Personality Testing

• Psychological tests assess a person’s abilities, aptitudes, interests or personality based on a systematically obtained sample of behavior.
2 Basic Goals
1.
Accurately & consistently reflect a person’s characteristics on some dimension.
2.
Predicts a person’s future psychological functioning or behavior.

Projective Techniques
• Interpretation of an ambiguous to trigger projection of one’s inner thoughts and feelings
• Used to determine unconscious motives, conflicts, and psychological defenses & traits

• Presentation and interpretation of a series of black and white and colored inkblots
• Developed in 1921.
• Personality test that seeks to identify people’s inner feelings by analyzing their interpretations of 10 inkblots
• Numerous scoring systems exist

• Series of pictures depicting ambiguous scenes
• Subject is asked to create a story about the scene
• Answers are scored based on themes, motives, and anxieties of main character

• Examiner or test situation may influence individual’s response
• Scoring is highly subjective
• Tests fail to produce consistent results
(reliability problem)
• Tests are poor predictors of future behavior
(validity problem)

• Questionnaires on which people respond to items designed to gauge a wide range of feelings and behaviors
• Used to assess selected personality traits
• Often true-false, agree-disagree, etc. types of questions
• Person’s responses to standardized questions are compared to established norms.

• The extent to which a test measures or predicts what it is suppose to test
• Personality inventories offer greater validity than do projective tests (e.g.
Rorschach).

• The extent to which a test yields consistent results, regardless of who gives the test or when or where it is given
• Personality inventories are more reliable than projective tests.

• Minnesota Multiphasic Personality
Inventory (MMPI)
• Most clinically-used personality test
• 500 total questions
• Originally designed to assess abnormal behavior

• Revised and updated version of the MMPI
• Assesses test takers on 10 clinical scales and 15 content scales
• Sometimes the MMPI-2 is not used as it was intended.

• California Personality Inventory (CPI) – assesses personality characteristics in normal populations.
• Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire
(16 PF) – Cattell’s test that creates a personality profile on 16 trait dimensions.

• Play “Personality Testing for Career
Choice” (3:59) Segment #28 from
Psychology: The Human Experience.

• Standardized—each person receives same instructions and responds to the same questions
• Use of established norms: results are compared to previously established norms and are not subjectively evaluated
• Greater reliability and validity than projective tests.

• Evidence that people can “fake” responses to look better (or worse)
• Some people are prone to responding in a set way, whether the item accurately reflects them or not.
• Tests contain hundreds of items and become tedious
• People may not be good judges of their own behavior