I think that was my point really. Not that the questionnare wasn't valid as a tool for collecting information - although the researchers' clear disregard for data validity and glee they expressed that they had managed to chalk up a lot of completed responses rather being concerned that they were clearly being polljacked worried me. It was rather that their research method, as you said, wouldn't yield the results they claimed to be after. You rightly pointed out that without some kind of physiological monitoring, such as fMRI, they would be unable to draw any conclusions about how the neurophysiology of study subjects is affected by what they read. And yes, cognition and neurophysiological response are two different things.
I did the test and was quite surprised. I've always been told that I'm quite an empathetic person and considered myself to be so. However, my answers on the questionnaire have me leaning more heavily on the side of systematising which, given the state of my house and my desk at work, surprises me! Though in some ways it does make sense because I can be somewhere bordering on autistic when it comes to having my routine disturbed, I do tend to notice patterns in things and I am extremely pedantic about grammar and language - as you might have been able to tell by my focus on the question construction in the questionnaire over all things in this case. If I'm reading anything that has poor grammar, or is constructed in such a way that it is unclear or misleading, it irritates me so much that I can't continue.
More than anything though, I agree that it seems obvious that they way in which they went about this would be guaranteed to put people's backs up. I'm guessing these guys would have scored quite low on EQ and are probably still blithely unaware why everything turned so nasty.
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Date: 2009-09-08 10:22 am (UTC)I did the test and was quite surprised. I've always been told that I'm quite an empathetic person and considered myself to be so. However, my answers on the questionnaire have me leaning more heavily on the side of systematising which, given the state of my house and my desk at work, surprises me! Though in some ways it does make sense because I can be somewhere bordering on autistic when it comes to having my routine disturbed, I do tend to notice patterns in things and I am extremely pedantic about grammar and language - as you might have been able to tell by my focus on the question construction in the questionnaire over all things in this case. If I'm reading anything that has poor grammar, or is constructed in such a way that it is unclear or misleading, it irritates me so much that I can't continue.
More than anything though, I agree that it seems obvious that they way in which they went about this would be guaranteed to put people's backs up. I'm guessing these guys would have scored quite low on EQ and are probably still blithely unaware why everything turned so nasty.