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PERSONALITY ASSESMENT: A THEORETICALMETHODOLOGICAL ALTERNATIVE
José Manuel Hernández López1
José Santacreu Mas
Víctor J. Rubio Franco
Abstract
This paper presents an alternative to conventional personality assessment.
Paraphrasing Carlson, it recovers the role of the person in personality psychology. This
paper proposes the concept of interactive style, taken as the individual, idiosyncratic,
consistent and stable way a person interacts with situations, as the key aspect in
personality study.
Objective tests, such as Cattell’s T-data, are considered suitable in personality
assessment in opposition to the primacy of self-report. They get around the difficulties of
observational techniques in natural settings. Also discussed are the theory and method of
designing and implementing computer-based objective tests. Some examples show the
usefulness of this type strategy.
1. Taking up an old issue again
A few years ago, Carlson (1971) asked where the person was in
personality studies. Carlson posed this question as the result of the so-called
"disembarkation" of social psychology in personality psychology (Sechrest,
1976; McAdams, 1997) that shifted the interest of personality psychology
from the person, considered globally, towards personal variables or specific
constructs. In his meta-analytic work, Carlson studied the key words of the
226 articles published in 1968 in the Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology. He found that most of the papers studied variables or constructs
that, although relevant inasmuch as they occurred in people, stole the
limelight from the person taken as an integral whole on the stage of
personality psychology. Carlson posed the question again a few years later,
finding fairly similar results (Carlson, 1984). In his opinion, personality
research had still not “recovered” the person.
1
Department of Biological Psychology and Health. Faculty of Psychology. Universidad
Autónoma de Madrid. Campus de Cantoblanco. 28049. Madrid. E.Mail:
josemanuel.hernandez@uam.es
2
Many of us fear that our science has still not recovered the person in
spite of a significant change in the overall situation. Many authors feel that
personality psychology has moved on from the crisis of the ’70s and ’80s to
a “rebirth” in the ’90s (for example, Revelle, 1995; Sperry, 1995; Caprara,
1996; Pervin, 1996 and McAdams, 1997).
However, this rebirth does not imply the recovery of the person; rather
it stresses the notion of the group as a fundamental element of distinction.
Consider the five-factors model, in which the person is important as
representing a group and is in a specific place in relation to the members of
that group. This boils down to a subject prototype that, by definition, does
not exist in reality. By adopting the correlational focus with its
unquestionable advantages, we risk “overlooking” the person’s relevance as
an individual and not just a part of the sample.
This does not necessarily imply an idiographic stance. We could think
that personality functions with regularities and is specific to each individual.
We could start with the individual and move up to the general (as Kelly did)
or from the general down to the individual (as proposed by the inductivehypothetic-deductive spiral formulated by Cattell, 1966, 1988).
Nonetheless, the person develops and therefore, behaves, not in a
void, but rather by dealing with the conditions in the medium in which the
person exists. Behavior and the context are related in terms of reciprocal
interaction (Overton and Reese, 1973; Bandura, 1978). In these terms, the
relevant element for the study of personality is the consistent and stable
behavior determined by an individual’s interaction with a specific situation.
This interaction is personal and idiosyncratic, constituting a style of
interaction or an interactive style. Determined by the individual’s history,
this style is the basis of this consistent, stable behavior. With this in mind, a
theory of personality should take three fundamental elements into account.
Firstly, it must propose a general form of the individual’s functioning
that places the theory of personality within behavioral theory. From this
perspective, reference to behavioral assessment seems unavoidable.
Traditionally, psychological assessment assumes a mechanistic model where
the individual is the owner and has the last word on behavior and this, in
turn, is the effect of a combination of internal and external causes. This
model suggests that behavior belongs to the individual and is characterized
by a basic or common component. This common component is determined
by consistency and stability, understood as defining elements of personality.
The morphological description of behavior has ended up classifying it in two
large types: observable motor behavior (action) and hidden cognitive
behavior, understood as referential or symbolic (thought and language). In
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some cases, however, thought has been understood as an alternative to
behavior or a type of phenomenon that can not be classified as behavior.
