A Study Of Chinese Intellectual Personality Structure

Wise personality can be defined as an integrated psychological quality with situational stability which can help individuals to act wisely across time.The study integrated a variety of research methods to explore the psychological structure of the wise personality mainly on the basis of the wisdom theory of integrating intelligence with morality in the context of Chinese culture,using the theoretical construction way of the combination of two theoretical construction ways,top-down construction and bottom-up construction.The present study consisted of five substudy,which were the psychological analysis of wisdom in ancient Chinese,the structure of wise personality based on qualitative analysis,the structure of wise personality from lexicological perspective,the structure of wise personality from free classification perspective,real-time measurement of wise personality cognition and foolishness prototypes cognition from the evidence of Mouse Tracking.The conclusions of the present study were as follows:(1)In Chinese culture,wisdom has abundant explanations and most of the meanings remain up till now.The purpose of this study 1 is to explore the connotations of wisdom in ancient Chinese books from a psychological perspective and find out Chinese classical viewpoint about wisdom.Using the words associated with wisdom in ancient Chinese to retrieve three famous Chinese classical works databases,this paper constructed the wisdom corpus of ancient Chinese language and analyzed the connotation of wisdom in the light of the result of semantic analysis.The results showed that in ancient Chinese,"wisdom" is a polysemous word,which mainly covers two aspects.One refers to pure intelligence,generally for neutral words,a few cases for derogatory term,and the other refers to the comprehensive integrity of virtue and competence which is a commendatory word.The ancient Chinese philosophers view wisdom as "benevolence and intelligence",whose essence is the integrity of virtue and competence.The diversity of interpretation of wisdom in Chinese philosophers is closely related to the fuzziness of their thinking and the situationality of the Chinese language.In conclusion,"wisdom" has rich connotations in ancient Chinese,and the Chinese classical viewpoint about wisdom emphasizes that the essence of wisdom is the integrity of virtue and competence.(2)Study 2 used qualitative analysis software NVivo 8 for exploration the structure of wise personality and found that the wise personality traits could be summarized as six categories,which were intelligence,problem solving ability,good attitude,knowledge and experience,thinking ability and virtue.On the basis of that two core elements of wise personality could be abstracted:competence and virtue.A true wise individual must be equipped with integrated psychological quality of competence and virtue,and the essence of wisdom is the alloy of competence and virtue.(3)Study 3 explored the structure of the wise personality based on the personality lexical hypothesis.We instructed participants to evaluate the typical words related to the wise personality to create a formal wisdom personality vocabulary assessment questionnaire.Exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis were used to analyze data.Results showed that personality trait words related to wisdom in the Chinese language can be used to explore the structure of the wise personality on the bases of the personality lexical hypothesis and implicit personality theory.The structure of the wise personality contained three dimensions:virtue,competence,and achievement.Virtue and competence were the core components of wise personality,while achievement was the external manifestation of wise personality.The ranking of Chinese participants' evaluation of the three dimensions of wise personality,in order from high to low,was competence,virtue,and achievement.The psychological model of the wise personality could be established on the basis of the lexical hypothesis.Study 4 verified the rationality and stability of the psychological model of the wise personality,and found that of the three factors that make up the wise personality,virtue was relatively independent,while competence and achievement were more closely related.(4)In study 5,mouse tracking techniques were used as a means to explore the cognitive dynamics of wise personality in two experiments.Experiment 1 showed that when participants were required to categorize wise and unwise characteristics in compatible and incompatible trials mouse trajectories showed a continuous spatial attraction toward the compatibility between wisdom and the wise characteristics.Further,in two dimensions of the wise personality,wisdom and the competence dimension were more closely linked.In Experiment 2,mouse trajectories revealed that the connections between the different types of wisdom and the two dimensions of wise personality were distinguishing through the priming social categories.The natural wisdom showed a stronger connection with the competence dimension,while the human wisdom showed a stronger tendency with the virtue dimension.Study 5 demonstrated that wisdom was the integration of virtue and competence,and the competence could be regarded as the primary feature of the wise individuals.(5)In study 6,mouse tracking techniques were used in three experiments to explore the cognition of foolishness prototypes from two perspectives:the outcome and the temporal dynamics of real-time processing.In Experiment 1 and Experiment 2,hierarchical cluster analysis,multidimensional scaling analysis,and social network analysis of ten foolish exemplars and 16 typical foolish personality traits revealed immoral and ignorant foolishness prototypes.In Experiment 3,the mouse trajectories showed that the connections among the different exemplars of foolishness and between the two dimensions of foolish personality were distinguished through the priming social categories.These experiments demonstrated that there are two prototypes of foolishness:Immoral foolishness and ignorant foolishness.Immorality can be regarded as a primary feature of immoral foolishness prototype,while ignorance can be regarded as a primary feature of the ignorant foolishness prototype.Through the above researches,the present study constructed a psychological model of wise personality,that is,virtue and competence were the core components of wise personality,and achievement was the external manifestation of wise personality.