Objective Personality Tests

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Assessing Personality
■ What do we still need to know?
Valuable as it is, this study leaves a number of unanswered questions about the relationship between temperament and personality (Roberts & DelVecchio, 2000). For
example, why is there a connection between temperament as a child and personality as
an adult? The link is probably a complex one, involving both nature and nurture. Caspi
and his colleagues (1989) offered one explanation that draws heavily on social-cognitive
theories, especially Bandura’s notion of reciprocal determinism. They proposed that
long-term consistencies in behavior result from the mutual influence that temperament
and environmental events have on one another. For example, people may put themselves in situations that reinforce their temperament. So undercontrolled people might
choose to spend time with people who accept, and even encourage, rude or impolite
behavior. When such behavior brings negative reactions, the world seems that much
more hostile, and the undercontrolled people become even more aggressive and negative. Caspi and his colleagues see the results of their studies as evidence that this process
of mutual influence between personality and situations can continue over a lifetime
(Caspi et al., 2003).
Assessing Personality
䉴 How do psychologists measure personality?
Suppose you are an industrial/organizational psychologist whose job is to ensure that
your company hires only honest, cooperative, and hard-working employees. How would
you know which candidates had these characteristics? There are four basic methods of
assessing and describing personality (Funder, 2004): life outcomes (such as records of
education, income, or marital status), situational tests (observations of behavior in situations designed to measure personality), observer ratings (judgments about a person
made by friends or family), and self-reports (responses to interviews and personality
test items). Data gathered through these methods assist in employee selection, in the
diagnosis of psychological disorders, in making predictions about a convict’s or mental patient’s dangerousness, and in other risky decision situations (Meyer et al., 2001;
Bernstein, Kramer, & Phares, in press).
Life outcomes, observer ratings, and situational tests allow direct assessment of many
aspects of personality and behavior, including how often, how effectively, and how consistently various actions occur. Interviews provide information about personality from
the person’s own point of view. Some interviews are open-ended, meaning that questions are tailored to the intellectual level, emotional state, and special needs of the person being assessed. Others are structured, meaning that the interviewer asks a fixed set
of questions about specific topics in a particular order. Structured interviews are routinely used in personality research because they are sure to cover matters of special
interest to the researcher.
Personality tests offer a way to gather self-report information that is more standardized and economical than interviews. To be useful, however, a personality test must be
reliable and valid. As described in the chapter on thought, language, and intelligence,
reliability refers to how stable or consistent the results of a test are; validity reflects the
degree to which test scores are interpreted appropriately and used properly in making
inferences about people. The many personality tests available today are traditionally
classified as either objective or projective.
Objective Personality Tests
objective personality test A form listing clear, specific questions, statements,
or concepts to which people are asked
to respond.
Objective personality tests ask clear questions about a person’s thoughts, feelings, or
behavior (such as “Do you like parties?”). The answers are used to draw conclusions about
the individual’s personality. These self-report tests are usually set up in a multiple-choice
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Chapter 11
TA B L E
Personality
11.3
Sample Summary of Results from the NEO-PI-R
The NEO-PI-R assesses the big-five personality dimensions. In this example of the results a person might receive, the five factors scored are,
from the top row to the bottom row, neuroticism, extraversion, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. Because people with different
NEO profiles tend to have different psychological problems, this test has been used to aid in the diagnosis of personality disorders (Trull &
Sher, 1994).
Compared with the responses of other people, your responses suggest that you can be described as:
□ Sensitive, emotional, and prone
嘺 Generally calm and able to deal
□ Secure, hardy, and generally relaxed
to experience feelings that are
with stress, but you sometimes
even under stressful conditions.
upsetting.
experience feelings of guilt, anger,
or sadness.
□ Extraverted, outgoing, active, and
high-spirited. You prefer to be
around people most of the time.
□ Moderate in activity and enthusiasm.
You enjoy the company of others,
but you also value privacy.
嘺 Introverted, reserved, and serious.
You prefer to be alone or with a few
close friends.
□ Open to new experiences. You have
broad interests and are very
imaginative.
□ Practical but willing to consider
new ways of doing things. You seek
a balance between the old and the
new.
嘺 Down-to-earth, practical, traditional,
and pretty much set in your ways.
□ Compassionate, good-natured, and
eager to cooperate and avoid
conflict.
嘺 Generally warm, trusting, and agreeable, but you can sometimes be
stubborn and competitive.
□ Hardheaded, skeptical, proud, and
competitive. You tend to express
your anger directly.
嘺 Conscientious and well organized.
You have high standards and always
strive to achieve your goals.
□ Dependable and moderately well
organized. You generally have clear
goals but are able to set your work
aside.
□ Easygoing, not very well organized,
and sometimes careless. You prefer
not to make plans.
LINKAGES
Can personality tests be used
to diagnose mental disorders?
