When the Factor of Crystallized Intelligence Can Be a Professionally "Undesirable" Personal Quality of Operators

Purpose: To discuss the case of oppositely directed influences of the indicators of crystallized and fluid intelligence in the decisive rule designed to predict the professional success of the nuclear power plants (NPPs) operators.

Material and methods: This paper analyzes the results of psychodiagnostic examinations of operators of main control rooms (MCR) of NPPs that functioned under normal conditions. All individuals were administered the J. Raven’s “Progressive matrices”, the Russian language adaptation of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) and the Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire (16PF, form A). A cross-expert review using the ranking method revealed two groups of operators with relatively higher and lower levels of professional success. The method of canonical correlation analysis has been used to obtain the best linear discriminator for predicting the professional success of MCR operators based on indicators of psychodiagnostic tests.

Results: Based on the results of the expert assessment, two groups of operators with the highest and lowest professional success were identified. Decisive rule were obtained that make it possible to predict the professional success of operators based on a system of signs (values of the psychodiagnostic tests scales multiplied by coefficients) after the data processing using canonical correlation analysis. Unexpected result was that the high values of 16PF factor «B» turned out to be «undesirable» for the prediction of professional success, that is, these values increased the probability of assigning the operator to the group of the lowest successful specialists.

Conclusion: Factor «B» of 16PF was considered as a tool for assessing predominantly crystallized intelligence, and the Raven’s test – for the fluid one. At the same time, there are no methods that allow measuring these indicators in their purest form. Taking this fact into account, the author believes that the true role of factor B in the decisive rule did not reflect the undesirability of advanced crystallized intelligence among MCR operators. It is most likely that its opposition to the «desirable» indicator (the number of correctly solved tasks of the Raven’s test) made it possible to single out the role of fluid intelligence (or some of its lower-level aspects) as a professionally important quality for the particular operator activity.