Secondly, a theory of personality must establish a situational
taxonomy to accommodate this way of functioning. This means describing
of a complete model of its ecosystem, classifying and defining its relevant
variables and limiting any research that is not based on the psychological
model of functioning. One of these relevant variables is the individual’s
perception of this environment, that is, the psychological significance of the
situations. This can already be understood as a clear product of interaction
given that, to be able to perceive a situation, you need both a situation to
perceive and a subject to perceive it. This representation of the environment
as this interactive effect is also a cause of the behavior and frees the subject
from the purely reactive role of a physicalist approach.
Lastly, the theory must delimit the various peculiar modes individuals
have of interacting with the situations that they habitually have to face and
that, to a certain extent, are determined by their past ways of proceeding in
this interaction and that constitute the individual’s personal interaction style.
The procedure for gathering information about these elements must
not be methodologically restricted from the start. Restricting personality
assessment to only using personality self-reports deserves further comment.
2. The “monopoly” of the self-report in personality assessment
One of the fundamental criticisms from many points of view of
traditional pencil-and-paper personality assessment tests is the difference
between what the individual says and what the individual actually does, and
the inferential leap to get from this to the description of what the individual
is. This brings us back to the age-old problem of the difference between
attitude and behavior.
Behavioral assessment has highlighted the traditional criticisms of
self-reports, mainly the biases originating with the testees—the simulation of
responses, social desirability (Edwards, 1957) and the search for response
tendencies (Cronbach, 1946, 1950)2. Psychometrics has only partly solved
this with sincerity scales and by altering the direction of the scale. However,
it can be assumed that, from a differentialist perspective of personality, this
form of assessment does discriminate individuals in certain variables (those
assessed). Functionally speaking, these solutions seem efficient but probably
insufficient.
2
See the revision by Fernández-Ballesteros (1983, 1991).
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The design of personality assessment self-reports uses the concept of
reliability to guarantee quality. Reliability appeals to temporal and internal
consistency. Temporal consistency (test-retest reliability) reviews the
similarity of the scores obtained by applying the self-report at two different
points in time while internal consistency reflects the coherence of the items
that make up the scale, concluding that all of them contribute proportionally
to the overall score of the evaluated dimension. In both cases, the referent is
the evaluation instrument itself while the individuals are representatives of
the group that allows these calculations to be made. Although we could
establish a parallelism between temporary consistency and internal
consistency with stability and behavioral consistency respectively, this
parallelism could create confusion. In terms of personality theory, both
stability and consistency allude to the individual and not to the assessment
instrument. An individual may show behavioral stability and consistency
independently of the quality of the assessment instrument in terms of
classical test theory. In other words, appealing to the technical guarantees of
a personality assessment self-report begs the issue of the peculiarity of an
individual’s behavior. Therefore, the coherence of the “items” that make up
a scale must not be confused with transituational consistency of behavior, or
test-retest reliability with behavioral stability.
A self-report assessment of a given personality construct puts the
individuals who answer it “in situation” through a series of elements that
arise from the rational and/or theoretical and/or empirical analysis of this
construct depending on the strategy that created it. The logic of these
instruments indicates that all the small portions into which the construct has
been dissected (the elements of the self-report) contribute to its quantitative
determination and therefore, should fulfill two requirements: one, be highly
interrelated; and two, be highly related to the final scoring of the construct.
If one of these elements fails to meet either of these requirements, it may be
eliminated from the final configuration of the self-report. This procedure
purges items from the assessment scale.
The hypothesis on which the analysis of internal consistency (like
Cronbach’s α ) is based is that the responses to each of the elements of the
scale should be similar since all of them are necessary to discriminate the
construct to be measured. Therefore, if consistency is detected, it must be
due to the elements of the scale and not to the people considered
individually, because the individual becomes meaningless when not related
to the group. Given the supposition or the premise that individuals are
“behaviorally” consistent, if the results obtained do not reflect this
consistency, the conclusion is that the scale is poorly created.
