Tyumeneva Yulia, Vergeles Kseniya
Institute of Education, National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia.
Center for Cognition and Communication, Pushkin State Russian Language Institute, Moscow, Russia.
Front Psychol. 2021 Sep 30;12:632991. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.632991. eCollection 2021.
Measures of psychological attributes, such as motivation, typically involve rating scales, assuming that an attribute can be ordered. If an attribute has an ordinal structure, its levels stand in ordinal relations to one another, and these must be transitive. We tested if transitivity is preserved when people compare different motives in terms of their importance to learning. We found transitivity violations in both strict (Study 1) and non-strict (Study 2) orderings in about half of the participants. Nevertheless, based on the distribution of such violations, we conclude that an ordinal structure of motivation can be found, but only when levels of motives differ noticeably. As the levels become subjectively similar, transitivity is not preserved, and the ordinal structure cannot be justified even in non-strict ordering. The findings question the mainstream practice of measuring psychological attributes before their structure is properly explored.
对诸如动机等心理属性的测量通常涉及评级量表，前提是假定属性可以排序。如果一个属性具有顺序结构，那么它的各个水平彼此之间存在顺序关系，并且这些关系必须是可传递的。我们测试了人们在比较不同动机对学习的重要性时，传递性是否得以保留。我们发现，在大约一半的参与者中，无论是严格排序（研究1）还是非严格排序（研究2），都存在传递性违背的情况。尽管如此，基于此类违背情况的分布，我们得出结论：动机的顺序结构是可以找到的，但前提是动机水平存在明显差异。当水平在主观上变得相似时，传递性无法保留，即使在非严格排序中，顺序结构也无法成立。这些发现对在未充分探究心理属性结构之前就对其进行测量的主流做法提出了质疑。
