Hans Eysenck's Personality Theories (continued)
Eysenck shares with Cattell the view of people as creatures with lasting and measurable qualities, and also the belief that measurement is fundamental to all scientific development. In psychology we are not yet sure what we should be measuring, so Eysenck says, taxonomy, or the classification of behavior, is an important first step toward the measurement of behavior. And factor analysis is the best means of classifying behavior.
From the beginning of his career, Eysenck was certain that most personality theories are too complicated and too loosely formulated. He has attempted to derive conceptions of behavior that are simple and can be used to its maximum in proper working order, and as a result, his system is characterized by a very small number of major dimensions that have very thorough empirical definition. At the same time, his conceptions reflect his study and absorption of the thought of many different figures in our intellectual history: Hippocrates, Galen, Kretschmer, Jung, Pavlov, Hull, Spearman, and Thurstone.
Eysenck has used questionnaires, or self-ratings; ratings by others; objective behavioral tests; assessments of physique; physiological measurements; and the biographical and other historical information as means of obtaining personality data. He believes that all kinds of data are useful in attempting to understand the organism. He also believes that because each method of obtaining data collection has its weaknesses (e.g., self-ratings are biased by subjects' views of themselves; objective tests carried out in a traditional experimental manner may tap too little of the total organism they are intended to understand), one should assemble "all and every type of factual and objective information which can be used to support or refute [an] hypothesis under investigation".
