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Robert White and the Study of Lives

2020· reference-entry· en· W3023890920 on OpenAlexaff
Raymond E. Fancher

Bibliographic record

VenueOxford Research Encyclopedia of Psychology · 2020
Typereference-entry
Languageen
FieldPsychology
TopicAcademic and Historical Perspectives in Psychology
Canadian institutionsYork University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsInstinctPersonalityWhite (mutation)Context (archaeology)PsychologyPsychoanalysisPersonality psychologyHistory

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Abstract Robert Winthrop White was an important psychologist and personality researcher at Harvard University during the middle years of the 1900s. First as a student and then chief lieutenant and colleague of Henry A. Murray at the Harvard Psychological Clinic, White became a leading proponent of Murray’s intensively case study-oriented “personological” approach to personality analysis and description. This approach emphasized that personality is not a fixed entity but a constantly changing and developing configuration of many different factors, which must be appreciated as a whole and is best conveyed in the context of individual life histories. Although sometimes overshadowed by both Murray and Harvard personality psychologist Gordon Allport, who both promoted the life study approach, White became the most prolific and skilled early practitioner of that approach. His early case study of “Earnst” was the only one selected to illustrate the Murray project’s personological approach in the seminal 1938 work Explorations in Personality. As the “caretaker” director of the clinic in the late 1930s and early 1940s, White oversaw the collection of numerous further case histories, several of which became the foundations of four highly influential books: The Abnormal Personality, Lives in Progress, Opinions and Personality, and The Enterprise of Living. In 1959, White made important contributions to the theory of motivation by asserting that the standard conception of motives as tension-reducing instincts or drives was severely limited and should be complemented by an innate “effectance” motive: an innate tendency to seek rather than reduce tension while achieving “competence” in dealing with the outside world.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.002
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.001
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMeta-epidemiology (narrow), Science and technology studies, Research integrity, Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categoriesResearch integrity
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: Not applicable
GenreCandidate signal: Other · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.710
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0020.001
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0020.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.001
Science and technology studies0.0000.005
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0020.001
Research integrity0.0010.006
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0030.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.068
GPT teacher head0.428
Teacher spread0.360 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.

Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreOther

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations1
Published2020
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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