Category Archives: » Individual Differences

All about individual differences

Missed Griffiths and Reicher & Haslam? Podcasts Avaliable!

Well after a brief hiatus preparing for an Ofsted inspection (which has thankfully passed) it’s back to normal posting … well as normal as possible with only 7 teaching weeks until AS exams and 9 until A2! After returning from a ‘Getting Started’ conference I found an email from OCR letting me know about [...]

OCR Psychology for AS with Dynamic Learning CD

Hodder Education presents OCR Psychology for AS a brand new text for the 2008 OCR AS Psychology specification, covering all 15 core studies, contextualising, presenting and evaluating each study in full, in order to make it relevant to the student. The textbook is highly accessible and readable, with useful guidance on comparing studies, applying themes, [...]

Griffiths: Role of cognitive bias and skill in fruit machine gambling

Over the next few weeks I am going to cover the five new studies on the 2008 specification and see what resources are around for them already. I was lucky enough to go the the OCR inset in Leeds on Wednesday where both Griffiths and Richer & Haslam were speaking. It was a [...]

All our brains are the same colour

In the Individual Differences module of the AS we look at the Gould review of Yerkes’ work at the beginning of the century in relation to IQ testing and race titled ‘A Nation of Morons‘. A big issue that is raised is the reliability and validity of psychometric tests - do these tests [...]

AS Study Full Text References (Spec. 2008)

A good while back I compiled a list of references and more importantly full text links for all of the core studies. Well now the new 2008 spec has been finalised it’s time for the updated references. If you’re looking for the ‘old’ (2000-2007) spec studies see this page. All of the [...]

A Girl Like Me: Re-examining Racial Preference

One study in the AS which always raises debate is that of Hraba & Grant who were replicating the research of Clark and Clark from the late 1930’s. The study is investigating racial preference, awareness and self-identification in both white and black children. Stumbling around the internet I found a very powerful video [...]

IQ Is Dumb: Validity and Reliability

“… the term intelligence designates a complexly interrelated assemblage of functions, no one of which is completely or accurately known in man”
(Yerkes, 1929, p. 524)

In the Gould study (which is actually a review of the work conducted by Yerkes) a big issue that is raised is the reliability and validity of psychometric tests - [...]

Interview: The gambling man? Prof. Mark Griffiths

You can get the audio to the interview from the new blogcast.psychblog site.
Professor Mark Griffiths has been kind enough to give me a few minutes of his time to answer some questions about his research on gambling, his feelings on being included in the new 2008 specification, and what relevance his studies have to help [...]