Three Human Attributes

Abstract

This study represents a beginning step in research that may ultimately show that the multitudes of human behavior that educators currently encounter may be reduced to three broad human attributes: arousal, affect, and cognition. The resulting simplicity should lead to improved understanding and better decision making by practitioners. Four measures were selected to represent each of the three attributes and data were collected for four age groups. In each case, when the data were submitted to principal axis factor analysis, three factors emerged in which the 12 variables were clearly aligned with their hypothesized factors. In each analysis more than 70% of the total variance was recovered (M=75.39%). Across four analyses, each variable had only one salient pattern coefficient, and none of its remaining pattern coefficients approached saliency. Following oblique rotation, factor one (arousal) accounted for an average of 50.00% of the explained variance; factor two (cognition) accounted for an average of 28.25% of the explained variance; and factor three (affect) accounted for an average of 21.75% of the explained variance. The implications of these findings and limitations of the research design are discussed.