The other type
of tests for personality that is well known,
and a little controversial, and I'll tell you why its controversial,
is the projective tests. The projective tests
are by definition
ambiguous. So where in the
objective tests you have very straightforward statements,
and those statements may be on "very much like me" scale to "very much
unlike me" or "very much agree to very much disagree or strongly disagree", whatever
the case may be.
Those are objective because the stimuli are always the same, people might interpret
slightly differently based on their vocabulary, experience,
but for the most part you get the gist of each item and people then respond from
looking within - how they feel they best fit that item.
But with projective tests, the stimulus
isn't clear; it's unclear by definition.
So with this ambiguous stimulus, you're supposed to
interpret it or create a story about it, and in so doing, you are thought to
"project"
your personality on to it. And this is going back to Freudian
psychoanalytic type of psychology.
You ask the subjects to respond an intentionally vague stimuli
and the idea is that they're gonna reveal their wants or their needs in
the process.
There are some iconic things associated with this, like the Rorschach test as
we'll see. People
think of psychology and they think "couch." We don't do that; that's Freudian.
They think, they see ink blot tests. Some of us do it but not very many anymore and
that's just not what happening. But
the biggest problem here is with reliability and validity. Because
there isn't any objectivity to the stimulus, you could say
anything. So how do you compare one person to another?
With an objective test you have some
limitations that people could deliberately deceive the test. Unless
you have a very extensive
means to check that. They
can respond in socially desirable ways, they can just not pay attention to it,
and
answer fairly randomly. But if you account for all that,
it's pretty straightforward that you can have validity because the measurement
standard
is very clear. Then so it's easy to link it
in terms of correlations or predicted validity - seeing what score on this
test would predict in the real world, and
there's validity the test. With the projective tests, however,
you have this ambiguous stimuli. There's almost no way to compare one person to
another. Now
the people who develop these tests would argue
the opposite. They would say. "Yes, there's so much data - so much rich data given
from these test that we do have the ability to standardize it, norm it
somewhat.
But with reliability and validity, there are certain processes
through classical measurement theory and a thing called item response theory that
we can
pretty definitively show the reliability and validity
of certain objective tests. It's much harder to do,
not to say that it can't be done, but it's much harder to do with projective tests.
However projective test do provide some very rich and interesting
types of data that could be useful.
You know of the Rorschach,
I'm sure. It's the ink blot. It's the standard icon for psychology. It's this
ink blot tests developed by Hermann Rorschach
way long ago; I think the 1920s. Back then it was 10 ink blots, there's more of them now. Back
then it was in
black-and-white, there in color now. But you get this blot of ink.
What does it mean? It doesn't mean anything.
By definition, it's ambiguous, it's vague. It's a
random shape; it's symmetrical because the way you would make them
is you just put some ink on a paper, you fold it up, it's splats however it does,
you fold it back out, and that's what you got.
And that's our stimulus to be interpreted. And then people are said
or are told, the people who are taking the tests are told, "Tell me what you see."
What do you see? Well, it could be virtually anything.
Because you're making it up as you go along.
And if you answer in a brief fashion, they would say, " Tell me more about that,
please." They'll give you
standardized promps but not anything else. They won't suggest to you, what you see.
That invalidates the whole procedure. So you do have a little bit of
standardization at least in
administration procedures in that you go through the cards in the same manner,
you present them to the person with the same instructions,
and the thematic apperception test, the TAT, both of those have their asterisks beside of them,
is also a well-known projective tests. This is actual cards of scenes, it used to be
drawings, now I think they're pictures -
photos, and the scenes that you see in the cards are ambiguous scenes. They can be
interpreted in a lot of ways.
But their actual scenes, and you're supposed to tell a story about it.
And telling in a story about any one card,
you don't get any kind of personality test out of that. But out of
a story of 30 cards, you might see some themes start to emerge
in those stories where some consistent type of element
that might be a projection of a person's personality is coming through.
With the objective tests, one question does not tell you anything about
somebody's personality.
It is the aggregation of data across lots of questions designed to measure
very specific types of things
that give us some confidence that we're measuring a personality construct.