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Another important element of self-report assessment is the limited
focus on the behavioral sequence because it emphasizes the final result. So,
the individual’s response to the question is what is significant and not so
much the base behaviors that manifest this response. Consider, for example,
a person who answers, “I always has difficulty in striking up a conversation
with strangers” on a typical introversion scale. From the point of view of
personality, knowing how this result is manifested is what is relevant. So, it
is not the same if this person “avoids” interaction with strangers or if they
simply do not have the opportunity to mix with them more than sporadically
or if, without being able to avoid the situation, this individual has
difficulties. The self-report assessment format precludes making these types
of distinctions. This brings use to consider the situation and the relation that
the person has to the situation as a necessary element in proper personality
assessment. So, the individual, in a given situation will interact in a
concrete, specific, unique and personal way with this situation, which
constitutes an interactive style.
3. Interactive styles
Emphasizing the conjunction of interaction and the behavioral study
of human personality, Ribes (1990) bases the study of personality on the
inter-behaviorism of Kantor (1959). He considers that personality:
a)
describes an interactive idiosyncratic manner,
b)
configured historically
c)
by the individual’s past,
meaning that you can predict particular interactive tendencies in certain
conditions.
These characteristics imply that personality is a variable or a
dispositional factor that belongs to the individual and operates interactively
and idiosyncratically. He proposes interactive style as a central element in
personality study as a dispositional term of the individual and defines it as
the tendency of individuals to behave in a certain way in a specific situation.
Furthermore, the manifestation of an interactive style will depend, on one
hand, on other dispositional terms: competence or functional
correspondence between response morphologies and objects to produce
specific results and reason, choice, or preference for certain situations,
contingencies, or objects, before interacting with them. In plain English, the
subject wants to establish this interaction. On the other hand, it will depend
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on the characteristics of the situation described in terms of the generic
contingencies that configure it.
By way of example, imagine posing a problem like this:
6
2
-----and asking for a solution (with the instructions: correctly solve this
operation). Without complicating things further, there are four possible
answers: 8, 4, 12, 3. The choice of one of these will be determined by ability
(the individual has a behavioral repertory with which to respond), the desire
or the need to do so (motive) and the individual's history of past interactions
(interactive style). For example, in this situation of open contingencies, one
could answer “8” because the sum of the operation is the first that comes to
mind.
One may only know how to add. In this case, ability would determine
the answer, not interactive style. In turn, the motive can be manipulated. For
example, you could add an instruction: “if you answer correctly you will
receive a prize" or “if you don’t answer correctly you will be punished.”
If we close the situational contingency and pose this other task:
6
x2
-----there would only be one possible correct and, therefore, reinforceable
answer: 12. To respond, the individual uses abilities and reason, but not
interactive style since the situation only demands an efficient functional
response, which implies multiplying.
From the example, we can conclude that an interactive style will be
identifiable and measurable if it is stable and consistent in a situation in
which the subject can not learn which response will obtain a positive
consequence. These are the situations that present open contingencies in
which no possible behavior is more reinforced than another. If reinforcement
were contingent to a given response, the frequency of this reinforced
response would increase and this would not allow for the expected
interactive style to manifest itself.
Ribes points out two necessary conditions for assessing interactive styles.
First, you need to represent contingent situations that require non-specific
forms of interaction, that is, you must evaluate in open-contingency
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situations in which no responses are more reinforced than others. Secondly,
situations must be socially neutral inasmuch as the condition with which an
individual interacts does not involve the behavior of another individual. In
other words, he feels that interactive styles can not be assessed in social
interaction situations.
In spite of its lack of empirical support, studies of one of these styles
(tendency towards risk) show individual differences in experimental
situations with open contingencies (Ribes and Sánchez, 1992) and confirm
the behavioral consistencies by means of intra-subject analysis (Santacreu,
Froján and Santé, 1997; Santacreu, Santé and López-Vergara, in press).