(a link to Psychological
Disorders)
or true-false format that allows them to be given to many people at once, much like
the academic tests used in many classrooms. And as in the classroom, objective personality tests can be scored by machine and then compared with the responses of other
people. So before interpreting your score on an objective test of extraversion, for example, a psychologist would compare it to a norm, or the average score of thousands of
others of your age and gender. You would be considered unusually extraverted only if
you scored well above that norm.
Some objective personality tests focus on one particular trait, such as optimism
(Carver & Scheier, 2002). Others measure a small group of related traits, such as empathy and social responsibility (Penner, 2002). Still other objective tests measure the
strength of a wider variety of traits to reveal general psychological functioning. For example, the Neuroticism Extraversion Openness Personality Inventory, Revised, or NEO-PI-R
(Costa & McCrae, 1992), is designed to measure the big-five personality traits described
earlier. Table 11.3 shows how the test’s results are presented. The NEO-PI-R is quite reliable (Viswesvaran & Ones, 2000), and people’s scores on its various scales have been successfully used to predict a number of criteria, including performance on specific jobs and
overall career success (Barrick & Mount, 1991; Siebert & Kraimer, 2001), social status
(Anderson et al., 2001), and the likelihood that people will engage in criminal activities
and risky sexual behaviors (Clower & Bothwell, 2001; Miller et al., 2004).
When the goal of personality assessment is to diagnose psychological disorders, the
most commonly used objective test is the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory,
better known as the MMPI (Butcher & Rouse, 1996). This 556-item true-false test was
developed during the 1930s at the University of Minnesota by Starke Hathaway and
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Assessing Personality
FIGURE
11.5
The MMPI: Clinical Scales and
Sample Profiles
120
40
T-score
50
30
45
35
35
25
55
35
40
45
50
35
20
40
40
30
55
30
40
30
35
15
35
25
25
15
20
30
10
25
35
Hs
1
D
2
25
25
20
20
5
10
Hy
3
15
Pd
4
35
30
20
25
20
15
10
10
30
20
15
15
5
30
25
20
45
40
35
25
50
45
30
20
65
60
45
50
30
25
50
60
40
40
45
40
65
55
60
55
40
75
70
55
45
35
85
80
65
50
45
95
90
60
50
105
100
30
50
115
110
A score of 50 on the MMPI’s clinical scales
is average. Scores at or above 65 mean
that responses on that scale are more extreme than at least 95 percent of the normal population. The red line represents
the profile of Kenneth Bianchi, the
“Hillside Strangler” who murdered
thirteen women in the late 1970s. His
profile is characteristic of a shallow person with poor self-control and little
personal insight who is sexually preoccupied and unable to reveal himself to
others. The profile in green comes from a
more normal man, but it is characteristic
of someone who is self-centered, passive,
and unwilling to accept personal responsibility for his behavior and who, when under stress, complains of numerous vague
physical symptoms.
The clinical scales abbreviated in the
figure are as follows:
1. Hypochondriasis (Hs; concern with
bodily functions and symptoms).
2. Depression (D; pessimism, hopelessness, slowed thinking).
3. Hysteria (Hy; use of physical or
mental symptoms to avoid
problems).
4. Psychopathic deviate (Pd; disregard
for social customs, emotional
shallowness).
5. Masculinity/femininity (Mf; interests associated with a particular
gender).
6. Paranoia (Pa; delusions, suspiciousness).
7. Psychasthenia (Pt; worry, guilt,
anxiety).
8. Schizophrenia (Sc; bizarre thoughts
and perceptions).
9. Hypomania (Ma; overactivity,
excitement, impulsiveness).
10. Social introversion (Si; shy,
insecure).
55
Mf
5
Pa
6
Pt
7
20
15
Sc
8
15
10
Ma
9
15
10
Si
0
Clinical scales
J. C. McKinley. It has since been revised and updated in the MMPI-2 (National
Computer Systems, 1992).
The MMPI is organized into ten groups of items called clinical scales. Certain patterns of responses to the items on these scales have been associated with people who
display particular psychological disorders or personality characteristics. The MMPI and
MMPI-2 also contain four validity scales. Responses to these scales detect whether
respondents are distorting their answers, misunderstanding the items, or being
uncooperative. For example, someone who responds “true” to items such as “I never
get angry” may not be giving honest answers to the test as a whole.
To interpret the meaning of MMPI test results, a person’s scores on the ten clinical scales are plotted as a profile (see Figure 11.5). This profile is then compared with
the profiles of people who are known to have certain personality characteristics or
problems. It is presumed that people taking the MMPI share characteristics with people whose profiles are most similar to their own. So although a high score on a
particular clinical scale, such as depression, might suggest a problem in that area,
interpreting the MMPI usually focuses on the overall pattern in the clinical scale
scores—particularly on the combination of two or three scales on which a person’s
scores are unusually high.
There is considerable evidence for the reliability and validity of MMPI clinical scales,
but even the latest editions of the test are far from perfect measurement tools (Carr,
Moretti, & Cue, 2005; Munley, 2002). The validity of MMPI interpretations may be particularly suspect when—because of cultural factors—the perceptions, values, and experiences of the test taker differ significantly from those of the test developers and the