personality

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Chapter 3

Traits and Trait Taxonomies

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Trait-Descriptive Adjectives Words that describe traits, attributes of a person that are reasonably characteristic of the person and perhaps enduring over time.

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Three Fundamental Questions Guide Those Who Study Traits

• How should we conceptualize traits? • How can we identify which traits are the most important

from among the many ways in which individuals differ? • How can we formulate a comprehensive taxonomy of traits

—a system that includes within it all the major traits of personality?

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Definitions of Trait: Basic Formulations

• Traits as internal causal properties. • Traits as purely descriptive summaries.

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Traits as Internal Causal Properties

Traits are presumed to be internal. Individuals carry their desires, needs, and wants from one situation to next. • Desires and needs are presumed to be causal in the sense

that they explain the behavior of the individuals who possess them.

Traits can lie dormant. • Capacities are present even when behaviors are not

expressed.

The scientific usefulness of viewing traits as causes of behavior lies in ruling out other causes.

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Traits as Purely Descriptive Summaries

Traits are descriptive summaries of attributes of a person. • No assumption about internality or is causality is made.

Personality psychologists argue that we must first identify and describe important individual differences and subsequently develop causal theories to explain them.

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The Act Frequency Formulation of Traits: An Illustration of the Descriptive Summary Formulation

Starts with the notion that traits are categories of acts.

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Act Frequency Research Program The act frequency approach to traits involves three key elements: act nomination, prototypicality judgment, and the recording of act performance. Act nominations. • Identifying which acts belong in which trait categories.

Prototypicality judgments. • Identifying which acts are most central to, or prototypical of,

each trait category.

Recording act performance. • Securing information on actual performance of individuals

in their daily lives.

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Critique for Act Frequency Formulation

Does not specify how much context should be included in the description of a trait-relevant act. Seems applicable to overt actions, but what about failures to act or covert acts not directly observable? • May not successfully capture complex traits.

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Accomplishments of Act Frequency Formulation

• Helpful in making explicit the behavioral phenomena to which most trait terms refer.

• Helpful in identifying behavioral regularities. • Helpful in exploring the meaning of some traits that are

difficult to study, such as impulsivity and creativity.

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Identification of the Most Important Traits: Three Approaches

• Lexical approach. • Statistical approach. • Theoretical approach.

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Lexical Approach 1

Lexical hypothesis: All important individual differences have become encoded within the natural language. Trait terms are helpful in describing people and for communicating information about them. • Two criteria for identifying important traits. • Synonym frequency. • Cross-cultural universality.

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Lexical Approach 2

Limitation. • Personality is conveyed through different parts of speech,

including adjectives, nouns, and adverbs. • Lexical approach is a good starting point for identifying

important individual differences but should not be the only approach used.

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Statistical Approach 1

• Starts with a large, diverse pool of personality items. • Most researchers using the lexical approach turn to the

statistical approach to distill self-ratings of trait adjectives into basic categories of personality traits.

• Goal of statistical approach is to identify the major dimensions of personality.

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Statistical Approach 2

Factor analysis. Identifies groups of items that covary, or go together, but tend not to covary with other groups of items. Provides means for determining which personality variables share some common property or belong within the same group. Useful in reducing the large array of diverse traits into smaller, more useful set of underlying factors. Factor loading: Index of how much of a variation in an item is “explained” by a factor. • Cautionary note: You only get out of factor analysis what you put

in. • Researchers must pay attention till the initial selection items.

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Theoretical Approach Starts with a theory that determines which variables are important. Example: Sociosexual orientation theory (Simpson & Gangestad, 19 91; Penke & Asendorph, 2008a). Evaluation. • Strengths coincide with strengths of the theory, and

weaknesses coincide with the weaknesses of the theory. • To the extent that the theory contains gaps or biases, the

subsequent identification of important individual differences will reflect omissions and distortions.

