An interview
We recently talked with Hayley Jach, about her paper titled, “Testing the Information-Seeking Theory of Openness/Intellect”, which is scheduled to appear in an upcoming issue of EJP. Hayley is a PhD student at the Melbourne University, Australia.
Read on to learn more about Hayley’s work on studying the information-seeking theory!
Q: Hi there Hayley! Can you tell us a bit about who you are and what made you become interested in studying personality psychology?
Yeah, for sure! I’m a fourth-year graduate student at Melbourne University in Australia. Throughout undergrad, I fell in love with a lot of different areas and subdisciplines of psychology – well-being research, cognitive neuroscience, computational modeling, and also individual differences broadly. I got into personality psychology primarily because I’m intellectually greedy and I didn’t really want to give up on any of my other research interests. And since I realized that combining all my interests was possible within personality psychology and that my PhD program could be naturally interdisciplinary, I knew that’s what I wanted to do. So I said to Luke (Smilie, my advisor), “Sign me up!”.
Basically, I really resonate with William Revelle’s statement that “personality is the home for the generalist in psychology”. That’s what I like about personality psychology; you can make it so many things and it’s so inclusive. It’s such a broad tent for all sorts of different interests.
Q: In your spare time, what do you like to do?
I’ve got quite a few hobbies. Probably the most important of those is rock climbing. In the past three years I’ve gotten super obsessed with rock climbing, mainly bouldering, but I’ve been starting to get into lead climbing and have been doing a bit more climbing just in general outdoors as well, which has been really fun. Climbing has been on hold though for the last few months due to the Coronavirus situation. But I’ve been trying to keep fit in other ways; going for runs, doing yoga, bodyweight fitness exercises. So that’s a big part of what I do in my spare time.
I also play the flute and the keyboard in my brother’s band, which is called “the Fainters”. That’s been really fun. It’s kind of indie pop – it has elements of rock and elements of folk. Being in the band is really low effort and high reward: the last couple of years we have just been meeting every week for band practice and every second month we’ll play a gig somewhere in Melbourne. So it’s a fun way to stay creative but not have too much pressure.
Then also I like reading and baking (cookies!).
Q: Can you tell us what your study is about?
In our study we conducted an initial test of the information-seeking theory of openness/intellect by Colin DeYoung, who theorized that people high on openness/intellect are more sensitive to the reward value of information and thus would be more likely to seek information. Information-seeking has formed a part of some definitions of openness/intellect if you look at review papers, but this idea of information-seeking connected to openness/intellect has never been formally tested.
For our study, we adapted information-seeking tasks from decision science. The task consisted of six trials with all the same structure where participants had to make a guess and we told them whether they were correct or incorrect. For example, in one of the trials we had a collection of fruit and we told the participants, “Your task is to guess which fruit is secretly rotten”. In other trials, there were boxes and they had to choose the left or the right box, or had to imagine they were explorers in a cave searching for gems and they had to choose certain chests.
In the original task design, the information participants are seeking is a few seconds’ advanced insight into whether or not they are going to receive a reward on the current trial. We changed the task design by switching the order of the trial around, to one where we immediately tell them whether they won or lost the trial and then ask if they want to know some random peripheral information to do with the trial. So for example for the fruit trial, we would tell them, “No, you got it wrong—but would you like to find out which fruit was secretly rotten?”.
These tasks measure the choice to seek what’s called “non-instrumental information”—that means any information that does not increase the chance of receiving an external reward such as money or food. So in these tasks, whether or not they choose to see the peripheral information doesn’t affect their reward or outcome, and even imposes a time delay because they have to click to find out which takes extra time. That’s important because we want to look at the choice to seek out information for its own sake, rather than for reward.
We found that many people chose to seek information in our task, even though they incurred a penalty, which is consistent with previous research on information-seeking. However, across two studies, openness/intellect did not predict information-seeking and Bayes Factors found substantial evidence for a null effect.
That was pretty surprising to us, but a bit of clarity emerged when we looked at how the finer grained traits of curiosity and intolerance of uncertainty related to information-seeking. In our confirmatory Study 2, curiosity and intolerance of uncertainty both positively predicted information-seeking. But, importantly, openness/intellect was strongly positively related to curiosity but strongly negatively related to intolerance of uncertainty, and curiosity and intolerance of uncertainty were negatively related to one another.
To us, this suggested that there could be two different information-seeking pathways: one that is related to one’s curiosity (that might be more approach-motivated), and one related to a desire to reduce the aversion that is caused by not knowing something (which could be more avoidance-motivated). So I guess while we didn’t find evidence for global openness/intellect predicting information-seeking, some tentative evidence was found via curiosity.
