Personality Assessment (Psychology Revivals)

A critical survey

Philip E. Vernon

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415716482
• eBook ISBN: 9781134751129
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Originally published in 1964, the aim of this book was to analyse the psychological processes involved in understanding personality, and to consider how the psychologist could help in making more accurate assessments.

Professor Vernon discusses in detail the scientific status of psychoanalytic and other 'depth' theories of motivation, the value of different types of psychotherapeutic treatment and counselling, the influence of upbringing on the development of personality, and the effectiveness of projective techniques. He also examines the reasons for the highly variable results obtained with personality tests and questionnaires.

As well as providing a balanced review of theories of personality and of various types of test, this work made a fresh contribution to developing improved techniques of assessment.

Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION
AND GENERAL SUMMARY

Our daily lives are largely made up of contacts with other people, during which we are constantly making judgments of their personalities and accommodating our behaviour to them in accordance with these judgments. A casual meeting of neighbours on the street, an employer giving instructions to an employee, a mother telling her children how to behave, a journey in a train where strangers eye one another without exchanging a word – all these involve mutual interpretations of personal qualities.

Success in many vocations largely depends on skill in sizing up people. It is important not only to such professionals as the clinical psychologist, the psychiatrist or the social worker, but also to the doctor or lawyer in dealing with their clients, the business man trying to outwit his rivals, the salesman with potential customers, the teacher with his pupils, not to speak of the pupils judging their teacher. Social life, indeed, would be impossible if we did not, to some extent, understand, and react to, the motives and qualities of those we meet; and clearly we are sufficiently accurate for most practical purposes, although we also recognize that misinterpretations easily arise – particularly on the part of others who judge us!

Errors can often be corrected as we go along. But whenever we are pinned down to a definite decision about a person, which cannot easily be revised through this ‘feed-back’, the inadequacies of our judgments become apparent. The hostess who wrongly thinks that the Smiths and the Joneses will get on well together can do little to retrieve the success of her party. A school or a business may be saddled for years with an undesirable member of staff, because the selection committee which interviewed him for a quarter of a hour misjudged his personality; and most marriages which break down do so because the partners wrongly believed that they understood and liked each other's personality.

Just because the process is so familiar and taken for granted, it has aroused little scientific curiosity until recently. Dramatists, writers and artists throughout the centuries have excelled in the portrayal of character, but have seldom stopped to ask how they, or we, get to know people, or how accurate is our knowledge. However, the popularity of such unscientific systems as Lavater's physiognomy in the eighteenth century, Gall's phrenology in the nineteenth, and of handwriting interpretations by graphologists, or palm-readings by gipsies, show that people are aware of weaknesses in their judgments and desirous of better methods of diagnosis. It is natural that, in the present century, they should turn to psychology for help, in the belief that psychologists are specialists in ‘human nature’.

This belief is hardly justified: for the primary aim of psychology has been to establish the general laws or principles underlying behaviour and thinking, rather than to apply these to concrete problems of the individual person. A great many professional psychologists still regard it as their main function to study the nature of learning, perception and motivation in the abstracted or average human being, or in lower organisms, and consider it premature to try to put so young a science to practical uses. They would disclaim the possession of any superior skill in judging their fellow-men. Indeed, being more aware of the difficulties than is the non-psychologist, they may be more reluctant to commit themselves to definite predictions or decisions about other people. Nevertheless, to an increasing extent psychologists are moving into educational, occupational, clinical and other applied fields, where they are called upon to use their expertise for such purposes as fitting the education or job to the child or adult, and the person to the job. Thus a considerable proportion of their activities consists of personality assessment, and the main object of this book is to evaluate the methods available to them. It will be appropriate, then, to begin by listing the kinds of situations in which they make decisions about people. These situations can be broadly categorized under three headings: Selection, Counselling or Guidance, and Research.

Selection. 1.Choosing, or promoting a man for a particular job: e.g. managing director, headmaster. Technical qualifications may be important, but these can be fairly adequately assessed from the candidates’ records, and the more crucial issue is which candidate possesses the most suitable combination of personality qualities.

2. Admission of men and women for training as officers in the Services, as doctors, nurses, lawyers, school-teachers, salesmen, etc., where again the ‘wrong kind’ of personality may prove disastrous.

3. Admission to advanced schooling or university education, where the supply of places is limited and it is necessary to select those with sufficient perseverance, personal stability, and interest – in addition to sufficient ability – to profit.

4. In the field of psychopathology: identifying those patients whose personality disturbance justifies some rather drastic and irreversible treatment such as electroconvulsive therapy or leucotomy.

5. Transfer of mentally retarded or maladjusted children to some special form of schooling, or residential care, where again provision is limited, and where the proposed treatment carries serious implications for the child and his family.

