Creptical Arguments Of Personality Research

Some psychologists believe that personality tests are very useful tools as predictors of sports behavior, whilst others believe them to be useless. Morgan (1979) presented this argument as the credulous-skeptical argument. He noted that psychologists seemed to belong to one of two groups regarding the usefulness of personality traits to predict athletic success. First there was the credulous group who believed that personality profile could be useful, and secondly there was the skeptical group who believed that such profiles had little or no use. Morgan suggested that neither group was correct and he believed that athletic success was partly due to personality traits, but that situation was also important (Morgan was therefore adopting interactionist

Traits are relatively stable aspects of personality and early trait theorists such as Eysenck and Cattell argued that traits were mainly inherited. According to Eysneck, there are two main dimensions to personality. An introversion-extroversion dimension and a stable.-neurotic dimension

The research from the 1960s and 1970s yielded few useful conclusions about the relationship of personality to sport performance. Researchers were divided into two camps. Morgan(1980) described one group as taking a credulous viewpoint; that is, there researchers believed that personality is closely related to athletic success. The other group, he said, had a skeptical viewpoint, arguing that personality is not related to athletic success. Neither the credulous nor the skeptical viewpoint appears to have proved correct. Rather, Some relationship exists between personality and sport performance.

One large comparative study of athletes and nonathletes tested almost 2000 college males using Cattell’s 16 PF, which measures 16 personality factors or traits ( Schurr, Ashley & Joy 1977 ). No single personality profile was found that distinguished athletes from