Sozial-, Wirtschafts- und Entscheidungspsychologie


Social, Economic, and Decision Psychology Blog

Archive for December, 2021

Wiebke Bleidorn

Wiebke Bleidorn, University of Zürich, will give a presentation in this week’s Social, Economic, and Decision Psychology research seminar (Thursday 16 December, 12:00-13:00).

Personality trait development across the lifespan—emerging principles and new directions

There is robust evidence that personality traits continue to develop throughout the lifespan, sometimes in response to environmental influences, including purposeful interventions. These findings would appear to provide a solid foundation for a deeper understanding of the course and causes of personality development. However, several open questions about the ways in which personality traits develop remain. In this talk, I will update and extend previous meta-analyses on personality trait development by synthesizing novel data on personality rank-order stability (k = 189, N = 178,503) and mean-level change (k = 276, N = 242,542) and discuss the role of genetic and environmental influences on personality development. In doing so, I will derive emerging principles of lifespan personality development, highlight limitations of past research, and present the broad outlines for future research, with a particular emphasis on relevant methodological complexities and conceptual challenges.

Anatolia Batruch

Anatolia Batruch, Faculty of Social and Political Sciences, University of Lausanne, will give a presentation in this week’s Social, Economic, and Decision Psychology research seminar (Thursday 9 December, 12:00-13:00).

School meritocracy and the reproduction of social class inequalities

The school system is intended to offer all students the same opportunities, but most international surveys reveal that lower social class students have lower grades and lower educational attainment as compared to higher social class students. In this talk, I will present a series of studies and experiments that show the specific contribution of school meritocracy in the reproduction of social class inequality in school and in society. I will first present evidence that teachers discriminate against lower-social class students. I will then present experiments documenting how school practices oriented towards meritocratic selection contribute to this discriminatory behavior. Finally, I will present data on the relationship between beliefs that schools are meritocratic and attitudes towards social class and income inequalities in the general population.