Cattell's Analysis of Specification Equation

John is sitting in an upscale restaurant with a few of his co-workers from the law firm. The atmosphere is nice. The food is good. The waitresses are beautiful. For some reason, because of his lack of social assertiveness, John is having a hard time fitting into the group. He is feeling left out of conversations and seemingly always one step behind the conversation. They have just sat down and he is already feeling his palms become sweaty. The waitress comes to the table and asks the other guys what they want to drink. They all agree on a variety of wines; cabernets, pino noirs, pino blancs, zinfandels, ect. Now, John normally doesn’t drink anything. In fact, he has seen the effects of alchohol in an alcoholic mother growing up. He knows it’s probably not the best thing for him. He is still debating what to do when the Waitress finishes taking their orders and turns to him.

“And what are you having to drink? A fruity Cabernet? Or a Spicy Pino Noir?”

John can’t answer. What does he do? Does he have a glass of wine to fit in with everyone? Or does he stick with water in front of his co-workers?

To better asses how John will react in this situation, we can use Raymond Cattell’s specification equation and his 16 factor personality index in order to predict the likely hood that John will drink wine as opposed to refraining.

First, we need to determine his 16 factor personality. The 16 factors are as follows; warmth, intellect, emotional stability, aggressiveness, liveliness, dutifulness, social assertiveness, sensitivity, paranoia, abstractness, introversion, anxiety, openmindedness, independence, perfectionism, and tension. Each of these factors are evaluated on a 0-100 scale, 100 appearing as a dominant factor in John’s overall personality, and 0 appearing as no factor in John’s overall personality.

We will now evaluate each of these factors in regards to John and give an example of why he falls where he does in the 0-100 scale.