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Evaluating the Approaches for Identifying Important Traits

In practice, many personality researchers use a combination of the three approaches. Norman (19 63), Goldberg (19 90), and Saucier (2009) started with the lexical strategy to identify the first set of variables for inclusion. Applied factor analysis to reduce the set to a more manageable number (five). This strategy solves two problems central to the science of personality. • Problem of identifying key domains of individual differences. • Problem of figuring out a method for describing structure that

exists among the individual differences identified.

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Taxonomies of Personality • Eysenck’s hierarchical model of personality. • Circumplex taxonomies of personality: The Wiggins

circumplex (19 79). • Five-factor model.

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Eysenck’s Hierarchical Model of Personality 1

Model of personality based on traits that Eysenck believed were highly heritable and had psychophysiological foundation. Three traits that meet the criteria. • Extraversion-introversion (E). • Neuroticism-emotional stability (N). • Psychoticism (P).

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Eysenck’s Hierarchical Model of Personality 2

Extraversion. High scorers are people who enjoy parties. • Have many friends. • Like to have people around to talk to. • Like playing practical jokes on others. • Display carefree and easy manner. • Have a high activity level.

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Eysenck’s Hierarchical Model of Personality 3

Neuroticism. High scorers are worriers. • Usually anxious and depressed. • Have trouble sleeping, experience array of psychosomatic

symptoms, and overreact to negative emotions.

Psychoticism. High scorers are solitary individuals. • Lack empathy and are often cruel and inhumane. • Have a penchant for the strange and unusual. • Impulsive and have antisocial tendencies.

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Eysenck’s Hierarchical Model of Personality 4

Hierarchical structure of Eysenck’s system. Super traits (P, E, and N) are at the top. Narrower traits are placed in the second level. Subsumed by each narrow trait is the third level. • Contain habitual acts.

At the lowest level of the four-tiered hierarchy are specific acts. Hierarchy has the advantage of locating each specific personality-relevant act within an increasingly precise nested system.

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Eysenck’s Hierarchical Model of Personality 5

Biological underpinnings. Key criteria for “basic” dimensions of personality is that it has reasonably high heritability. • P, E, and N have moderate heritabilities but so do many

other personality traits.

Psychological traits should have identifiable physiological substrate.

Limitations. • Many other personality traits show moderate heritability. • Eysenck may have missed important traits.

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The Wiggins Circumplex 1

Wiggins (19 79). • Developed measurement scales to assess traits. • Started with the lexical assumption. • Argued that trait terms specify different kinds of ways in

which individuals differ: Interpersonal, temperament, character, material, attitude, mental, and physical traits.

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The Wiggins Circumplex 2

Wiggins was concerned with interpersonal traits and carefully separated these out. Defined “interpersonal” as interactions among people involving exchanges. • Two resources that define social exchange are love and

status. • Dimensions of status and love define axes of the Wiggins

circumplex.

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Figure 3.2: The Circumplex Model of Personality

Source: Adapted from “Circular Reasoning About Interpersonal Behavior,” by J. S. Wiggins, N. Phillips, and P. Trapnell, 19 89, Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 56, p. 297. Copyright 19 89 by the American Psychological Association. Reprinted with permission.

Access the text alternative for slide images.

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The Wiggins Circumplex 3

Wiggins circumplex has three key advantages. • Provides an explicit definition of what constitutes “interpersonal”

behavior. • Specifies relationships between each trait and every other trait

in the model (adjacency, bipolarity, and orthogonality). • Alerts investigators to “gaps” in investigations of interpersonal

behavior.

Key limitation. Interpersonal map is limited to two dimensions. • Other traits, not captured by these two dimensions, also

have important interpersonal consequences.

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Five-Factor Model 1

Five broad factors. • Surgency or extraversion. • Agreeableness. • Conscientiousness. • Emotional stability. • Openness-intellect.

Originally based on a combination of lexical and statistical approaches. Achieved a greater degree of consensus than any other trait taxonomy in the history of personality trait psychology.

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Norman’s Markers for the Big Five 1

Extraversion or surgency • Talkative–silent. • Sociable–reclusive. • Adventurous–cautious. • Open–secretive.

Agreeableness • Good-natured–irritable. • Cooperative–negativistic. • Mild/gentle–headstrong. • Not jealous–jealous.