However, it is not easy to know which interactive styles would be
relevant in personality study. In principle, we do not have an independent
theory that identifies these interactive styles. But, in principle, classic
personality dimensions do not have one either. Introversion and neuroticism
do not exist by themselves outside the behaviors they describe. We do not
have conclusive information (not even Eysenck’s) that neuroticism exists
beyond a doubt. We simply know that certain behaviors that appear in a
sample of individuals are closely related.
Observational methods are the golden rule for measuring individuals.
However, observing behavior requires defining not only what is going to be
observed, but also where and when, which determines the interactive nature
of what needs to be observed. If interactive styles reveal themselves when
the individual has to cope in specific situations, sets of these functionallyinterrelated specific situations can give rise to manifestations of similar
interactive styles. This leads us to an empirical strategy to define the
situations that should be identified by other functionally similar situations
from which to create the tests. So, the analysis of the prior situation that the
assessment demands (its purpose) justifies the use of certain evaluative tasks
and not others and delimits the interactive style to be assessed.
4. Gathering T-data
This discussion points to the need to base personality study on
behavior and break the “monopoly” of self-reports in personality
assessment.
To put it in Cattellian terms, tests that provide T-data could assess this
behavior. T-data come from objective tests, understood as a procedure for
obtaining an individual score based on responses to a series of stimuli
without the individual knowing the correct response and being unable to
modify the response in a given direction (Hundleby, 1973). So, the purpose
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of the test must be hidden from the subject. This means the individual must
be given a convincing reason for the test.
This implies asking the person to execute a task, which implies a
substantial change in personality assessment. Subjects “do”; they do not
“say.”
Cattell and Warburton (1967) proposed over 200 action or
performance tests, hypothesizing the need for a wide range of short-duration
tests (no more than 5 minutes), which could include several different
methods during one assessment session. They considered four variable
dimensions in the construction of these tests:
a) Instructions: they found that minor changes to instructions could cause
substantial changes to individuals’ performance.
b) Location and materials used: definition of the test conditions.
c) Response form: for example a simple response compared to a repetitive
response.
d) Score: its coding for later analysis
Growth in computer technology and its increased use in psychological
assessment and diagnosis has made the task of designing such tests easier in
the last thirty years. This increases the viability of designing objective
assessment tests that measure certain personality traits (particular ways in
which an individual interacts with a task) without resorting to self-reporting.
Being able to combine various tasks makes it easier to design these tests than
in Cattell’s time. Moreover, this probably makes for more precise
formulation of the tasks and increases accuracy of the control of the
variables as well as of the recording, coding and analysis of the data
obtained.
5. Conditions for creating objective tests for personality assessment.
The task is to create tests that provide objective data to quantify an
interactive or peculiar behavior, determined to some extent by the
individual’s learning history. In these tests the individual must deal with a
situation or a set of contingencies. This all means considering a series of
premises:
♦ Since the idea is to assess an individual who will be taking the test with a
certain level of competence and motivation, the results of the test to be
created must not be contaminated by these variables. If the test is
complex, performance might be affected by the individual’s ability or
competence. The immediate consequence of this risk is the creation of
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minimum difficulty tasks that do not involve any specific ability. In other
words, any individual must be able to solve the tasks. Likewise, the
person assessed must be sufficiently motivated to undertake the task.
This implies being able to control the situation so that the person does
indeed complete the task. For example, a job interview could guarantee
this level of motivation (in this case, supposedly quite a high level).
Experimental situations in which individuals participate voluntarily
might not guarantee such motivation. In conclusion, the test design must
ensure that the subject has the will and the ability to complete the task.
♦ The test design must consider the situation and contingencies that we can
control. This brings us to reflect on the contingencies that, from this
perspective, we could manipulate to help the subject interact with the
test. In theory, the best way to do this would be to observe and quantify
the individual’s behavior in his or her natural context, facing a varied
range of open contingencies (even selecting the situations, contexts and
settings—the motive in Ribes’ terms—would be a relevant indicator).
However, this could make the task impossible to approach. Without
getting into philosophical digressions about the concept of liberty,
methodologically speaking, the individual’s freedom must be restricted to
study the subject’s personality. That is to say, the subject must face
situations in which possible behaviors (behavioral sequences) are not
predetermined in one direction, but are limited to a finite (and not overly
extensive) number, previously considered by the researcher. For
example, we can predict and therefore quantify the various ways of
putting together a puzzle. Social psychology gives us several examples
such as the tasks derived from the well-known “prisoner’s dilemma.”
