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How good is your country? what you should know
Perron. in&id. Difl Vol. 18. No. 3, p. 449, 1995
ElsevierScienceLtd. Printed in Great Britain
BOOK REVIEWS Luciano L’Abate: A Theory of Personality Development
New York: Wiley (1994). 313 pp.
The author of this book, a sixty-five year old, retired professor of psychology, describes himself as “a student of personality for 64 years” and “a rank amateur as a social psychologist”. This says it all. His previous publications have been largely in the field of family therapy, and from his occasional lapses into it, this clearly is where his expertise lies. Superficially, the book looks impressive: it has almost 600 references, mostly post-1980, 31 tables and 19 figures. It contains no hard data. The tables reflect the author’s obsessive need to classify and the figures are notable more for their geometric elegance than for any enlightenment they might provide. The book has no focus because the author is for ever setting off in different directions, so when, by Chapter 13, he begins to use the term “the theory”, it is difficult to know what he is referring to. The book’s most promising development is its reworking of the old separation-individuation theme. Six stages of separation are proposed, ranging from symbiosis (minimal) to autism (maximal) and the characteristics of each are described. The four extreme positions are referred to as undifferentiated and linked with adjustment, and the two central positions as differentiated, and linked with adjustment. It is proposed that low levels of differentiation are associated with dichotomous thinking and abrupt role reversals; an idea that might be worth pursuing. Beyond this, there is some useful speculation about the well-defined and the poorly-defined self, selfishness and selflessness, and degrees of self-importance, but nothing that has not been better dealt with by others. The book does not stand up as a serious contribution to personality theory. John Birtchnell
R. B. Cattell: How Good is Your Counrry? What You Should Know. Washington, DC. Institute for the Study of Man, Mankind Quarterly Monograph Number 5. ISBN O-941694-44-5. This book is immediately recognizable as a product of that most fecund of authors, now in his nineties, Raymond B. Cattell. About a third (37 out of 115) references are to Cattell himself, including books printed 55 years apart (1933 and 1987). The style is engaging, challenging and mocking. And of course, multi-variate statistics are the answers to all of our woes. The book is about the taxonomizing of countries by use of factor analysis. The aim is to describe empirically, by using 78 variables as diverse as deaths by syphilis (per 100,000) Jews per capita, percentage of illiterates and sugar consumption per capita, the personalities of culture. Cattell, who has always favoured neologisms, no doubt in search of eponymous fame uses the term syntuliry. His argument is that whereas many historical, political and analytic writers have attempted to classify countries, they have done this intuitively, the result being many different contradictory systems. What one needs is an empirical multivariate approach. Cattell has in fact been pursuing this exercise for 40 years as he used the term syntality as early as 1950 in the Journal ofSocial Psychology. The idea is fairly simple-get a lot of reliable socio-economic data (hoping it is accurate and salient) on as many countries as are available and throw it into a factor analysis-oblique not orthogonal. Step two is to attempt to interpret the 19 to 21 factors. Step three, try to provide some validity evidence for the either common-sensical or oddly heterogenous factors that emerge. Factors have been labelled. Thus we have (1) Vigorous development (9) Cosmopolitan Muslim and (14) Orderly self sufficient. Because he only has a grid (80 X 120) both countries and economic variables can be factored and pretty maps plotted. Having done this analysis Cattell goes way beyond the data given with many speculations which certainly makes this far from a dry read. In essence we have another 16PF, not for individuals but for countries. We have exactly the same Cattellian formulae applied. On the one hand I believe Cattell is correct. I believe it is quite possible, indeed preferable, to replace speculative taxonomization with multi-variate statistics. In this sense he is a pioneer. But some of the problems remain. Why use an oblique and not an orthogonal rotation? How stable, replicable is the analysis? How good, useful or salient were the input variables? Indeed, were the country comparison data not based on an opportunistic assembly of pretty dubious econometric data? Surely it would be better to choose better data, even psychological data, to throw into the factor analysis. I suppose what disappointed me with the analysis was the fact that the results are so common-sensical. The countries fit together so logically-thus we have all the Scandinavian countries, all the African countries and Central/South American countries clustering together. Couldn’t a 14 year old with a Q sort and a rudimentary knowledge of history and geography do likewise? Cattell has not read the literature. There is no mention of Hofstede’s book that has electrified the world of Internationalist Management. Richard Lynn’s latest book used 12,000 subjects from 40 countries to do what Cattell has done but using psychological data. What I believe is interesting about Hofstede, and much less so about Cattell is that he has fewer, more interesting, orthogonal psychological dimensions: individual-collectivism; low-high power distance; low-high uncertainty avoidance and masculinity-femininity. Furthermore the countries don’t fit together in socio-historical terms. Thus the top five countries in terms of masculinity are Japan, Austria, Venezuela, Italy and Switzerland. Cattell’s little book (only 120 pages) will sit on my rapidly expanding cross-cultural shelf. I am pleased that he and his colleagues are continuing to pursue work in the field but I fear the pages of Hofstede (1984) and Lynn (1991) will appear more thumbed in years to come.
