New Zealand Psychological Society Annual Conference - Hamilton, Aug 23rd-26th, 2007

Two papers were presented:

#1: Good Judgment, Intelligence, and Personality. This 18-slide presentation is available for download here as a *PPT-minimized version, in a zip archive - 500kb. The 27-page presentation paper/notes document is available here, as a pdf file, 1.5Mb). The conference abstract: Managers and executives must make periodic decisions about how best to allocate their scarce financial and human resources.  Each decision they make is the end result of a problem solving exercise.  The quality of individual managerial problem solving and decision making is a function of intelligence. But, what is intelligence? The distinction made between intelligence and mental abilities is the key to this answer.  What various people call “g” concerns mental abilities. What we call “intelligence” is defined in terms of good judgment, and is a key component of successful managerial performance.  We argue that two kinds of reasoning are essential to all of this—problem finding and problem solving. Problem-finding involves detecting gaps, errors, or inconsistencies in phenomenal observations, trends, textual materials, or verbal arguments. Problem-solving involves determining what to do, once a problem has been identified as existing, stated or framed correctly. These are measurable constructs, with the initial attempt now available as the Hogan Business Reasoning Inventory. This paper presents the schematic model for version 2 - which is currently under development.

#2: Two Big Ideas. This 22-slide presentation is available for download here as a *PPT-minimized version, in a zip archive - 298kb. The 25-page presentation paper/notes document is available here, as a pdf file, 1.4Mb). This presentation discusses the implications of a quote from Bob Hogan (Hogan, R. (2005) In defense of personality measurement: new wine for old whiners. Human Performance, 18, 4, 331-341 … pp. 334-335) ...
"However, other people don’t have traits; rather, we assign trait terms to them as a way of summarizing recurring themes in their behavior. There is a difference between description and explanation, and trait theorists ignore the distinction". The second "Big Idea" was complexity theory and biological self-organization, and the implications of this knowledge for how psychologists construe variables, measurement, and causality.

I've also created a 3rd "micro-presentation" (just 4 slides!) and a 9 page explanatory document tying together the themes embedded in these other two presentations.
Brunswick Symmetry, Complexity, & Non-Quantitative Psychology - Tying it all Together. This 4-slide presentation is available for download here as a *PPT-minimized version, in a zip archive - 130kb. The 9-page presentation paper/notes document is available here, as a pdf file, 270kb).

My advice - skim the presentation notes for #1 and #2 (these contain the slides in the presentation itself) to get a feel for the kind, quality, and depth of information being presented. There is some very interesting information in these two - not least the highlighting of a 1989 US Government investigative Committee report which reduced Hunter and Schmidt's meta-analytic correlation between General Mental Abilities and Job Performance to 0.25 (from 0.5!), as well as the case report and images from the Lancet (July, 2007) of a normally functioning man with nearly 75% of his brain apparently "missing". Then skip straight to the presentation notes for #3 .. this one gives you the big picture logic and argument - which draws upon the content of #2 and #3 presentation notes.

And yes, the thinking leaves many questions unanswered - but as I say in Presentation #3 notes ...

"That’s science for you. It doesn’t come shrink-wrapped like the courses and text-books of quantitative psychology.".

Enjoy!

*PPT-Minimizer: PPTminimizer reduces PowerPoint presentations by up to 96% of their initial size in seconds. Therefore there is no need to unzip the optimized files in order to work on them. The graphics and embedded objects are automatically and intelligently optimized. PPTminimizer is the perfect tool for every PowerPoint -User: Mail Boxes, Servers and Networks are relieved of unnecessary data, and loading time is accelerated considerably. Th epresentations below were each 5 or 6 Mb in size - they have been reduced to about 600kb each! This is a real handy compression tool!