by Morton Hunt
(He was equally disenchanted with behaviorism, which, he said, portrayed the human being as a purely “reactive” organism—acting only in response to external prodding—when in fact human beings are “proactive” and driven largely by their own goals, purposes, intentions, plans, and moral values.12)
During his graduate years Allport began devising his own paper-and-pencil tests of personality traits. He and his older brother, Floyd, a psychologist, created a test that was more objective than the Bernreuter and other early efforts. In order to measure what they called “ascendance-submission,” they asked respondents not how ascendant or submissive they were but how they would behave in specific situations involving that trait dimension. An example:13
Someone tries to push ahead of you in line. You have been waiting for some time, and can’t wait much longer. Suppose the intruder is the same sex as yourself, do you usually
—remonstrate with the intruder ….
—“look daggers” at the intruder or make clearly audible comments to your neighbor ….
—decide not to wait, and go away ….
—do nothing ….
After trying the test on a number of volunteers, the Allports concluded that people who gave either an ascendant or a submissive answer to any one challenging situation were very likely to give the same kind of answer to other such situations. “People by and large,” they wrote, “do tend consistently to occupy a given spot on the continuum from high ascendance to low submission.” This seemed to them to establish the reality of traits and of the similarity of a person’s behavior in similar situations. As Allport later put it:
If it can be proved that one kind of activity is usually associated with another kind of activity, there is evidence that something underlies the two activities, viz., a trait… [i.e.,] a neuropsychic structure having the capacity to render many stimuli functionally equivalent, and to initiate and guide equivalent (meaningfully consistent) forms of adaptive and expressive behavior. 14
Then why did the children tested by Hartshorne and May behave inconsistently? Allport found an answer in Gestalt theory. Each individual’s traits are assembled in a unique configuration with a hierarchical structure: at the top is the person’s master quality or cardinal trait; below it are a handful of central traits, the ordinary foci of the individual’s life (the kind of qualities, said Allport, that we are likely to mention when writing a letter of recommendation); and finally below these are a large number of secondary traits, each aroused by a few specific stimuli.15 So a person’s behavior could be inconsistent in specific ways but consistent—Allport preferred “congruent”—in larger ones.
For example, he said, if you observe a man strolling and see him later hurrying to take a book back to the library, you might judge him inconsistent because in one situation he ambles, in the other hurries. But that is trait behavior at the secondary level. A more central trait is flexibility. If you asked him to write large on a blackboard and small on a paper and he did so, you could judge him flexible—as he is, too, in his walking. His behavior in both activities exhibits flexibility and thus is congruent, though not consistent.16
This was also Allport’s solution to the question: Why is it so common for a person to exhibit traits that seem incompatible or to behave in different situations in ways that seem inconsistent? Transient moods or “states” often make for what looks like inconsistency; an alarming situation may create a temporary state of anxiety in anyone, even a person who is usually placid.
Although Allport modified his theory of personality over the years, he always considered traits the fundamental and relatively stable units of personality. His trait research earned him acclaim and honors in his time; he would be gratified to know that despite the advent of genetic, neurological, cultural, sociological, and other factors affecting personality, many psychologists still regard personality psychology as all but synonymous with the study of traits.17
Measuring Personality
Since traits are neither visible objects nor specific actions but personal qualities, the central problem for researchers is how to measure them.
First they have to decide exactly what it is they mean to measure. Early personality researchers chose a handful of intuitively obvious traits such as introversion, dominance, and self-sufficiency. But soon they began looking farther afield and attempted to measure many others, so many, indeed, that the field rapidly became chaotic.
For there are all too many possibilities. The hardworking Allport and a colleague once counted all the words in the dictionary that designate distinctive kinds of human behavior or qualities; the total was about eighteen thousand. Not all refer to traits: some are the observer’s reactions to another person rather than that person’s traits (“adorable,” “boring”); some describe temporary states rather than enduring traits (“abashed,” “frantic”); and some are only metaphors (“alive,” “prolific”). But that still left four to five thousand terms denoting traits.18 And even after nearly seven decades of research had winnowed out most of these as unfruitful, a relatively brief review article in 2001 still listed forty-one topics as just “some” of the significant traits or manifestations of personality:
The ability to delay gratification, the ability to process social information, aggressiveness, agreeableness, behavioral inhibition, carelessness, coercive behavior, conformity, conscientiousness, criminal behavior, curiosity, distractibility, driving while intoxicated, emotional expressiveness, extraversion, fearfulness, impulsiveness, industriousness, irritability, job satisfaction, leadership ability, moodiness, narcissism, neuroticism, openness, political attitudes, religious attitudes, restlessness, self-confidence, self-control, self-directedness, shyness, sociability, social potency, social responsibility, spouse abuse, submissiveness, substance use, the tendency to feel mistreated or deceived by others, the tendency to have temper tantrums, and the tendency to seek or avoid danger.19
Many of these and hundreds of Allport’s list have been explored by means ranging from subjective impressions to laboratory experiments and from psychoanalytic interpretations to behavioral data. These are some of the major methods:
Personal documents and histories: Letters, memoirs, autobiographies, diaries, and the like are full of information—and misinformation— about the personality of their subject, since a self-portrayal meant to be read by others is apt to present a dressed-up self rather than naked reality. (Pepys’ diary, full of licentious episodes and shameful thoughts, was meant only for his own eyes and was written in code.) Certain celebrated interpretations of famous personalities have been based on personal documents, but tastes and theories change from generation to generation, and the same sources can yield widely differing portraits of the writer. Analyses of personality based on such sources are sometimes good literature but rarely, if ever, good science.
