Personality Assessment

We assess personality all the time

  • It appears we have evoled to automatically assess other people's personalities - all the time when we interact with humans
  • When we meet them - focus on superficial features
  • When we know them for a long time - focus on deeper features

Informal (non-scientific) Personality Assessment

Self-assessment

  • Can be accurate
  • Insight, self-understanding
  • Implications for psychological well-being and life outcomes
  • Problems arise when it is wrong

Assessment of others

  • Implications for our and other people's behaviour and self-views
  • If people are seen in a negative light by many others can develop their own negative self-concept
  • Can be accurate - even with minimal information
  • But can be inaccurate and affected by many biases

Can makeup affect your judgement of personality? In what way? (Etcoff et al., 2011)

Makeup affects attractiveness, trust likeability, competence perception, however glamorous makeup is trusted less

Can Personality Be Assessed Scientifically?

Allport: Idiographic vs. nomothetic

  • Idiographic - uniqueness, individuality, subjective experience, qualitative methods
  • Nomothetic - laws, general knowledge, objective knowledge, quanitative methods, statistical analysis

Popper: importance of reliability and validity in personality testing

Objective vs. Projective

Objective

  • Highly structured, tends to be clear and straightforward and can be scored in a precise and objective measure
  • Omibus (multi-construct) tests vs. single constructs
  • Most often have multiple straightforward questions and items

Projective

  • Unstructured and ambiguous, participants project their personality characteristics onto stimuli
  • Often ambiguous stimuli and open-ended questions
  • Focuses on deep, unconscious, and hidden personality characteristics

Used by psychodynamic theroists as believe most important parts of our personality are hidden to ourselves

Objective: MACH-IV

Measure of machiavellianism

  • Objective measure of a single personality characteristic
  • Found to be reliable and valid
  • Used as a measure of one of the Dark Triad
  • Treated as a unidimensional construct
  • Assumed three facets: tactics, views, and morality

Christie and Geis

Measures a personality that has a highly manipulative, cynical, controlling, and cold approach to interpersonal interactions and morality; absence of psychopathology

Further research found:

  • Machievellianism should be treated as a two-dimensional construct
  • These should be tactics and views
  • These two constructs are orthogonal

Response Biases

Reason we have positive (pro-trait) and negative (con-trait) items in personality assessments

Acquiesence bias

  • A response bias where participants tend to agree or disagree with items regardless of their content
  • We have individuals who would choose contrary items - put pos and neg items but identify these individuals

Deviation

  • Participants tend to respond in a very unusual, unexpected and odd way

Social desirability

  • Participants respond in such a way to present themselves in a more favourable light

Extreme responding

  • Affected by culture
  • People who choose the extremes - nothing in between

Objective: The Omibus Test - The Personality Research Form (PRF)

Douglas Jackson

  • 20 personality variables and 2 validity scales
  • Different versions
  • Each contain hundreds of true/false items
  • Comprehensive measurement of personality

Bipolar scales

  • Highly complex measure of personality, low score does not indicate absence of the trait, but a trait which is the opposite of the higher score
  • E.g. dominance on one end, social recognition on the other end

Validity scales

  • Infrequency - controlling deviant responding to items, to identify individuals who responds in implausible or pseudo-random manner
  • Desirability - about social desirability, describes self in terms judged as desirable
  • Reliability and validity

Methods for construction:

  • Rational - developer decides to test personality constructs based on pre-existing theory e.g. PRF
  • Empirical - purely empirical method the most important thing is the empirical criterion, want to see items correlate with specific empirical trait e.g. MMPI
  • Factor Analytic - mathematical technique e.g. IPIP Big 5

Projective: Thematic Apperception Test (TAT)

Henry Murray

  • Test to investigate the main unconscious needs, emotions and conflicts of a personality
  • Test material: set of standard pictures, and one blank card which call for constructing a story
  • Invent a story for each card and these are interpreted

Projective: Rorschach inkblot

  • Describe or interpret a meaningless stimulus - inblot
  • Answer thought to come from a projection of needs, feelings, experiences etc. of the participant
  • Dropped ink onto note cards, folded the cards and then unfolded them

Hermann Rorschach

Not widely used today, clinicians are most likely to use them
Issues surrounding their validity and reliability are controversial

Realistic Accuracy Model

Explains how people manage to accurately evaluate one or more aspects of the personalities of people they know

Four stages:

  • First, the person being judged must do something relevant i.e. informative about the person being judged
  • Second, this information must be available to a judge
    Third, this judge must detect this information
  • Fourth, and finally, the judge must utilise this information correctly

Important implication: accuracy of personality judgement can be improved in four different ways

Accurate self-knowledge is considered a hallmark of mental health

  • People who are secure and don't distort anything around them see themselves more accurately as well
  • Accurate self-knowledge helps make informative decisions on important issues