Learning and the hybrid model

Sensation seeking is a drive to explore and to seek out new experience. I argue that it is neither good nor bad. It is raw energy, and what a person learns to do with it decides the result. I call this the hybrid model of learning in personality, because it joins biological, socio-cognitive and experiential accounts of personality.

In the model, four learned capacities redirect the drive: pursuing difficult goals, planning and persevering, understanding problems in depth, and thinking rationally. People who are high in sensation seeking and high in these capacities tend toward functional outcomes. People who are high in sensation seeking and low in them tend toward dysfunctional ones.

Peter O’Connor and I tested this in “Learning to be saints or sinners” (Journal of Personality, 2008), which traced an indirect path from sensation seeking to behaviour through mastery orientation. With Elizabeth Hobman, Nerina Jimmieson and Robin Martin I compared the model with established approach and avoidance models in predicting work, university and leadership outcomes in part-time workers (British Journal of Psychology, 2009). With Peter Baguma and Adrian Furnham I found similar indirect paths to grade point average in Ugandan and Australian students (Educational Psychology, 2009).

The Learning Styles Profiler measures the model. It describes personality and learning processes, not a claim that teaching should be matched to a “learning style”.