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Norman’s Markers for the Big Five 2

Conscientiousness • Responsible–undependable. • Scrupulous–unscrupulous. • Persevering–quitting. • Fussy/tidy–careless.

Emotional stability • Calm–anxious. • Composed–excitable. • Not hypochondriacal–

hypochondriacal. • Poised–nervous/tense.

Culture—Intellect, Openness • Intellectual–unreflective/

narrow. • Artistic–non-artistic. • Imaginative–simple/direct. • Polished/refined–crude/

boorish.

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Five-Factor Model 2

Empirical evidence for the five-factor model. • Replicable in studies using English-language trait words as

items. • Found by more than a dozen researchers using different

samples. • Replicated in different languages. • Replicated in every decade for the past half-century, suggesting

that five-factor solution is replicable over time. • Replicated using different item formats.

The troublesome fifth factor. Some disagreement remains about the content and replicability of the fifth factor.

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Five-Factor Model 3

Is the five-factor model comprehensive? Possible omissions. • Positive evaluation. • Negative evaluation. • Religiosity and spirituality. • Attractiveness. • Sexuality.

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The HEXACO Model 1

Some argue that the most comprehensive cross-language taxonomy of personality is best captured by the HEXACO model. • Humility–Honesty (H). • Emotionality (E). • Extraversion (X). • Agreeableness (A). • Conscientiousness (C). • Openness to Experience (O).

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The HEXACO Model 2

Five of the six factors are very close to those of the Big Five, although there are subtle differences. Six-factor taxonomy has emerged in lexical-based studies of the major world languages. The Honesty–Humility factor has accrued strong construct validity. • High scorers are more likely to offer sincere and humble

apologies (Dunlop et al., 2015), even though they are less likely to violate social rules.

• Those high on Honesty–Humility are more likely to be sincerely religious.

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The HEXACO Model 3

Those low on Honesty–Humility tend to be interpersonally exploitative, are more likely to sabotage others in their work environment, and are even more likely to engage in criminal activity.

Evaluation: • HEXACO Model is being validated in many different

cultures. • Evidence continues to accumulate that Honesty–Humility is

not well captured by the five-factor model.

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Summary and Evaluation • There are different approaches to identifying important

traits. • Personality psychologists sometimes use a blend of

approaches. • Formulating an overarching taxonomy of personality traits

is fundamental.

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Chapter 1

Introduction to Personality Psychology

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Personality Defined Personality is the set of psychological traits and mechanisms within the individual that are organized and relatively enduring and that influence his or her interactions with, and adaptations to, the intrapsychic, physical, and social environments.

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Psychological Traits • Describe ways in which people are different from each

other. • Define ways in which people are similar to some others. • Describe the average tendencies of a person.

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Psychological Mechanisms Refer to the processes of personality. • Have three essential ingredients. • Input: May make people more sensitive to certain kinds of

information from the environment. • Decision rules: May make people more likely to think about

specific options. • Outputs: May guide their behavior toward certain

categories of action.

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Within the Individual

• Personality is something a person carries with himself or herself over time and from one situation to the next.

• Definition of personality stresses that the important sources of personality reside within the individual.

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Personality is Organized and Relatively Enduring Organized. • Mechanisms and traits are linked to one another in a

coherent fashion. • Personalities contain decision rules that govern which

needs or motives are activated, depending on the circumstances.

Psychological traits are relatively enduring over time, particularly in adulthood, and are somewhat consistent over situations.

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Influential Forces of Personality • Personality traits and mechanisms can have an effect on

people’s lives. • Personality influences how people act, view themselves,

think about the world, interact with others, feel, select their environments, react to their circumstances, and what goals and desires they pursue in life.

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Person–Environment Interaction • Perceptions refer to how individuals “see,” or interpret, an

environment. • Selection describes the manner in which individuals

choose situations to enter. • Evocations are the reactions individuals produce in others,

often quite unintentionally. • Manipulations are the ways in which individuals

intentionally attempt to influence others.