The method can relegate the classic terms of test management theory
(reliability and validity) to a secondary level of importance and emphasize
other terms that are very close to personality theory: consistency
(permanence of the interactive style across various tasks of the same nature,
displaying functionally efficient behavior) and stability (permanence of the
interactive style at different application times). This leads us to stipulate
three tasks:
♦ There must be a consensus about the suitability of the concept (what we
want to measure) and the operational definition of the response to the
task or situation. For example, if the purpose were to evaluate an
interactive style called risk tendency, the consensus would imply an
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explicit agreement as to the possibility of measuring this style by
examining the individual’s behavior in a computer-simulated task. This
could involve an individual urgently needing to cross a street during
heavy traffic conditions. In this context, a person who crosses without
checking the traffic would display riskier behavior than someone who
takes more precautions.
♦ Once a consensus is reached, the next step consists in defining tasks that
will keep contingencies open, that is, tasks that allow “freedom”, as
mentioned previously, but restricting that freedom in carrying out the
task in such a way that the subject is not directed by the conditions of the
task itself. In other words, it is assumed theoretically that an individual
may behave in a consistent, stable, and idiosyncratic way, but that such
behavior can only be reflected in situations of open contingencies, since,
otherwise, the subject would try to meet the “closed” contingencies of the
context or behavioral field.
Ribes (1990) uses two strategies to open the contingencies: reducing
the test instructions as much as possible and presenting numerous trials that
make the relationship between contingencies clear. However, fewer
instructions should not imply a loss of precision and clarity. Put another
way, the instructions should not allow any ambiguity that makes the
performance of the task more difficult. Another important aspect is the
absence of any feedback about the subject’s performance and the
consequences that arise from this. This reduces the risk of previous trials
affecting the subject’s behavior, preventing learning that closes off
contingencies. Going back to the previous example of crossing a road in the
shortest time possible to evaluate risk tendency (Santacreu and Rubio,
1998), the subject can decide where and when to cross. The instructions only
state that the subject must cross the road in the shortest time possible, and
the person can move the simulated pedestrian before making it cross. The
further the subject moves the “figure” to the left on the screen, the better the
view of traffic will be, but the longer it will take to cross. Once the subject
decides to cross, there will be no feedback about the result (in other words,
the subject will not know whether the “figure” has been run over or not).
In short, two variables will define the final result. On one hand, the
individual’s style, which influences the strategy adopted, and on the other
hand, the characteristics of the situation as interactive elements that “help
direct” the path that will be taken in carrying out the task in an interactive
style.
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In principle, we can manipulate three aspects to facilitate the subject’s
interaction with the task:
a) Test instructions: the idea is for a “natural” strategy to emerge without
forcing any other types of determinants. In this sense, the instructions
should indicate the nature of the task with no reference to mistakes or
time limits. The objective is to leave the maximum number of
contingencies open.
b) Test format: this must meet two conditions. It must not be excessively
complex and it must be possible to complete within the allocated time.
c) Feedback: one of Cattell’s T-test characteristics consists in not telling
the subject what is being measured. Neither should the subject be given
any information about how to perform the task in each situation, not even
after the task has been completed.
♦ A third task (or perhaps requirement) is to mask the variable to be
evaluated to avoid the individual attributing greater probability to certain
responses and thereby not act “freely.” This brings us back to one of the
conditions of Cattell’s objective tests
Once the test has been constructed, an assessment session will consist
of a series of trials. The number will vary depending on the time required to
solve each of them. In this respect, Cattell’s criteria that no exercise must
take longer than 5 minutes is perfectly appropriate. The result will be a
series of repeated scores on tasks presented in successive trials of the
operationalized variable. Each of these trials will be a situation (reactive, an
assessment element) in which the individual will perform a task (always the
same) leading to at least two types of scores—one for each trial and a global
score (summary) obtained by adding up or averaging those of each trial. So,
different situations at the same time is the same as consistency, but the
individual’s consistency and not the test’s. Subsequent assessment sessions
applied after the time planned in the research design lapses will contribute
stability measures: the same situations at different times.
