12.1 Personality: What It Is and How It Is Measured

If someone said, “You have no personality,” how would you feel? Like a cookie-cutter person, a boring, grayish lump who should go out and get a personality as soon as possible? As a rule, people don’t usually strive for a personality—one seems to develop naturally as we travel through life. As psychologists have tried to understand the process of personality development, they have pondered questions of description (how do people differ?), explanation (why do people differ?), and the more quantitative question of measurement (how can personality be assessed?).

Describing and Explaining Personality

As the first biologists earnestly attempted to classify all plants and animals (whether lichens or ants or fossilized lions), personality psychologists began by labeling and describing different personalities. And just as biology came of age with Darwin’s theory of evolution, which explained how differences among species arose, the maturing study of personality also has developed explanations of the basis for psychological differences among people.

Most personality psychologists focus on specific, psychologically meaningful individual differences, characteristics such as honesty, anxiousness, or moodiness. Still, personality is often in the eye of the beholder. When one person describes another as “a conceited jerk,” for example, you may wonder whether you have just learned more about the describer or the person being described. Interestingly, studies that ask acquaintances to describe each other find a high degree of similarity among any one individual’s descriptions of many different people (“Jason thinks that Carlos is considerate, Renata is kind, and Jean Paul is nice to others”). In contrast, resemblance is quite low when many people describe one person (“Carlos thinks Jason is smart, Renata thinks he is competitive, and Jean Paul thinks he has a good sense of humor”; Dornbusch et al., 1965).

How would you describe each of these personalities?

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What leads Lady Gaga to all of her entertaining extremes? In general, explanations of personality differences are concerned with (1) prior events that can shape an individual’s personality or (2) anticipated events that might motivate the person to reveal particular personality characteristics. In a biological prior event, Stefani Germanotta received genes from her parents that may have led her to develop into the sort of person who loves putting on a display (not to mention putting on raw meat) and stirring up controversy. Researchers interested in events that happen prior to our behavior study our genes, brains, and other aspects of our biological makeup, and also delve into our subconscious and into our circumstances and interpersonal surroundings. The consideration of anticipated events emphasizes the person’s own, subjective perspective and often seems intimate and personal in its reflection of the person’s inner life (hopes, fears, and aspirations).

Of course, our understanding of how the baby named Stefani Germanotta grew into the adult Lady Gaga (or the life of any woman or man) also depends on insights into the interaction between the prior and anticipated events: We need to know how her history may have shaped her motivations.

Measuring Personality

Of all the things psychologists have set out to measure, personality may be one of the toughest. How do you capture the uniqueness of a person? What aspects of people’s personalities are important to know about, and how should we quantify them? The general personality measures can be classified broadly into personality inventories and projective techniques.

Personality Inventories

To learn about an individual’s personality, you could follow the person around and, clipboard in hand, record every single thing the person does, says, thinks, and feels (including how long this goes on before the person calls the police). Some observations might involve your own impressions (Day 5: seems to be getting irritable); others would involve objectively observable events that anyone could verify (Day 7: grabbed my pencil and broke it in half, then bit my hand).

Psychologists have figured out ways to obtain objective data on personality without driving their subjects to violence. The most popular technique is self-report, a method in which people provide subjective information about their own thoughts, feelings, or behaviors, typically via questionnaire or interview. In most self-report measures, the respondent is asked to circle a number on a scale indicating the degree to which they endorse that item as being self-descriptive (e.g., reporting on a scale of 0–5 to what extent they believe they are a “worrier”) or to indicate whether an item is true or false in describing them. The researcher then combines the answers to get a general sense of the individual’s personality with respect to a particular domain. TABLE 12.1 shows the 10 items from a self-report test of different personality traits (Gosling, Rentfrow & Swann, 2003). In this case, the respondent is asked to indicate whether each personality trait applies to him or her. To score the measure you simply add up the two items for each of the five traits listed at the bottom of the table.

How is a self-report scale created? The usual strategy is to collect sets of self-descriptive statements that indicate different degrees of a personality characteristic. To measure friendliness, for example, you could ask people to rate their agreement with statements ranging from “I am somewhat friendly” to “I am very outgoing,” and even to “I love being around people every minute of the day.” Adding up the number of statements the person endorses that indicate friendliness (and subtracting endorsements of those that indicate unfriendliness) yields a measure of the person’s self-reported friendliness. Scales based on the content of self-reports have been devised to assess a whole range of personality characteristics, all the way from general tendencies such as overall happiness (Lyubomirsky, 2008; Lyubomirsky & Lepper, 1999) to specific ones such as responding rapidly to insults (Swann & Rentfrow, 2001) or complaining about poor service (Lerman, 2006).

Personality inventories ask people to report what traits they possess; however, many psychologists believe that people do not always know what’s in their mind. Can we rely on people to accurately report on their personality?

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One of the most commonly used personality tests is the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), a well-researched, clinical questionnaire used to assess personality and psychological problems. The MMPI was developed in 1939 and has been revised several times over the years, leading up to the current version, the MMPI–2–RF (restructured form; Ben-Porath & Tellegen, 2008). The MMPI–2–RF consists of 338 self-descriptive statements to which the respondent answers “true,” “false,” or “cannot say.” The MMPI–2–RF measures a wide range of psychological constructs: clinical problems (e.g., antisocial behavior, thought dysfunction), somatic problems (e.g., head pain, cognitive complaints), internalizing problems (e.g., anxiety, self-doubt), externalizing problems (e.g., aggression, substance abuse), and interpersonal problems (e.g., family problems, avoidance). The MMPI–2–RF also includes validity scales that assess a person’s attitudes toward test taking and any tendency to try to distort the results by faking answers.