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Adaption Adaptive functioning refers to accomplishing goals, coping, adjusting, and dealing with the challenges and problems individuals face as they go through life. Some aspects of personality processes represent deficits in normal adaptations. • Breakdowns in the ability to cope with stress. • To regulate one’s social behavior. • To manage one’s emotions.

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Environment • Physical: Direct threats to survival. • Social: Struggle for belongingness, love, and esteem. • Intrapsychic (within the mind): Having memories, dreams,

desires, fantasies, and a collection of private experiences.

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Three Levels of Personality Analysis • Human nature. • Individual and group differences. • Individual uniqueness.

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Human Nature • How we are “like all others.” • Traits and mechanisms of personality that are typical of our

species and are possessed by nearly everyone.

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Individual and Group Differences • How we are “like some others.” • Individual differences refer to ways in which each person

is like some other people (for example, extraverts and sensations seekers).

• Group differences refer to ways in which people of one group differ from those in another group (for example, cultural and age differences).

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Individual Uniqueness • How we are “like no others.” • Individual uniqueness refers to the fact that every

individual has personal qualities not shared by any other person in the world.

• Individuals can be studied nomothetically or idiographically.

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A Fissure in the Field • The gap within personality psychology, between the human

nature level of analysis and the analysis of individual and group differences, has not been successfully bridged.

• This translates into a gap between grand theories of personality (human nature level of analysis) and contemporary research in personality (individual and group differences level of analysis).

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Grand Theories of Personality • Attempt to provide a universal account of the fundamental

psychological processes and characteristics of our species.

• Statements about the universal core of human nature lie at the center of grand theories of personality, such as Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory.

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Contemporary Research in Personality

• Most of the research in contemporary personality addresses ways in which individuals and groups differ.

• Personality psychologists specialize in a particular domain, such as biological aspects of personality or how culture impacts personality.

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Domains of Knowledge

• Domain of knowledge is a specialty area of science and scholarship in which psychologists have focused on learning about some specific and limited aspects of human nature.

• This degree of specialization is reasonable, but we must strive to integrate diverse domains of knowledge to get a bigger picture of personality.

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Six Domains of Knowledge

• Dispositional. • Biological. • Intrapsychic. • Cognitive-experiential. • Social and cultural. • Adjustment.

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Dispositional Domain

Deals with the ways in which individuals differ from one another. • Cuts across all other domains.

Focuses on the number, nature, and consequences of fundamental dispositions. Those working in this domain seek to identify and measure the most important ways in which individuals differ from one another. • Interested in the origin of individual differences and how

they develop over time.

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Biological Domain

• Core assumption of biological approaches to personality is that humans are collections of biological systems, and these systems provide building blocks for behavior, thought, and emotion.

• Behavioral genetics of personality. • Psychophysiology of personality. • Impact of evolution on human psychological functioning.

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Intrapsychic Domain

• Deals with mental mechanisms of personality, many of which operate outside of conscious awareness.

• Linked to classic and modern versions of Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis, including his work on repression, denial, projection, and motives for power, achievement, and intimacy.

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Cognitive-Experiential Domain

Focuses on thought processes and subjective experience, such as conscious ideas, feelings, beliefs, and desires about oneself and others. • Self and self-concept. • Goals we set and strive to meet. • Emotional experiences, in general and over time.

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Social and Cultural Domain

Assumes that personality affects, and is affected by, cultural and social context. At a cultural level, groups differ tremendously from one another. • For example, in social acceptability of aggression.

At the level of individual differences within cultures, personality plays itself out in the social sphere. • For example, gender differences, traits, and mechanisms.

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Adjustment Domain

• Personality plays a key role in how we cope, adapt, and adjust to events in our daily lives.

• Personality is linked with health-related behaviors and problems in coping and adjustment.

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Role of Personality Theory Personality research is often informed by personality theories. Theory has several key purposes. • Serves as a guide for researchers. • Organizes and explain known findings. • Makes predictions about behavior and psychological phenomena that

no one has yet documented or observed.

Scientific theories need to be distinguished from beliefs. • Beliefs are based on leaps of faith, not on reliable facts and

systematic observations. • Theories are based on systematic observations that can be repeated

by others to yield similar conclusions.

