It's a common belief that to get ahead in business or politics, people have to be driven, callous, and unsympathetic. Is it true? A journalist for Forbes magazine reviewed a study by personality psychologist Hedwig Eisenbarth. The study used methods you're learning about in Chapters 8 and 9.
The journalist introduces the topic with an interview with the researcher:
“There is this public opinion or belief that psychopathy is related with higher success — that individuals high on psychopathic traits would be successful CEOs or politicians,” says Hedwig Eisenbarth, ...lead author of the research. “People often think so because they associate the cold-bloodedness, fearlessness, and low empathy that psychopathy is characterized by with high income positions....we wanted to find out if this actually has an empirical basis.”
The journalist reported that the study used a representative sample of New Zealand adults. The sample size was 2300.
The researchers measured three key variables: psychopathy, professional success, and occupational prestige. Psychopathy was operationalized via self-report responses to surveys that measured "fearless dominance, self-centered impulsivity, and coldheartedness." Professional success was operationalized via self-report measures of job satisfaction and job security. And occupational prestige was operationalized as a combination of socioeconomic status and the status of their job.
The results went against the prevailing view that psychopathy is associated with more job success. Here's the journalist's summary:
From these measures, the researchers were able to test their core hypothesis — that people with psychopathic personality tendencies would be less likely to achieve high levels of professional success. They found this to be mostly the case. Individuals higher on the fearless-dominance aspect reported higher subjective professional success while individuals higher on self-centered impulsivity reported lower subjective professional success. Furthermore, those higher on coldheartedness showed lower occupational prestige.
Questions
a) The paragraph above reports three bivariate correlations. You can sketch each one of them on its own scatterplot. Do that now--use the text to decide what variables go on each axis as well as what the slope of the scatterplot should be.
b) Note that the journalist describes above the direction of the bivariate correlations, but does not mention the strength of the relationships. How spread out were the dots on your sketched scatterplots for a)? The spread of the dots is an indicator of how strong you think the relationships might be. Make adjustments if necessary.
The journalist reported a regression result, as well:
These associations held true even when the researchers accounted for other variables that might have influenced their predictions, such as gender, education level, age, and duration of job tenure.
c) Why might it be important to control for the variable of gender in these relationships? Explain how one gender might be higher on both of the variables in each scatterplot.