Personality inventories such as the MMPI–2–RF are easy to administer: All that is needed is the test and a pencil (or a computer-based version). The respondent’s scores are then calculated and compared with the average ratings of thousands of other test takers. Because no human interpretation of the responses is needed (i.e., “true” means true, “false” means false, etc.), any potential biases of the person giving the test are minimized. Of course, an accurate measurement of personality will only occur if people provide accurate responses. Although self-report test results are easy to obtain, critics of this approach highlight several limitations. One problem is that many people have a tendency to respond in a socially desirable way, such that they underreport things that are unflattering or embarrassing. Perhaps even more problematic is that there are many things we don’t know about ourselves and so are unable to report! Studies show that people often are inaccurate in their self-report about what they have experienced in the past, what factors are motivating their behaviors in the present, or how they will feel or behave in the future (Wilson, 2009).

Projective Techniques

Figure 12.1: Sample Rorschach Inkblot Test takers are shown a card such as this sample and asked, “What might this be?” What they perceive, where they see it, and why it looks that way are assumed to reflect unconscious aspects of their personality.

SPENCER GRANT/PHOTO EDIT

A second, somewhat controversial, class of tools for evaluating personality designed to circumvent the limitations of self-report mentioned above, is projective tests, which are tests designed to reveal inner aspects of individuals’ personalities by analysis of their responses to a standard series of ambiguous stimuli. The developers of projective tests assume that people will project personality factors that are below awareness—wishes, concerns, impulses, and ways of seeing the world—onto the ambiguous stimuli and will not censor these responses. Probably best-known is the Rorschach Inkblot Test, a projective technique in which respondents’ inner thoughts and feelings are believed to be revealed by analysis of their responses to a set of unstructured inkblots. An example inkblot is shown in FIGURE 12.1. Responses are scored according to complicated systems (derived in part from research with people with psychological disorders) that classify what people see (Exner, 1993; Rapaport, 1946). For example, most people who look at Figure 12.1 report seeing birds or people. Someone who reports seeing something very unusual (e.g., “I see two purple tigers eating a velvet cheeseburger”) may be experiencing thoughts and feelings that are very different from most other people.

Figure 12.2: Sample TAT Card Test takers are shown cards with ambiguous scenes such as this sample and are asked to tell a story about what is happening in the picture. The main themes of the story, the thoughts and feelings of the characters, and how the story develops and resolves are considered useful indices of unconscious aspects of an individual’s personality (Murray, 1943).

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The Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) is a projective technique in which respondents’ underlying motives, concerns, and the way they see the social world are believed to be revealed through analysis of the stories they make up about ambiguous pictures of people. To get a sense of the test, look at FIGURE 12.2. The test administrator shows the respondent the card and asks him or her to tell a story about the picture, asking questions such as: Who are those people? What is happening? What led them to this moment? What will happen next? Different people tell very different stories about the image. In creating the stories, the respondent is thought to identify with the main characters and to project his or her view of others and the world onto the other details in the drawing. Thus, any details that are not obviously drawn from the picture are believed to be projected onto the story from the respondent’s own desires and internal conflicts.

Many of the TAT drawings tend to elicit a consistent set of themes, such as successes and failures, competition and jealousy, conflict with parents and siblings, feelings about intimate relationships, aggression, and sexuality. For instance, one card that shows an older man standing over a child lying in bed tends to elicit themes regarding relationships that respondents have with an older man in their life, such as a relationship with a father, teacher, boss, or therapist. The interviewer might be interested in learning whether respondents see the person lying down as a male or female, and whether they report that the man standing is trying to help or harm the person lying down. Consider a story proposed by a young man in response to this card: “The boy lying down had a hard day at school. He worked so hard studying for his exam that when he came home after taking the test he fell asleep with his clothes on. No matter how hard the boy tries, he can never make his father happy. The father is sick and tired of the son not doing well in school and so he is going to kill him. He suffocates the boy and the boy dies.” The test administrator might interpret this response as indicating that the respondent perceives that his father has high expectations that are not being met, and perhaps that the father is disappointed and angry with the young man.

The EAR (electronically activated recorder) sampled conversations of hundreds of participants and found that women and men are equally talkative (Mehl et al., 2009).

THANKS TO STEPHANIE LEVITT; © MATTHIAS MEHL, UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA

The value of projective tests is debated by psychologists. Although they continue to be widely used by practicing clinicians, critics argue that tests such as the Rorschach and the TAT are open to the biases of the examiner. A TAT story like the one above may seem revealing; however, the examiner must always add an interpretation (Was this about the respondent’s actual father, about his own concerns about his academic failures, or about trying to be funny or provocative?), and that interpretation could well be the scorer’s own projection into the mind of the test taker. Thus, despite the rich picture of a personality and the insights into an individual’s motives that these tests offer, projective tests should be understood primarily as a way in which a psychologist can get to know someone personally and intuitively (McClelland et al., 1953). When measured by rigorous scientific criteria, projective tests such as the TAT and the Rorschach have not been found to be reliable or valid in predicting behavior (Lilienfeld, Lynn, & Lohr, 2003).

Newer personality measurement methods are moving beyond both self-report inventories and projective tests (Robins, Fraley, & Krueger, 2007). High-tech methods such as wireless communication, real-time computer analysis, and automated behavior identification open the door to personality measurements that are leaps beyond following the person around with a clipboard—and can lead to surprising findings. The stereotype that women are more talkative than men, for example, was challenged by findings when 396 college students in the United States and Mexico each spent several days wearing an EAR (electronically activated recorder) that captured random snippets of their talk (Mehl et al., 2009). The result? Women and men were equally talkative, each averaging about 16,000 words per day. The advanced measurement of how people differ (and how they do not) is a key step in understanding personality.