6. Allocation of criminals and delinquents to special types of detention, probation or release on parole, where a wrong assessment may likewise have serious social consequences.

7. Screening of recruits by a short test or preliminary interview with a view to referring possible cases of mental disorder or maladjustment for more detailed study, e.g. by psychiatrists. It would be wasteful and impractical to submit all recruits, over 90 % of whom may be reasonably normal, to skilled psychiatric examination.

Counselling. 8. Providing a person with normative information on his interests, attitudes, and other qualities (i.e. showing him how he compares with people of similar age, sex, etc.) in order to help him to make wise educational or vocational decisions.

9. Counselling or psychotherapy of maladjusted persons based more on clinical interview methods than on testing, with the aim of promoting self-understanding and resolution of personality conflicts.

10. A counsellor or clinical psychologist collects similar material but uses it to make up his own mind as to what kind of treatment will best suit an educationally retarded, maladjusted or delinquent child or adult patient. This is similar to Nos. 4, 5 or 6, but is more exploratory, less drastic or irreversible. Alternatively, he may pass on his findings regarding the personality to the child's parents or teachers, or to a court of law, or to a hospital psychiatrist, leaving it to them to decide the appropriate treatment.

Research. 11. Surveying the effects of some form of treatment or instruction, generally with a view to making practical recommendations. For example, evaluating the effects on pupils' personalities and attitudes of different kinds of schooling, of violent TV programmes, or of different techniques of child upbringing; assessing the changes brought about by various psychotherapies.

12. Miscellaneous issues of public concern where practical decisions have to be taken, and where a knowledge of personality differences would be useful. Thus it may be asked whether certain personality types are more liable than others to ethnic, fascist or communist prejudice, more susceptible to special kinds of advertising and propaganda, weaker in industrial or military morale, more liable to accidents, etc.

The role of contemporary psychology in personality decisions. To all of these and other situations in daily life, psychologists have made some contributions, but their success is so limited, in comparison with what they have achieved in the fields of abilities and training, that most people continue to rely mainly on unscientific methods of assessment. The past third of a century has seen a tremendous amount of work on personality tests, and on carefully controlled experimental studies of personality. Investigations of personality by Freudian and other ‘depth’ psychologists and psychiatrists have an even longer history. And yet psychology seems to be no nearer to providing society with practicable techniques which are sufficiently reliable and accurate to win general acceptance. It is true that counsellors are working full-time in most American schools and colleges, and that child guidance and vocational guidance are developing so rapidly in Europe that it is difficult to meet the demand for trained personnel. But the soundness of their methods and the value of their work are under constant fire from other psychologists, and we shall see below that it is far from easy to prove their worth.

The growth of psychology in the present century has probably helped responsible members of society to become more aware of the difficulties of assessment. But it is not much use telling employers, the Services, educationists and judges how inaccurately they diagnose the personalities with which they have to deal unless psychologists are sure that they can provide something better. Even when university psychologists themselves appoint a new member of staff, they almost always resort to the traditional techniques of assessing the candidates through interviews, past records, and testimonials, and probably make at least as many bad appointments as other employers do. However, a large amount of experimental development of better methods has been carried out since 1940 by groups of psychologists in the Armed Services and in the Civil Service, and by such organizations as the (British) National Institute of Industrial Psychology and the American Institute of Research. It is hoped in this book to show which of their techniques are most promising and worth more extensive application.

In some ways, popular interest in psychology, and its potential applications to practical decisions, has been embarrassing and even harmful. The personnel manager and the teacher, possessing very little psychological training (and even some industrial and educational psychologists who ought to know better), are tempted to procure tests which claim to measure good adjustment or other traits or interests, and to give them to employees and school pupils, without realizing the precautions that are necessary if they are to have any reliability. W. H. Whyte, in The Organization Man, has trenchantly criticized this all-too-common misapplication of testing. Many of the discoveries of depth psychology are equally open to abuse, for example in the handling of maladjusted children at school, or in so-called motivation research on consumer preferences.

Ethical considerations. One of man's strongest motives is the maintenance and enhancement of his Ego. Hence any attempt by psychologists and others to study his personality more closely with a view to controlling his freedom of action is likely to be resented. Many serious thinkers, therefore, are shocked by the invasions of privacy which are implied by the kind of situations we have listed above, and are inclined to regard any scientific investigation of the person as unethical, particularly if done without his consent, or, in the case of children, without the consent of their parents.

