Psychology: Personality 2
Personality 2:
I)
Assessing Personality (tests)
A) Life outcomes - Education/income levels, marital status
B) Situational tests - Laboratory measures of behavior, reaction to
conflict, & frustration
C) Observer ratings - Ratings by family/friends
1) e.g., interviews (can be open ended – tailor the interview to the
person or structured – ask everyone the same questions in the
same order)
D) Self-reports - Responses to interviews/personality tests (they can be
objective or projective):
1) Objective personality tests - Contain clearly stated items that
relate to a person’s thoughts, feelings, behavior
(a) Responses combine into a total score – compared to norms
(b) These are quite reliable
(c) NEO-PI-R - Neuroticism Extraversion Openness Personality
Inventory, Revised
i
DO IT! http://www.personal.psu.edu/faculty/j/5/j5j/IPIP/
ii Reveals general psychological functioning
iii Measures Big-5 (OCEAN)
(d) MMPI-2 - Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, (-2)
i
Compares scores to those who have clinical “problems”
 Organized into clinical scales
ii Some Cultural differences in responses
1
2) Projective personality tests - Tests made up of unstructured
stimuli that can be perceived & responded to in many ways
(a) Psychodynamic perspective – responses guided by unconscious
needs, motives, fantasies…
(b) These are less reliable
(c) Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) - Look at an ambiguous
picture, write a story about it
i Used to measure need to achievement, power, affiliation…
(d) Rorschach Inkblot Test - Look at inkblots, tell what the inkblot
might be and why
i Can be used to measure psychological distress
Type
Characteristics
(+)
(-)
Objective Asks direct
Efficiency,
questions about a standardization
person;
quantitatively
scored
Subject to
deliberate
distortion
Projective Unstructured
stimuli create
maximum freedom
of response;
scoring is
subjective
Reliability and
validity lower than
those of
objective tests
“Correct answers”
not obvious;
designed to tap
unconscious
impulses; flexible
use
E) Personality Tests and Employee Selection
1) Some use MMPI, but most use big-5 objective tests
(a) Good because they show significant relationships between
scores and job performance & effective leadership
(b) Bad because they are far from perfect behavior predictors and
invade one’s privacy
2