The interview: This is perhaps the most common method of personality assessment but one of the least effective. Some employment interviewers, college admissions personnel, and psychotherapists can glean a good deal about a person from an interview, but many others cannot. Even skilled interviewers, studies have shown, may evaluate the same person quite differently. Moreover, interviews yield descriptions and interpretations but not quantitative measurements of traits. The interview is best suited to the identification of distinct mental or emotional disorders, but with normal people it is most useful as a source of personal data, attitudes, recollections, and other details that throw light on the more objective data gathered about that person by other methods.20
Ratings by observers: Researchers often ask an individual’s friends or acquaintances to rate him or her on a number of specified traits. To achieve precision, the researchers direct respondents to weigh each trait on a scale that runs from zero to five or perhaps one to ten—essentially what Thomasius suggested in 1692. But the method has many difficulties. Raters have their own styles of rating (some avoid extremes, others favor them); subjects are not necessarily consistent when a
sked the same questions at different times; and ratings are subject to the “halo effect” (a subject rated high for one trait tends to be rated high for others).21
In general, then, ratings are considered neither especially reliable nor especially valid. (A reliable method yields consistent answers time after time; a valid method measures what it is supposed to be measuring.) Still, under certain conditions ratings can be both reliable and valid. Raymond Cattell, a leading trait researcher who relied on them in his own work, used only data from raters who saw the subject under many circumstances and over a long time (a year, if possible) and gathered ratings on only one trait at a time to reduce the halo effect. Such conditions improve both reliability and validity but make the method prohibitively costly, time-consuming, and nearly impossible to use anywhere except in an institution, where the population is relatively fixed and always visible.22
The questionnaire: This is by far the most commonly used tool for personality assessment. As we have seen, the method quickly expanded beyond simple self-evaluation to quasi-objective techniques, such as presenting real-life situations and asking respondents how they would most likely behave in them. Other early tests continued to present questions about the respondent’s attitudes and feelings rather than probable behavior but were worded in ways that made the respondent less likely to prettify his self-portrait than did the questions in the Personal Data Sheet. Most offered as possible answers “yes-no” or “true-false” options, but some included a “don’t know” middle ground.
The famous Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), developed in the late 1930s by Starke Hathaway, a psychologist, and J. C. McKinley, a psychiatrist, both of the University of Minnesota, is of the latter type. It contained 550 statements, among them:
I am happy most of the time.
I enjoy social gatherings just to be with people. I am certainly lacking in self-confidence.
I believe I am a condemned person.
The respondent answers “yes,” “no,” or “?” (uncertain) to each question. The questions were grouped into ten scales that measured hypochondriasis, depression, hysteria, psychopathic deviancy, masculinity-femininity, paranoia, psychasthenia, schizophrenia, hypomania, and social introversion. These names convey the impression that the MMPI was concerned chiefly with mental illness; it did measure mental illness but also traits of normal personality. Those who, for instance, answered “false” to “I am happy most of the time” and most other questions in the same scale were said to be shrewd, guarded, and worrisome; those who answered “true” to “I enjoy social gatherings just to be with people” and related questions were rated sociable, colorful, and ambitious; and those who answered “false” were rated modest, shy, and self-effacing.23
Such interpretations were based not on intuition or common sense but on empirical evidence. In constructing the MMPI, Hathaway and McKinley tried a large number of questions on people hospitalized with neurosis or mental illness and on the presumably normal people who came to visit them; the MMPI was made up only of those items which differentiated the two groups. The depression scale of the MMPI, for instance, consisted of questions that were answered differently by depressed and not-depressed people.
Although the MMPI has been the single most widely used personality questionnaire for more than a half century, it has limitations and flaws. For one thing, it is very long. For another, respondents feel that many items, if answered honestly, are embarrassingly revealing (“Bad words, often terrible words, come into my mind and I cannot get rid of them,” “I am very strongly attracted by members of my own sex”). For a third, other items are so obviously aimed at pathology as to strike many normal people as either funny or insulting. Some time ago the humorist Art Buchwald lampooned the MMPI by suggesting additional questionnaire items like:
A wide necktie is a sign of disease.