One can sympathize with this point of view, and with the underlying fear that unscrupulous politicians or employers might use the results of scientific research on personality to manipulate man against his will. But surely the answer is that the good of civilized society already demands some control over the freedom of its members. Thus, we think it right to refuse to employ persons with unsuitable qualities in important posts, and to care for the deviant (criminal or psychopathological cases) in prisons and hospitals. Again, teachers, ministers and the law are already interfering with the parents' rights to bring up their children as they wish. If these things are being done ineffectively it seems obscurantist to object to the psychologist's attempt to improve our methods.

Secondly, psychologists have generally shown themselves more aware of the need to serve the individual's best interests than have other ‘manipulators’ or decision-makers. They have an ethical code similar to that of the doctor,^* which emphasizes this responsibility, though admittedly there are many doubtful cases. For example, a lecturer in psychology wishes to demonstrate to his students, or to carry out research on, personality inventories. How far is he justified in invading their privacy by applying these highly personal questionnaires, perhaps making them aware of abnormal tendencies which had not previously occurred to them; and may not his own reactions to some students be biased by his knowledge of their responses to tests of very dubious validity? Many other problems arise in connection with the communication of the results of personality studies to employers and teachers. But there is good reason to think that, as the science of personality assessment becomes more advanced, the practitioners will formulate even more adequate principles and safeguards.

The nature of personality. This book does not attempt to offer a novel psychological theory of personality. It draws on the contributions of those who have studied personality from many different theoretical viewpoints, and tries to reconcile the frequently conflicting evidence. In the course of these discussions, a tentative eclectic picture will emerge which, it is hoped, will be acceptable to occupational and educational psychologists and to counsellors generally (cf. especially Chapter 14). But for the moment we will make do with Harsh and Schrickel's phrase (1950): personality is ‘that which characterizes an individual and determines his unique adaptation to the environment’. More colloquially, personality means – what sort of a person is so-and-so, what is he like? At the same time we usually restrict the term to the relatively permanent emotional qualities underlying the person's behaviour, his drives and needs, attitudes and interests, and distinguish it from his intellectual and bodily skills and cognitive characteristics.

SUMMARY OF LATER CHAPTERS

Parts I, II and III of this book deal respectively with the approaches to personality of the lay or psychologically unsophisticated individual (naïve interpretation), of the clinical psychologist or psychiatrist who is influenced by Freudian or depth psychological theories of human nature, and of the psychological tester or psychometrist who aims to measure people's traits or other personality characteristics scientifically. The fourth Part describes some methods of studying people which appear most promising for the practical purposes outlined above, in the light of the weaknesses of both clinical and psychometric techniques brought out in Parts II and III.

PART I. Naïve interpretations of personality

Chapter 2. Perceptions and misperceptions of people. In daily life, and in such situations as the selection interview, we judge people by observing their outer appearance and expressions, how they behave in various contexts, and what they or others tell us about them. However, we do not so much observe or perceive particular cues as such, but immediately interpret these as expressing underlying intentions and dispositions. Much as the ordinary processes of perception serve to sort out our complex physical environment into a lot of stable objects, so we see people as motivated beings, like ourselves, each possessing a stable and organized structure of traits, interests and abilities, which constitute his personality. A reciprocal interaction occurs between any two persons: each realizes that he is being observed and evaluated by the other, and tries to behave in such a way as to create a favourable impression of his personality; at the same time he tries to penetrate the disguises or facades that the other is displaying.

There are many reasons why one's judgments of people's personalities (or of one's own) disagree with those of others, or measure up badly to external criteria: for example the tendency to over-generalize from insufficient observation and to oversimplify; also inflexibility in accepting fresh evidence and undue egocentricity or self-reference. Different observers differ characteristically in their modes of perception, and there is evidence that perception may be distorted by the perceiver's motivation and attitudes. In particular, each of us builds up theories or stereotypes of human nature, in terms of which we sort people and make predictions about them. Despite the crudity of these theories they serve many useful purposes in everyday social contacts.

Chapter 3. Theoretical considerations. Two main types of explanation of our perception and interpretation of the emotions and dispositions of others are distinguished: inference theories, based on association and the processes of social learning and reinforcement; and intuition theories (including instinctive reactions, empathy, physiognomic perception and Versteher) which invoke an unlearned capacity for understanding others. The former is generally favoured by those who study personality nomothetically, i.e. as an object possessing universal properties which can be measured scientifically; the latter by those who approach it idiographically, i.e. as an unique individual structure. These approaches are characteristic, respectively, of the experimental psychologist or psychometrist, and of the clinical psychologist. They are considered in detail in ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• 1 Introduction and General Summary
• Part .I Naïve Interpretations of Personality
• Part .II The Clinical Psychologist's Understanding of Personality
• Part .III Objective Approaches to Personality
• Part .IV Practicable Methods of Assessment
• Bibliography
• Subject Index
• Author Index