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Standards for Evaluating Personality Theories

Comprehensiveness: Explains most or all known facts. Heuristic value: Guides researchers to important new discoveries. Testability: Makes precise predictions that can be empirically tested. Parsimony: Contains few premises or assumptions. Compatibility and integration across domains and levels. • Consistent with what is known in other domains. • Can be coordinated with other branches of scientific

knowledge.

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Chapter 2 Personality Assessment, Measurement, and Research Design

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Sources of Personality Data • Self-report data (S-data). • Observer-report data (O-data). • Test data (T-data). • Life-outcome data (L-data).

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Self-Report Data (S-Data)

Information provided by a person through a questionnaire or an interview. Individuals have access to a wealth of information about themselves that is inaccessible to anyone else. S-data personality tests. • Unstructured items: Open-ended. • Structured items: Response options are provided.

Limitations of S-data. • People may not respond honestly. • People may lack accurate self-knowledge.

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Observer-Report Data (O-Data) 1

Information provided by someone else about another person. • Key features. • Provides access to information not attainable through other

sources. • Multiple observers can be used to assess a person.

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Observer-Report Data (O-Data) 2

Strategies for selecting observers. Using professional personality assessors. Using people who actually know the target person. • Remain in a better position to observe target’s natural

behaviors than professional personality assessors. • Allows for the assessment of multiple social

personalities. • May be biased because of their relationship with the target.

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Observer-Report Data (O-Data) 3

Naturalistic versus artificial observation. Naturalistic observation. • Observers witness and record events that occur in the

normal course of the lives of participants. • Maintains an advantage of being able to secure

information in realistic context, but at the cost of not being able to control the events witnessed.

Artificial observation. • Occurs in artificial settings or situations. • Maintains an advantage of controlling conditions and

eliciting relevant behavior, but at the cost of sacrificing realism.

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Test Data (T-Data) 1

• Information provided by standardized tests or testing situations.

• Idea is to see if different people behave differently in identical situations.

• Situation is designed to elicit behaviors that serve as indicators of personality.

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Test Data (T-Data) 2

Limitations • Participants may try to guess what trait is being measured

and then alter their behavior to create certain impressions. • Difficult to know if participants define the testing situation

as intended by the experimenter. • Researcher might influence how participants behave.

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Test Data (T-Data) 3

Mechanical recording devices (for example, “Actometer” that is used to assess children’s activity). Strengths. • Unhampered by the biases of human observation. • Obtainable in naturalistic settings.

Disadvantage. • Few personality dispositions lend themselves to

mechanical assessment.

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Test Data (T-Data) 4

Physiological data. • Includes information about potential indicators of

personality such as a person’s level of arousal and reactivity to stimuli.

• Functional magnetic resonance imaging (f M R I). • Key benefit is that it is difficult to fake responses. • Disadvantage: Recording is constrained by a relatively

artificial laboratory situation.

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Test Data (T-Data) 5

Projective techniques. • Person is presented with an ambiguous stimulus and is

asked to describe what he/she sees. • Assumption is that the person “projects” his/her personality

onto the ambiguous stimulus. • Strength: May provide useful means for gathering

information about wishes, desires, and fantasies that a person is not aware of and could not report.

• Disadvantage: Uncertain validity and reliability.

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Life-Outcome Data (L-Data)

Information that can be gleaned from events, activities, and outcomes in a person’s life that are available for public scrutiny. • For example, marriage and speeding tickets.

Can serve as an important source of “real life” information about personality.

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Issues in Personality Assessment

Linking different data sources. Fallibility of personality measurement. • All sources of data have limitations. • Results that transcend data source (triangulation) are the

most powerful.

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Evaluation of Personality Measures

• Reliability. • Validity. • Generalizability.

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Reliability

Degree to which an obtained measure represents true level of the trait being measured. Measures of reliability. • Test-retest reliability. • Internal consistency reliability. • Inter-rater reliability.

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Response Sets

• Tendency of some people to respond to the questions on a basis that is unrelated to the question content.

