Personality

• Eysenck said there are three dimensions to personality:

  • Extroversion,
  • Emotional stability,
  • Psychoticism.

  The Eysenck test gives you a score on these traits. He said that personality is 75% nature and 25% nurture, as there are stable innate traits we all have.
• Cattell proposed that we have 16 personality traits and developed a test that gives a person a score for each trait. He also said that situational factors can have an impact on how someone will score on the test. The traits he developed included aggressiveness, liveliness and tension.

  Cattell said this measure has high predictive validity and can be used to predict the type of sport a person should/does play based on their personality.
• Kroll and Crenshaw aimed to compare the personalities of elite athletes participating in different sports using Cattell's 16 personality factors.
• Kroll and Crenshaw studied 387 male athletes who competed at national or regional levels in either:

  • American Football,
  • Gymnastics,
  • Wrestling,
  • Karate.
• Kroll and Crenshaw used self reports to gather the data. All participants completed Cattell's 16 personality factor test with 200 true or false questions. Participants also completed the MMPI scale to measure their honesty, participants of scored higher than 7 out of 15 was removed from analysis. They also used a maximum likelihood classification system which allowed him to analyse whether predictions can be made about the typical traits associated with different sports.
• Kroll and Crenshaw found there were significant differences in the traits of each group of athletes except between footballers and wrestlers. The biggest difference was between footballers and gymnasts as gymnasts were more shy and self-sufficient whereas footballers were venturesome and group-dependant. The classification system correctly identified gymnasts personalities 73.1% of the time.
• Kroll and Crenshaw concluded that personality profiles do differ between different sports as gymnasts are distinctly different from footballers in terms of group/self dependency. This research also highlights that we can predict what traits athletes in certain sports are likely to have.
• Matching the personality of an athlete to a sport.

  Kroll and Crenshaw show there is a relationship between choice of sport and personality, which can be used to suggest sports for individuals that they had not previously considered. E.g. can give people Cattell's 16 personality factor test that coaches can use to suggest sports like gymnastics to a shy, self-dependent person.
• Team building

  According to Eysenck, 25% of personality is due to nurture. If personality is due to the environment then we can modify factors in the environment to change a person's personality to improve sport performance. Such as using Tuckerman's theory of group cohesion to make a footballer more group-dependent in order to improve their sport performance.