Personality Tests

History of Personality Testing

Documented use of some form of testing in an effort to place and classify individuals dates back to at least [Page 781]2200 B.C., when the ancient Chinese used such tests to determine the placement of individuals in various civil service positions. Plato and Aristotle noted that humans differ in personality traits, interests, and intellectual abilities and that these differences can be assessed in various ways. However, it was not until the late 19th century that interest in the scientific measurement of human differences began. In 1869, the British psychometrician and statistician Sir Francis Galton (cousin of Charles Darwin) published the influential Classification of Men According to Their Natural Gifts. This text helped lay the groundwork for the field of psychological measurement by focusing attention on precision and accuracy in measurement and by advancing severalx basic statistical techniques, such as correlation and regression. At approximately the same time, the scientific study of human mental processes was being advanced by German psychologists such as Wilhelm Wundt, who is generally acknowledged as the founder of experimental psychology. In this new field, scientific observation began to replace subjective impression and introspection as the primary means by which to study mental processes. James McKeen Cattell, a student of Wundt and an acquaintance of Galton, brought the German emphasis on measurement precision and Galton's work on psychological testing to American academe. Another important advance was the 1904 publication of the first textbook on educational measurement, Introduction to the Theory of Mental and Social Measurement, by E. L. Thorndike. The major accomplishment of this early era, however, was the 1905 publication of the first standardized psychological test, the Binet–Simon Intelligence Scale, by French psychologists Alfred Binet and Théodore Simon. This test ushered in the modern era of standardized testing, and no other single test has had a greater influence on the field of psychological and educational measurement than the Binet–Simon IQ test. In fact, its revision by Stanford psychologist Lewis Terman in 1916 resulted in the still used and widely adopted Stanford–Binet Intelligence Scale, currently in its fifth edition.

The assessment of personality traits and related psychological constructs parallels the development of the major theories of personality and important advances in psychometric and statistical techniques. For example, Freud's psychoanalytic theory, with its emphasis on unconscious needs and drives, inspired the development of two of the most well-known projective tests: the Rorschach Ink Blot Test (1921) and the Thematic Apperception Test (1938). Another example is the more contemporary Myers–Briggs Type Indicator (1985), based on personality types proposed by Carl Jung, the Swiss neo-Freudian. Trait theorists, such as Raymond Cattell, used sophisticated statistical methods such as factor analysis to reduce lists of hundreds of trait descriptors to the 16 most basic ones, which are termed factors. The product of his work, the Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire (16 PF), is now in its fifth revision and is considered one of the most psychometrically sound and useful measures of personality traits in use today. Perhaps the most famous of the empirically (or statistically) derived personality tests is the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), which was developed by S. Hathaway and J. McKinley in the early 1940s. Hathaway and McKinley used a psychometric technique called empirical criterion keying, in which scores are computed based on their differentiation of individuals according to some external criterion. In the case of the MMPI, responses on each of the scales distinguished various groups of psychiatric patients from control groups of nonpsychiatric individuals. Another example of a widely used empirical criterion-keyed test is the Strong Interest Inventory (SII), originally developed in the 1920s by E. K. Strong. During test development of the SII, Strong found that individuals who worked in different occupations tended to respond in distinctive ways to various questions relating to their everyday likes and dislikes; subsequently, responses to these questions on the inventory were empirically keyed for different occupations.

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