The implication of our findings is that it might not be accurate to say, as a blanket statement, that openness/intellect is grounded in information-seeking, because people seek information for different reasons and only some of those reasons might be connected to openness/intellect.
I also think that more on the level of the study, this is an example of the possible benefits of interdisciplinary research. Reading a lot of that literature (in decision science and cognitive neuroscience) informed the study design and I think made it a bit different than it could have been if I had come from just one discipline.
The next step forward is to use different task designs that are more likely to elicit curiosity-driven information-seeking, rather than uncertainty- and anxiety-driven information-seeking, or try to increase uncertainty as participants seek information. We have suggested a few of those in the discussion section of the paper as well. For example, for curiosity-driven information-seeking we were thinking of trivia questions because they are used a lot in research looking at curiosity already.
Q: Do you have any tips or advice for young researchers?
Because I’m an ECR (Early Career Researcher) myself, I tend to ask for advice rather than give it a lot of the time, so I had to have a think about this and also think about advice that people haven’t heard as frequently.
I thought of one thing that I would tell my former self that might be helpful for other people at a similar stage, and that is to try and get comfortable in the space between cynicism and optimism. I tend to go through this cycle where I get really excited about an idea or research area and then I read something which causes me to be cynical about it and I get annoyed at myself for having been so hopeful initially. But I don’t think that’s a particularly helpful place to be for your motivation, your ability to work, or even your well-being.
I feel like the nature of research is to be in a constant state of uncertainty, which is broken up by short moments of insight – but even in those insights, you have the professional obligation to doubt yourself, because we should question everything and try to find flaws in our own logic. So I feel that adequately calibrated cynicism is an important part of science and should make for better researchers in the general sense. But just because we doubt, doesn’t mean that we should lose hope about the point of research or why we’re doing what we’re doing. I feel that it’s impossible to know what is going to happen in the future – this year of Coronavirus is an example of that – so we may as well do our best to keep thinking about complex issues and indulging in our intellectual curiosity. At the same time, we should keep holding ourselves – and others – to high standards, but also be kind to everyone, including ourselves! That’s something I have to tell myself a lot so I felt it could be useful to also share.
I mentioned indulging in your intellectual curiosity, I feel that’s important to do at every stage, in particular undergraduate. It’s a really nice time to read about different areas and you might not realize there’s a subdiscipline that’s really cool and you might want to make a part of your future research. So if you have the time to do that, it might be fun to read widely and go to different lectures – and not write off an area because you think it might not be for you. For instance, I didn’t think I would enjoy cognitive psychology or mathematical psychology, but when I started learning about it I realised it was really cool.
Q: Who is your favorite young scholar?
I found this really hard to answer, because there’s just so many amazing ECRs out there! I didn’t pick just one – hope that’s okay. First, at the start of the year I was really fortunate to take part in a symposium on mechanisms of openness at SPSP alongside three other ECRs: Alex Christensen, Ted Schwaba, and Stephen Antonoplis. They are all doing really amazing work in the openness space using a variety of interesting new methods. I’m always excited when I see new research by these folks.
I also really admire the other graduate students in my advisor’s lab: Tim Bainbridge, Erin Lawn, Nick Tan, Haisu Sun, Reb Rebele and Luiza Bonfim. They are looking at personality processes too, and they have a variety of expertise that they bring to that question. Some of them have had a career previously and bring in the knowledge of that alternative career. Others have interdisciplinary research areas that they were part of before they moved into personality psychology and bring that expertise in. And others like to spend a long time thinking about theoretical and methodological issues which gives them a deep understanding of personality psychology. When we have lab meetings with the group we often go overtime, delving into conceptual issues and disagreeing with each other and challenging each other’s positions. Those guys are amazing and I’m really excited to see where everyone goes once they leave the comfortable nest of the lab.
Finally, my friend Jessie Sun, I see her as a peer mentor. We went to undergrad together at Melbourne University and since that time I’ve had such a deep respect for her work ethic, her passion for psychology, and her incredible skill at writing and doing research. She’s inspiring. She’s also a really generous person; she’s happy to share her resources and her academic experiences. She’s done great work in personality psychology already and she’s now got a post-doc at the University of Pennsylvania. I’m excited to see what she does next!
So there are many people who inspire me – and I haven’t even gotten into the people who inspire me in mathematical science and neuroscience!