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The Act-Frequency Approach

A Conceptual Critique

University of Hohenheim

The core assumptions of Buss and Craik's act-frequency approach are analyzed, with special emphasis on their conception of personal dispositions. Points of critique are (1) a positivistic interpretation of personal dispositions, (2) lack of empirical content of the integration of prototypicality and fuzzy sets notions, (3) the unrealistic conception of traits, and (4)problems with the metric underlying the act-frequency approach. The author argues that a philosophical critical realist's interpretation of dispositions is more appropriate given the central research topics in personality psychology, that the integration of the cognitive concepts still needs a demonstration of its worth, and that some of the new metric possibilities do not make much sense. The final thesis is that the act-frequency approach's proposal to aggregate individual data, an idea born of the consistency debate of the seventies, bypasses the original main issue: the explanation and prediction of single behavioral acts.

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