When I was younger, I used to tease vegetables. I use shoe polish to excess. 24
In 1949, a small group of personality psychologists got a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to set up within the University of California at Berkeley a new research unit, the Institute for Personality Assessment and Research. Its original purpose was to develop better methods of personality assessment.* Over the next forty years it produced a phenomenal number of studies and new psychological tests; but the best known and most widely used of them to this day, the California Psychological Inventory (CPI), was completed within the organization’s first two years.
The CPI was the work of Dr. Harrison Gough, an institute member and Berkeley professor, who set out to improve on the MMPI by using material appropriate to a normal population. As raw material, he assembled a pool of a thousand items, some taken from the MMPI, others written by him and some of his colleagues. With the help of associates and collaborators, he tested the items, first on eighty graduate students, then on eighty medical school seniors, and, over the years, on a total of thirteen thousand males and females of various ages and socioeconomic status. To assess the validity of the items—or, rather, of the answers they elicited—Gough and his colleagues had a sample of respondents rated by friends, and then compared the ratings with the subjects’ own answers, weeding out those items which proved untrustworthy.
The final form of the CPI included 480 items (the 1987 revision had 462), such as:
People often expect too much of me.
It is hard for me just to sit still and relax.
I like parties and socials.
The respondent answered “true” or “false” to each; the answers yielded scores on fifteen personality traits ranging from dominance and self-acceptance to self-control and empathy.† By every measure—sales, number of versions in other languages (thirty-six, including Arabic, Mandarin, Chinese, Romanian, and Urdu), a research bibliography of more than two thousand entries, and importance ascribed to it by experts in assessment—it is among the top five personality tests in use today, five decades after it was developed.25
Many other personality tests offer the respondent a wider choice of answers to questions than the MMPI or CPI, as in these three examples:26
Responses scaled in this fashion yield more precise measurements of attitudes and feelings than “yes-no” responses.
Over the years, hundreds of personality inventories have been devised by psychologists and published by research institutes and commercial publishers; some embody good scientific practice, others do not, but many of each kind are good business properties. The sales figures for the CPI, for instance—guidebook, reusable test books, answer sheets, and other items—though a secret, can be assumed to be fairly large.
Projective tests: From the early 1930s on, a growing number of psychologists accepted the psychoanalytic doctrine that unconscious processes are major determinants of personality and, pace Gordon Allport, sought ways of testing that would measure those processes as well as the traits they generated. The most feasible way to do so was to present the respondent with ambiguous stimuli—vague or suggestive shapes or pictures—and ask him or her to describe them; presumably, the answers would reveal partially or completely unconscious fantasies, fears, wishes, and motives.27
The best-known such test had been developed many years earlier— between 1912 and 1922—by a Swiss psychiatrist, Hermann Rorschach. He created a number of inkblots and asked patients to say what each looked like; after years of experimentation he had narrowed down the test to ten blots, some black-and-white and others colored. In administering the Rorschach, the tester shows a card to the subject, asks him or her what the blot may be or what it brings to mind, writes down the response and, after showing all the cards, scores the answers. Scoring, which requires careful training and the use of a manual, is based on such criteria as whether the subject responds to the whole blot or only part of it, what part of the blot is attended to, and whether the answer deals with the blot itself or the shape of the background.28 Here are some blots similar to those in the test (the actual Rorschach blots may not be reproduce
d), along with brief interpretations of typical responses:*
FIGURE 15
Rorschach-type blots and typical interpretations (from Kleinmuntz, 1980, by permission)
The Rorschach test became extremely popular among psychologists in the United States in the 1930s and was used widely. For several decades it was the leading topic of Ph.D. dissertations in clinical psychology, and thousands of research papers have been written about it, but the net verdict is mixed. Some have found the prescribed interpretations reliable and valid, others have not.29 Nonetheless, it remains one of the tests most often used by clinical psychologists and psychiatrists.
Another well-known projective test is the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), created by the psychologist Henry Murray and an assistant, Christiana Morgan.
Murray, coolly patrician in appearance but driven by some demon, had traveled a tortuous road before finding himself. He began as a history major, went through medical training, specialized in surgery, and then spent five years in physiological chemistry. Still searching, he visited Jung in Zürich and for three weeks had daily sessions and long weekends of psychotherapy with him, from which “explosive experience,” as he calls it, he “emerged a reborn man.”30 Freed of hitherto incurable stuttering and immensely attracted to psychology, he turned to the study of that subject, became a psychoanalyst, and eventually found his calling as a psychoanalytically oriented researcher at the Harvard Psychological Clinic. He briefly collaborated with Allport, but thereafter his psychodynamic view of personality kept them, according to Allport, “in a state of friendly separation.”