So for the test and and for your own general knowledge realize that the
objective tests
have good reliability and validity. The projective tests,
that's one of their biggest challenges is demonstrating reliability and validity.
And of these, the Minnesota Multiphasic
Personality Inventory, MMPI, is your objective test icon, something to
remember for your
test and beyond, and the Rorschach inkblot test
and TAT, or the thematic apperception test, is your icon for
projective tests. Now just to show you
some this. This is an old TAT card
and what you have is a woman, objectively what you have is...
what appears to be a woman, or a person in a dress, with her
hair.... looks like it's long, done up in a bun, with her
head in her hand, and another hand over here on a doorknob, possibly a light
switch.
Over here you have what appears to be a man lying in a bed
and he appears to be not conscious. He could be dead.
You don't know what he is. There's a window over here. A little dark space back
here, grey up here.
And the idea is you say to the person, "Tell me a story about this picture."
And they would then look at it, and they would make up the story.
And you would take that down, word by word -
verbatim and then later analyze it. That's another one of the problems with the
projected test is they take a lot of time to administer.
They have to be done one on one with the test given and a test taker.
And then you have to go through all that data and then interpret it. Whereas, with the
objective test,
a person can usually, assuming literacy, can take it themselves,
they can be scored on a computer, and the scores could be interpreted pretty
quickly.
So they're a cost saver in that regard as well.
But so a person might look at this and go, "Oh, she's killed him!
She finally couldn't take it anymore. She killed him off. She got
pissed.
He's drunk again. He came in and laid out in the bed. And she finally had enough. After
his abuse, years of abuse, she killed him
and now she's just she's thinking about it. 'How am I going to get away with this?'
or 'How am I gonna
deal with the aftermath of this act?'" That would be a potential story
you could tell. Or you could look at and see somebody go, "Man. he's sick. He's been really
sick, and she's terribly worried about his health. She loves this man,
and she's attending to his needs. And she wants him to get better, but she's afraid
he's not gonna make it.
And so she's suffering because of her love and caring for this person."
Diametrically opposed interpretations - all which
are perfectly okay. Each person would then give their own story. Again, one card
wouldn't tell you anything,
but if you gave 30 cards and you saw a person giving stories over and over
again that had themes of substance abuse
or taking verbal abuse or physical abuse or
caring for somebody's health or precariousness of health.
And you saw this came up again and again and again and again. You might then have
some basis for assuming some needs and some wants that a person may have.
It will take you a lot of time to get that. That's a Rorschach inkblot.
Old school. It's the plate for the father card,
and if you look at it you'll see it's just a blot.
So the person is asked, "Tell me what you see."
And if you don't give a good answer, they say, "Can you tell me more?" but they won't say
anything else. And they may or may not respond. So you may get good data or
rich data where people are giving you really flowery and
verbose descriptions what they see. Or they may get somebody like, "I don't know...
uhhh... armadillo.
Puppy. Something like that." This is supposedly a father card, so you can
harken back to Freudian personality theory,
and remember the importance that parents played in that. So
they equate "father" with authority figure. They say, "The 'boots' are fairly
conspicuous. Between them is the apparent head a Chinese dragon or a dog.
Many say this is a animal skin. After a few seconds, most can see it is standing
figure
seen from below. Common descriptions: bear, gorilla,
man a heavy coat. Quote-unquote "bad description" would be
monster, attacking bear. I don't know why they would call those good or bad
description.
But Rorschach theorists equate your description of the figure with your
perception of your father or male authority figures. For me,
that is one helluva stretch. I don't know that you can make any kind of
a leap of faith like that from some ambiguous interpretation of an inkblot
to how you got along or how you see or how you respond with your father or
authority.
But that's the idea, and from a Freudian point of view,
that's where they're going with this. For me, I don't know cause you can just flip
that thing over what I see right there is three seahorses coming at you.
So if you flip it over and come up with a totally different interpretation it shows you
I think an inherent weakness of the projective test genre.
But people who are into it are very into it, and they will defend it
staunchly.