Abstract
The usual distinction between rational and intuitive thinking styles is still a subject of scientific debate, as there is no consensus about their nature, mutual relations and relations to other personality constructs. Cognitive-experiential self-theory (CEST) proposes rational and experiential thinking styles as original personality constructs not fully explainable by five-factor personality models. Following CEST, we aimed to examine: 1. The uniqueness of rational and experiential dimensions by relating them to other personality constructs: trait emotional intelligence (TEI) and HEXACO; 2. Thinking style profiles defined through combined rational and experiential dimensions, and the possible role of TEI in understanding them. A total of 270 undergraduate students (82% females) completed the TEIQue-SF, REI-40, and HEXACO-PI-R. Our results showed that constructs from all three paradigms were low to moderately correlated to each other. TEI had incremental validity in explaining both rational and experiential dimensions, but large amounts of their variances remained unexplained by both TEI and HEXACO. We revealed four thinking style profiles defined through combined rational and experiential dimensions. TEI was the highest when both dimensions were high and the lowest when both were low, which could be related to processes of understanding and managing emotional functioning – proposed as an essential part of TEI, while within CEST they are seen as the way in which rationality influences experientiality. This finding might be of specific significance for understanding irrationality as not exclusively related to high intuition, but to low rationality as well.
Highlights
The usual distinction between rational and intuitive thinking styles is still a subject of scientific debate, as there is no consensus about their nature, mutual relations and relations to other personality constructs
The general goal of the current study was to examine thinking style constructs from the Cognitive-experiential self-theory (CEST) paradigm by relating them to trait emotional intelligence (TEI), while taking into account the variance shared with basic personality traits
From the perspective of classical personality models, it was meaningful to expect that some personality traits could predict the tendency towards intuitive vs. rational thinking, but past research showed that personality traits were not strong predictors of thinking styles – just like the Cognitive-experiential self-theory proposed (Epstein, 2003, 2016; Pacini & Epstein, 1999)
Summary
The usual distinction between rational and intuitive thinking styles is still a subject of scientific debate, as there is no consensus about their nature, mutual relations and relations to other personality constructs. There is strong empirical support for the assumption that these are two independent dimensions rather than the opposite ends of a bipolar continuum (Akinci & Sadler-Smith, 2013; Hodgkinson, Sadler-Smith, Sinclair, & Ashkanasy, 2009; Wang, Highhouse, Lake, Petersen, & Rada, 2017) This assumption is in line with Cognitive-experiential self-theory (CEST) which provided one of the most often used instruments for measuring individual differences in thinking styles, the Rational-Experiential Inventory (REI) (Epstein, 2003, 2016; Pacini & Epstein, 1999). Connecting different paradigms and testing uniqueness and mutual overlapping of constructs proposed to explain personality space could further our understanding of human behavior – in this particular case, one’s preference for rational or/and experiential thinking styles, and preference for irrationality
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