• Called noncontent responding. • Acquiescence: Tendency to simply agree with the

questionnaire items, regardless of the content of those items.

• Extreme responding: Refers to the tendency to give endpoint responses.

• Social desirability: Tendency to answer items in such a way as to come across as socially attractive or likable.

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Validity

Degree to which a test measures what it claims to measure. Types of validity. • Face validity. • Predictive (criterion) validity. • Convergent validity. • Discriminant validity. • Construct validity.

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Generalizability

Degree to which a measure retains its validity across different contexts, including different groups of people and different conditions.

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Research Designs in Personality

• Experimental methods. • Correlational method. • Case study method.

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Experimental Methods

Used to determine causality. • Causality: Whether one variable influences another.

Two key requirements: • Manipulation of variables. • Ensuring that participants in each experimental condition

are equivalent to each other influences at the beginning of the study.

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Correlational Studies 1

• Correlation is a statistical procedure for determining whether there is a relationship between two variables.

• Designed to identify “what goes with what” in nature and not designed to identify causal relationships.

• Major advantage is that it allows us to identify relationships among variables as they occur naturally.

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Correlational Studies 2

Correlation coefficients vary from +1 (perfect positive relationship) through 0 (no relationship) to −1 (perfect negative relationships). Correlation does not indicate causation because of: • Directionality problem. • Third variable problem.

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Case Studies

In-depth examination of the life of a person. Advantages. • Can find out about personality in great detail. • Can give insights into personality that can be used to

formulate a more general theory to be tested on a larger population.

• Can provide in-depth knowledge about an outstanding individual, such as a political or religious personality.

Disadvantage. • Results based on the study of a single person cannot be

generalized to others.

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When to Use Experimental, Correlational, and Case Study Designs Each design has strengths and weaknesses. • Strength of one is weakness of another.

Design chosen by a researcher depends on the research question and goal of research. Taken together, the three designs provide complementary methods for exploring personality.

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Summary and Evaluation

• Decisions about data source and research design depend on the purpose of study.

• There is no perfect data source. • There is no perfect research design. • Some data sources and methods are better suited for

some purposes than for others.

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Chapter 4

Theoretical and Measurement Issues in Trait Psychology

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Theoretical Issues • Meaningful differences among individuals. • Stability over time. • Consistency across situations. • Person–situation interaction. • Aggregation.

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Meaningful Differences among Individuals

There are meaningful differences among individuals (trait psychology is also called differential psychology). People differ in the number of traits they possess. • Differences can be accurately measured.

According to trait psychologists, every personality is the product of a combination of a few basic and primary traits.

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Stability over Time Research indicates a degree of stability in personality over time. Although a trait might be stable over time, its manifestation in behavior may change considerably. How can there be stability in a trait if it is known to change with age (for example, impulsivity)? • Focus should be on the rank order differences among

people. • People in general can show a decrease in impulsiveness

as they get older, yet those individuals who were the most impulsive at an earlier age are still the ones who are most impulsive at a later age.

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Consistency across Situations 1

Trait psychologists traditionally assumed cross-situational consistency. If situations mainly control how people behave, then the existence or relevance of traits is questionable. Hartshorne and May (19 28) reported low cross-situational correlations for the traits of honesty, helpfulness, and self-control. Mischel (19 68) suggested that personality psychologists should abandon their efforts to explain behavior with traits and focus on situations instead. • Situationism: If behavior varies across situations, then

situational differences, and not personality traits, determine behavior.

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Consistency across Situations 2

Mischel’s (19 68) critique encouraged the debate about the importance of traits in comparison to situations in causing behavior. Both sides have modified their views. • Trait psychologists acknowledged the importance of situations. • Situationists acknowledged the importance of traits.

Debate led to two lasting changes. • Focus on person–situation interaction. • Practice of aggregation.

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Person–Situation Interaction 1

Two possible explanations for behavior. • Behavior is a function of personality traits. • Behavior is a function of situational forces.

