The Story of Psychology (61 page)

For Allport the study of personality was always a commonsense matter; he was interested in the conscious and easily accessible rather than the murky depths of the unconscious. He often told of his only meeting with Freud, an episode that profoundly affected him. As a brash youth of twenty-two, he had written to Freud while visiting Vienna to say that he was in town and would like to meet him. Freud graciously received him but sat in silence, waiting for him to speak. Trying to think of something to say, Allport mentioned that in the tram on the way to Freud’s office he had heard a four-year-old boy talking to his mother about wanting to avoid things that were dirty; he was displaying a genuine dirt phobia. All-port described the mother as a well-starched, domineering
Hausfrau
, and thought the connection was plain, but, as he recalled, “Freud fixed his kindly therapeutic eyes upon me and said, ‘And was that little boy you?’” Flabbergasted, Allport changed the subject; the experience, he later concluded, “taught me that depth psychology, for all its merits, may plunge too deeply and that psychologists would do well to give full recognition to manifest motives before probing the unconscious.”
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(He was equally disenchanted with behaviorism, which, he said, portrayed the human being as a purely “reactive” organism—acting only in response to external prodding—when in fact human beings are “proactive” and driven largely by their own goals, purposes, intentions, plans, and moral values.
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)

During his graduate years Allport began devising his own paper-and-pencil tests of personality traits. He and his older brother, Floyd, a psychologist, created a test that was more objective than the Bernreuter and other early efforts. In order to measure what they called “ascendance-submission,” they asked respondents not how ascendant or submissive they were but how they would behave in specific situations involving that trait dimension. An example:
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Someone tries to push ahead of you in line. You have been waiting for some time, and can’t wait much longer. Suppose the intruder is the same sex as yourself, do you usually

After trying the test on a number of volunteers, the Allports concluded that people who gave either an ascendant or a submissive answer to any one challenging situation were very likely to give the same kind of answer to other such situations. “People by and large,” they wrote, “do tend consistently to occupy a given spot on the continuum from high ascendance to low submission.” This seemed to them to establish the reality of traits and of the similarity of a person’s behavior in similar situations. As Allport later put it:

Then why did the children tested by Hartshorne and May behave inconsistently? Allport found an answer in Gestalt theory. Each individual’s traits are assembled in a unique configuration with a hierarchical structure: at the top is the person’s master quality or
cardinal
trait; below it are a handful of
central
traits, the ordinary foci of the individual’s life (the kind of qualities, said Allport, that we are likely to mention when writing a letter of recommendation); and finally below these are a large number of
secondary
traits, each aroused by a few specific stimuli.
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So a person’s behavior could be inconsistent in specific ways but consistent—Allport preferred “congruent”—in larger ones.

For example, he said, if you observe a man strolling and see him later hurrying to take a book back to the library, you might judge him inconsistent because in one situation he ambles, in the other hurries. But that is trait behavior at the secondary level. A more central trait is
flexibility.
If you asked him to write large on a blackboard and small on a paper and he did so, you could judge him flexible—as he is, too, in his walking. His behavior in both activities exhibits flexibility and thus is congruent, though not consistent.
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This was also Allport’s solution to the question: Why is it so common for a person to exhibit traits that seem incompatible or to behave in different situations in ways that seem inconsistent? Transient moods or “states” often make for what looks like inconsistency; an alarming situation may create a temporary state of anxiety in anyone, even a person who is usually placid.

Although Allport modified his theory of personality over the years, he always considered traits the fundamental and relatively stable units of personality. His trait research earned him acclaim and honors in his time; he would be gratified to know that despite the advent of genetic, neurological, cultural, sociological, and other factors affecting personality, many psychologists still regard personality psychology as all but synonymous with the study of traits.
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Since traits are neither visible objects nor specific actions but personal qualities, the central problem for researchers is how to measure them.

First they have to decide exactly what it is they mean to measure. Early personality researchers chose a handful of intuitively obvious traits such as introversion, dominance, and self-sufficiency. But soon they began looking farther afield and attempted to measure many others, so many, indeed, that the field rapidly became chaotic.

For there are all too many possibilities. The hardworking Allport and a colleague once counted all the words in the dictionary that designate distinctive kinds of human behavior or qualities; the total was about eighteen thousand. Not all refer to traits: some are the observer’s reactions to another person rather than that person’s traits (“adorable,” “boring”); some describe temporary states rather than enduring traits (“abashed,” “frantic”); and some are only metaphors (“alive,” “prolific”). But that still left four to five thousand terms denoting traits.
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And even after nearly seven decades of research had winnowed out most of these as unfruitful, a relatively brief review article in 2001 still listed forty-one topics as just “some” of the significant traits or manifestations of personality:

Many of these and hundreds of Allport’s list have been explored by means ranging from subjective impressions to laboratory experiments and from psychoanalytic interpretations to behavioral data. These are some of the major methods:

Personal documents and histories:
Letters, memoirs, autobiographies, diaries, and the like are full of information—and misinformation— about the personality of their subject, since a self-portrayal meant to be read by others is apt to present a dressed-up self rather than naked reality. (Pepys’ diary, full of licentious episodes and shameful thoughts, was meant only for his own eyes and was written in code.) Certain celebrated interpretations of famous personalities have been based on personal documents, but tastes and theories change from generation to generation, and the same sources can yield widely differing portraits of the writer. Analyses of personality based on such sources are sometimes good literature but rarely, if ever, good science.

