Prof. Dr. Matthias Ziegler

The Psychological Assessment Group’s fields of research cover issues of personality, personality and intelligence interaction, situation perception, achievement motivation, faking, and working memory. They are interested in theoretical basics as well as practical implementations. The focus regarding practical implementation is set on prognostic validity and effects of faking.

Personality and Situation - Noncognitive measures are continuously gaining importance. During the last years, despite many controversies, interest is directed especially towards the 'Big Five'. In their research the Ziegler Group has established a Big Five taxonomy for a comprehensive description of human personality. In addition, they have developed questionnaires, allowing the assessment of the constructs. They are also interested in how personality affects behavior in interaction with situational influences. Here, they have developed a taxonomy of how situations are perceived. In combination, they run studies in which they use experience sampling methods to elucidate the manifestation of personality traits into actual behavior and the influence of situation perception. 

Personality and Intelligence Interaction - When predicting human performance or learning, intelligence has proven to be a powerful variable. Aspects of personality, such as openness to experience or conscientiousness have also been successfully included in many studies. However, research on the combined impact of intelligence and personality is rare. Moreover, usually a linear combination is assumed. The Ziegler Lab has suggested and empirically tested a developmental model explaining how the different constructs interact over time when knowledge is cumulated. Here, they look at a macro-level perspective (development over years) but also the micro-level using experience sampling. The latter allows to incoporate situational influences again.

Achievement Motivation - Some studies, especially long-term studies, have shown that, besides intelligence and personality, differences in achievement motivation help to explain differences in achievement. However, when it comes to measuring motives, there exist numerous different approaches: Objective, subjective, projective, and semi-projective methods. Besides that there are instruments measuring general motives and others assessing domain specific aspects. Within a series of the Ziegler Team’s studies, the similarities of the methods, their predictive validity, and their sensitivity for falsification are being analyzed. Recently, they have explored the interplay between situation perception and motive states, also with regard to learning. 

Faking - As described earlier, the influence of the situation affects construct and criterion validity of noncognitive measures. In a broader sense, faking can be understood as situational influence on how people answer questionnaire items. The effects are analyzed with a variety of methods, e.g., Latent State Trait Designs, Individual Causal Effect Designs, and Mixed Rasch Models. The present results show: Faking aggravates the correlation between personality measures. If one controls this influence, the correlations fall to close to zero. Furthermore, the Ziegler Group was able to show that the individual differences related to faking are barely valid for prediction. Other results show that there are different faking strategies. A model was developed based on the results.