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The Effects of Personality on a Subject's Information Processing.

Walter McGhee¹; Michael D. Shields¹; Jacob G. Birnberg²

¹ Doctoral candidate, University of Pittsburgh. 1 · ² Professor of Business Administration, University of Pittsburgh. 2

ABSTRACT: This article contains an experiment designed to assess the importance of two personality variables, tolerance for ambiguity and decision style, on a subject's information processing. Subjects who were classified as heterogeneous on personality variables made homogeneous decisions. Further, subjects who were classified as having homogeneous linear decision models had heterogeneous personality classifications. Thus, in this experiment as in several other experiments (which are cited in this paper), personality variables do not appear to be useful in describing, understanding, or predicting human information processing. Psychological literature was reviewed which reinforces the finding of this and other papers--that personality alone does not account for much of the variance in a decision maker's behavior. The literature reviewed indicated that to account for large portions of the variance in behavior, human information processing models might need to take into account not only the processor, but also (particularly) the task and the processor-task interaction.

DOI

10.2308/tar-4485548

Volume

53 (3)

Pages

681-697

Language

en

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BibTeX

Sources

crossref openalex