In our example, the person has a maximum of 60 seconds to make a
decision to cross the road, and will make 10 discrete attempts. The variable
operates with two indicators: the distance moved before crossing and the
total time spent crossing. There will be ten different scores for these
variables (one for each attempt) and one overall score for the test taken as a
whole.
One definite advantage is that when we say the same situation we
mean this from a functional point of view. The reactives or elements of the
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test are not exactly the same, but functionally equivalent. This avoids the
possible problem of the subject learning the reactives and the possible
problems of social desirability or acquiescence if the purpose of the test is
sufficiently disguised.
This strategy has proved particularly useful in evaluating personality
variables in the five-factor model such as conscientiousness (Hernández,
Santacreu, Lucía and Shih, 1998).
The statistical manipulation of the data obtained will depend on the
nature of the variables measured. We can consider the scores of each trial
independently and as “contributing” to the overall results (the case of the
conscientiousness test mentioned above). Alternatively, we can consider
them hierarchically interrelated ( the score of one trial plays a role in
interpreting the following one and so on). This would allow us to use
accumulated records of the data obtained. A test measuring motivational
persistence, for example, would use this analytical strategy.
6. By way of conclusion
The paper proposes a commitment to the behavioral study of the
personality of human beings. Its antecedents are in the work that authors
such as Kantor, Staats, and Ribes have been conducting over the years. As
stated in the preceding pages, putting the person back into personality study
requires observing individuals in the contexts in which they are behaving.
This may seem over ambitious, especially from a methodological point of
view. It seems necessary to restrict the object of study. This restriction lies in
limiting the individual’s possible behaviors. In other words, limiting such
behavior involves restricting the individual’s “free” scope of action.
It is only useful to stray into such philosophical and ideologically thorny
areas such as freedom if we consider it in either functional or operational
terms or both. We simply point out that it is difficult to record the
consistencies and stability of behavior that reflect an interactive style in
everyday situations where, at least in theory, the possibilities of behavior
are, if not unlimited, at least quite numerous,.
Two questions about developing the alternative described here remain.
One is theoretical and the other has to do with method.
The theoretical question refers to delimiting the interactive styles relevant
to personality study. However, the strategy should not lead to establishing a
“menu” like a general or universal trait structure. In principle there is room
to hypothesize that there are as many interactive styles as functionally
different situations capable of provoking a response. We do not know how
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many. Naming these styles requires a consensus among researchers as a
starting point. Given that the concept of interactive style alludes to
implementing a specific behavioral strategy, it will probably be difficult to
label these styles without using more or less global descriptions, which may
or may not parallel traditional traits. For example, “performing a task in an
ordered and organized manner following a systematic pattern” may well
correspond to some facets of the conscientiousness dimension of the fivefactor model. As we have stated, this will not always be possible.
The methodological matter is linked to the foregoing. What remains to be
done is to design “controlled” situations (in the sense of “limiting” possible
behaviors) in which the individual has to perform a given task. It is
understood that the interactive style will come into play in functionally
identical situations (those which require the same behavioral strategy),
although they are morphologically different, since we are not talking about
the same situation. In short, to evaluate distinct interactive styles, there must
be functionally distinct situations. To achieve sufficient behavioral examples
of an interactive style, however, we must observe the behavior of the
individual in functionally identical yet morphologically different situations.
For example, interactive style “A” would manifest itself in situations “a1,
a2,…an” and “B” in situations “b1, b2,…bn”, where “a” and “b” would
represent the functional equivalent, while “1,2,…n” would indicate the
morphological differences among them.
One last aspect to consider is the relevance of a study of these
characteristics that allows assessing the personality of individuals while
avoiding the possible bias arising from the subject answering questions on a
self-report.
All this constitutes an interesting challenge that we are willing to go on
accepting.
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