REFERENCES Hofstede, G. (I 984). Cultures Consequences. London: Sage. Lynn, R. (199 1). The Secret of the Miracle Economy. London: Social Affairs Unit. Adrian Furnham 449
ElsevierScienceLtd. Printed in Great Britain
BOOK REVIEWS Luciano L’Abate: A Theory of Personality Development
New York: Wiley (1994). 313 pp.
The author of this book, a sixty-five year old, retired professor of psychology, describes himself as “a student of personality for 64 years” and “a rank amateur as a social psychologist”. This says it all. His previous publications have been largely in the field of family therapy, and from his occasional lapses into it, this clearly is where his expertise lies. Superficially, the book looks impressive: it has almost 600 references, mostly post-1980, 31 tables and 19 figures. It contains no hard data. The tables reflect the author’s obsessive need to classify and the figures are notable more for their geometric elegance than for any enlightenment they might provide. The book has no focus because the author is for ever setting off in different directions, so when, by Chapter 13, he begins to use the term “the theory”, it is difficult to know what he is referring to. The book’s most promising development is its reworking of the old separation-individuation theme. Six stages of separation are proposed, ranging from symbiosis (minimal) to autism (maximal) and the characteristics of each are described. The four extreme positions are referred to as undifferentiated and linked with adjustment, and the two central positions as differentiated, and linked with adjustment. It is proposed that low levels of differentiation are associated with dichotomous thinking and abrupt role reversals; an idea that might be worth pursuing. Beyond this, there is some useful speculation about the well-defined and the poorly-defined self, selfishness and selflessness, and degrees of self-importance, but nothing that has not been better dealt with by others. The book does not stand up as a serious contribution to personality theory. John Birtchnell
R. B. Cattell: How Good is Your Counrry? What You Should Know. Washington, DC. Institute for the Study of Man, Mankind Quarterly Monograph Number 5. ISBN O-941694-44-5. This book is immediately recognizable as a product of that most fecund of authors, now in his nineties, Raymond B. Cattell. About a third (37 out of 115) references are to Cattell himself, including books printed 55 years apart (1933 and 1987). The style is engaging, challenging and mocking. And of course, multi-variate statistics are the answers to all of our woes. The book is about the taxonomizing of countries by use of factor analysis. The aim is to describe empirically, by using 78 variables as diverse as deaths by syphilis (per 100,000) Jews per capita, percentage of illiterates and sugar consumption per capita, the personalities of culture. Cattell, who has always favoured neologisms, no doubt in search of eponymous fame uses the term syntuliry. His argument is that whereas many historical, political and analytic writers have attempted to classify countries, they have done this intuitively, the result being many different contradictory systems. What one needs is an empirical multivariate approach. Cattell has in fact been pursuing this exercise for 40 years as he used the term syntality as early as 1950 in the Journal ofSocial Psychology. The idea is fairly simple-get a lot of reliable socio-economic data (hoping it is accurate and salient) on as many countries as are available and throw it into a factor analysis-oblique not orthogonal. Step two is to attempt to interpret the 19 to 21 factors. Step three, try to provide some validity evidence for the either common-sensical or oddly heterogenous factors that emerge. Factors have been labelled. Thus we have (1) Vigorous development (9) Cosmopolitan Muslim and (14) Orderly self sufficient. Because he only has a grid (80 X 120) both countries and economic variables can be factored and pretty maps plotted. Having done this analysis Cattell goes way beyond the data given with many speculations which certainly makes this far from a dry read. In essence we have another 16PF, not for individuals but for countries. We have exactly the same Cattellian formulae applied. On the one hand I believe Cattell is correct. I believe it is quite possible, indeed preferable, to replace speculative taxonomization with multi-variate statistics. In this sense he is a pioneer. But some of the problems remain. Why use an oblique and not an orthogonal rotation? How stable, replicable is the analysis? How good, useful or salient were the input variables? Indeed, were the country comparison data not based on an opportunistic assembly of pretty dubious econometric data? Surely it would be better to choose better data, even psychological data, to throw into the factor analysis. I suppose what disappointed me with the analysis was the fact that the results are so common-sensical. The countries fit together so logically-thus we have all the Scandinavian countries, all the African countries and Central/South American countries clustering together. Couldn’t a 14 year old with a Q sort and a rudimentary knowledge of history and geography do likewise? Cattell has not read the literature. There is no mention of Hofstede’s book that has electrified the world of Internationalist Management. Richard Lynn’s latest book used 12,000 subjects from 40 countries to do what Cattell has done but using psychological data. What I believe is interesting about Hofstede, and much less so about Cattell is that he has fewer, more interesting, orthogonal psychological dimensions: individual-collectivism; low-high power distance; low-high uncertainty avoidance and masculinity-femininity. Furthermore the countries don’t fit together in socio-historical terms. Thus the top five countries in terms of masculinity are Japan, Austria, Venezuela, Italy and Switzerland. Cattell’s little book (only 120 pages) will sit on my rapidly expanding cross-cultural shelf. I am pleased that he and his colleagues are continuing to pursue work in the field but I fear the pages of Hofstede (1984) and Lynn (1991) will appear more thumbed in years to come.
REFERENCES Hofstede, G. (I 984). Cultures Consequences. London: Sage. Lynn, R. (199 1). The Secret of the Miracle Economy. London: Social Affairs Unit. Adrian Furnham 449