The interview:
This is perhaps the most common method of personality assessment but one of the least effective. Some employment interviewers, college admissions personnel, and psychotherapists can glean a good deal about a person from an interview, but many others cannot. Even skilled interviewers, studies have shown, may evaluate the same person quite differently. Moreover, interviews yield descriptions and interpretations but not quantitative measurements of traits. The interview is best suited to the identification of distinct mental or emotional disorders, but with normal people it is most useful as a source of personal
data, attitudes, recollections, and other details that throw light on the more objective data gathered about that person by other methods.
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Ratings by observers:
Researchers often ask an individual’s friends or acquaintances to rate him or her on a number of specified traits. To achieve precision, the researchers direct respondents to weigh each trait on a scale that runs from zero to five or perhaps one to ten—essentially what Thomasius suggested in 1692. But the method has many difficulties. Raters have their own styles of rating (some avoid extremes, others favor them); subjects are not necessarily consistent when asked the same questions at different times; and ratings are subject to the “halo effect” (a subject rated high for one trait tends to be rated high for others).
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In general, then, ratings are considered neither especially reliable nor especially valid. (A
reliable
method yields consistent answers time after time; a
valid
method measures what it is supposed to be measuring.) Still, under certain conditions ratings
can
be both reliable and valid. Raymond Cattell, a leading trait researcher who relied on them in his own work, used only data from raters who saw the subject under many circumstances and over a long time (a year, if possible) and gathered ratings on only one trait at a time to reduce the halo effect. Such conditions improve both reliability and validity but make the method prohibitively costly, time-consuming, and nearly impossible to use anywhere except in an institution, where the population is relatively fixed and always visible.
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The questionnaire:
This is by far the most commonly used tool for personality assessment. As we have seen, the method quickly expanded beyond simple self-evaluation to quasi-objective techniques, such as presenting real-life situations and asking respondents how they would most likely behave in them. Other early tests continued to present questions about the respondent’s attitudes and feelings rather than probable behavior but were worded in ways that made the respondent less likely to prettify his self-portrait than did the questions in the Personal Data Sheet. Most offered as possible answers “yes-no” or “true-false” options, but some included a “don’t know” middle ground.

The famous Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), developed in the late 1930s by Starke Hathaway, a psychologist, and J. C. McKinley, a psychiatrist, both of the University of Minnesota, is of the latter type. It contained 550 statements, among them:

The respondent answers “yes,” “no,” or “?” (uncertain) to each question. The questions were grouped into ten scales that measured hypochondriasis, depression, hysteria, psychopathic deviancy, masculinity-femininity, paranoia, psychasthenia, schizophrenia, hypomania, and social introversion. These names convey the impression that the MMPI was concerned chiefly with mental illness; it did measure mental illness but also traits of normal personality. Those who, for instance, answered “false” to “I am happy most of the time” and most other questions in the same scale were said to be shrewd, guarded, and worrisome; those who answered “true” to “I enjoy social gatherings just to be with people” and related questions were rated sociable, colorful, and ambitious; and those who answered “false” were rated modest, shy, and self-effacing.
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Such interpretations were based not on intuition or common sense but on empirical evidence. In constructing the MMPI, Hathaway and McKinley tried a large number of questions on people hospitalized with neurosis or mental illness and on the presumably normal people who came to visit them; the MMPI was made up only of those items which differentiated the two groups. The depression scale of the MMPI, for instance, consisted of questions that were answered differently by depressed and not-depressed people.

Although the MMPI has been the single most widely used personality questionnaire for more than a half century, it has limitations and flaws. For one thing, it is very long. For another, respondents feel that many items, if answered honestly, are embarrassingly revealing (“Bad words, often terrible words, come into my mind and I cannot get rid of them,” “I am very strongly attracted by members of my own sex”). For a third, other items are so obviously aimed at pathology as to strike many normal people as either funny or insulting. Some time ago the humorist Art Buchwald lampooned the MMPI by suggesting additional questionnaire items like:

In 1949, a small group of personality psychologists got a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to set up within the University of California at Berkeley a new research unit, the Institute for Personality Assessment and Research. Its original purpose was to develop better methods of personality assessment.
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Over the next forty years it produced a phenomenal number of studies and new psychological tests; but the best known and most widely used of them to this day, the California Psychological Inventory (CPI), was completed within the organization’s first two years.