal type of discovery as it might be in the natural sciences. Psychology is a science about humans. Because humans are thinking and speaking creatures, psychology can use an opportunity not available to many other sciences — introspection. The mainstream language hypothesis tradition is an example of research where the methodology used came from natural science’s strive for universality and the transference of researched phenomena into numbers for statistical analyses. While trying to formulate universal personality theories, psychology should not lose the foundations which are not shared with sciences that deal with non-humans: it is a science about thinking animals living in different cultural environments, and its theories and methods are meaningful only if they are meaningful for people in these environments. Language hypothesis research shows that the situation in psychology is similar to the situation in (Czech) theatre science, as described by Janoušek (2008). Theatre science differs from literary science in that there is not only text, but also a context to the text — scenery, music, interplay between actor and public. When studying local theatre, theatre science mostly ignores text and focuses mainly on the context. However, when studying foreign theatre, there is often no access to the context, so theatre science focuses mainly on the text. If researchers in theatre science chose the (Czech) theatre science perspective for studying foreign theatre and if they use only text as the medium for research, the theatre science would become literary science. As theatre science differs from literary science by also having context, psychology differs from many other sciences by having (introspective) context for the description of people. If psychology ignored this context and chose the English language perspective (or the biological perspective), and if it chose the lexicon (or behavior shared with non-human animals) to research personality (and ignored what is meaningful for people who are objects of the research), it would merge into biology and other life sciences. Using introspection in research process, and keeping in mind that a person is always rooted in some cultural environment, is necessary for psychology to keep its identity.14 Acknowledgements I thank Dylan Glynn, Lubomír Linkov, Blanka Ferklová, and Youngran Kwak for their ideas, which helped me in creating this text. This article was produced with the financial support of the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports within the National Sustainability Programme I, project of Transport R&D Centre (LO1610), on the research infrastructure acquired from the Operation Programme Research and Development for Innovations (CZ.1.05/2.1.00/03.0064).
The term Bintrospection^ as used in this paper means mostly introspection in the context of conceptual analysis or the evaluation of terms/methods/theories. Nevertheless, introspection usually means a research method in most published literature. This paper supports the idea that introspection is necessary in the evaluation of the terms and methods used in the formulation of theories and research problems. However, by supporting this usage of introspection, it also provides some support for the idea that introspection is useful as a method in psychological research.
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Author declares that he has no conflict of interest.
Ethical Approval This article does not contain any studies with human participants or animals performed by any of the authors.
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Integr Psych Behav Valsiner, J. (2006). Dangerous curves in knowledge construction within psychology. Fragmentation of methodology. Theory & Psychology, 16, 597–612. doi:10.1177/0959354306067439. Watanabe, T. (2010). Metascientific foundations for pluralism in psychology. New Ideas in Psychology, 28, 253–262. Wertz, F. J. (2010). The method of eidetic analysis for psychology. Les Collectifs du Cirp, 1, 281–300. Yang, K.-S. (2012). Indigenous psychology, westernized psychology, and indigenized psychology: a nonwestern Psychologist’s view. Chang Gung Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, 5(1), 1–32. Václav Linkov works as a researcher in transportation psychology at CDV - Transport Research Centre. He received master degrees in discrete mathematics and psychology and Ph.D. in social psychology from Masaryk University. He worked as a mathematics lecturer at Mendel University and database programmer in various companies. He spent a year studying intensive course of Korean language at Sungkyunkwan University and another two years studying Asia-Pacific studies at National Chengchi University. His past research concerned mainly personality psychology, social perception and deception detection. His current research interests are traffic and transportation psychology, comparative cultural psychology, East Asian studies, and programming driving simulators.