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Person–Situation Interaction 2

• Interaction. • Personality and situation interact to produce behavior. • Differences among people make a difference only under

certain circumstances. • Situational specificity: Certain situations can provoke

behavior that is out of character for an individual. • Strong situation: Situations in which most people react in

similar ways (for example, grief following the loss of a loved one).

• When situations are weak or ambiguous, personality has its strongest influence.

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Person–Situation Interaction 3

Three additional ways in which personality and situation interact to produce behavior. Situational selection. • Tendency to choose or select situations in which one finds

oneself.

Evocation. • Certain personality traits may evoke specific responses

from the environment.

Manipulation. • Various means by which people influence the behavior of

others; tactics of manipulation vary with personality.

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Aggregation • Longer tests are more reliable than shorter ones and are

better measures of traits. • Any single behavior or occasion may be influenced by

extenuating circumstances unrelated to personality. • Aggregation implies that traits are only one influence on

behavior. • Aggregation also implies that traits refer to the person’s

average level.

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Measurement Issues 1

Trait approach relies on self-report surveys to measure personality. Personality psychologists assume that people differ in the amounts of various traits they possess. • Key measurement issue is determining how much of a

particular trait a person possesses.

Traits are often represented as dimensions along which people differ. Trait psychologists are aware of and address circumstances that affect accuracy, reliability, validity, and utility of self- report trait measures.

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Measurement Issues 2

Carelessness. Embedding an infrequency scale in a test can help detect problems related to carelessness. • Infrequency scale contains items that most people

answer in a particular way. • If a participant answers differently than most, this suggests

carelessness.

Another method for detecting carelessness is to include duplicate items spaced far apart in the survey. • If a person answers the same item differently, this

suggests carelessness.

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Measurement Issues 3

Faking on questionnaires. “Fake good.” • Attempting to appear better off or better adjusted than one

is.

“Fake bad.” • Attempting to appear worse off or less adjusted than one

is.

Detected by devising a scale that, if answered in particular way, suggests faking. Beware of Barnum statements in personality test interpretations. • Barnum statement: Generality that could apply to anyone.

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Personality and Prediction Whether someone does well in an employment setting may be determined, in part, by whether a person’s personality traits mesh with the job requirements. Personality traits may predict who is likely to do well in a particular job, so it makes sense to select people for employment based on measures of these traits. Integrity tests are surveys designed to assess whether a person is generally honest or dishonest. • Replaced polygraphs in the private sector.

Using tests to select employees has limitations and potential liabilities. • Lawsuits have challenged the use of tests on the grounds of

discrimination, invasion of privacy, and freedom of religion.

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Personnel Selection: Choosing the Right Person for the Job

Personality tests are frequently used to screen out “wrong” individuals from a pool of applicants for police officers. Frequently used tests. • Revised Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (M M

P I 2). • California Personality Inventory (C P I). • 16 Personality Factor (16 P F) questionnaire.

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Selection in Business Settings: The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (M B T

I) 1

M B T I is the most widely used personality assessment device in business settings. Assesses eight fundamental preferences, which are reduced to four scores. • Extraverted or introverted. • Sensing or intuitive. • Thinking or feeling. • Judging or perceiving.

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Selection in Business Settings: The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (M B T

I) 2

• Four scores are combined to yield 16 types. • M B T I is used widely to select applicants for leadership

positions. • Criticized regarding its reliability and predictive validity.

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Social Desirability Tendency to answer items in such a way so that one comes across as socially attractive or likable. Two views on social desirability. • Represents distortion and should be eliminated or reduced. • Valid part of other desirable personality traits, such as

agreeableness, and should be studied.

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Summary and Evaluation • Hallmark of trait perspective is the emphasis on the differences among

people. • Trait psychology assumes that people will be relatively consistent over

time in their behavior because of the various traits they possess. • Traits are more likely to influence a person’s behavior when situations

are weak and ambiguous and don’t push for conformity from all people.

• Personality trait scores refer to average tendencies in behavior. • Trait psychologists are interested in the accuracy of measurement. • Interest in measurement and prediction has led trait psychologists to

apply these skills to the selection or screening of job applicants and other situations where personality might make a difference.

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