Intellectual Styles: Their Associations and Their Relationships to Ability and Personality

Abstract

This study investigated the associations among intellectual styles in the three approaches: cognition-centered, personality-centered, and activity-centered approaches. Field dependence-independence, psychological types, and learning approaches were respectively selected as the representatives of the cognition-centered, personality-centered, and activity-centered styles. This study also explored the relationships between intellectual styles and ability as well as between intellectual styles and personality. The participants in this study were 510 students in a Chinese university. The results showed that the three style constructs did not significantly share common variance, implying that styles in different approaches likely represent different rather than similar constructs. Also, field dependence-independence strongly associated with ability, whereas psychological types and learning approaches strongly associated with personality. This suggested that different style constructs relate to ability and personality to different degree: cognition-centered styles may closely relate to ability, whereas personality-centered and activity-centered styles may highly relate to personality.