Now, how do you test personality?
We've been talking about testing almost since the beginning.
We got into biology and then we got into talking about some constructs, and how
to operationalize those, in the research part of that first section of material.
How do you measure stuff in psychology? Are we really a soft science that we don't
really
touch on anything that's real? No. We're a difficult science because the things we
try to
understand are very difficult to measure.
Given great precision, science advances rapidly.
Given total imprecision, you have no science at all.
In the middle, and leaning towards greater precision, at least in
spirit, you have sciences that are in the social sciences and wheeling towards
the hard sciences
as a discipline, because what we try to do is to measure,
with the greatest precision possible, constructs that are hard to
measure. Doesn't mean they don't exist, because they're hard to measure, means you have to be creative,
but not just creative, you have to be willing to let go of theories and
hypotheses when the data refutes
what you believe to be the case. So, you're refining knowledge.
Objective tests are one way to measure
personality traits. Now I've got them in
white fonts and asterisked, because one of the strengths
of an objective test is that it has, generally speaking, good reliability and
good validity, and it's
easy to determine whether it has good reliability. It's
a little less easy to determine if it's valid,
but it's determinable. In the same way, when we looked at IQ testing,
right, if you test high on IQ you would expect that to predict
certain kinds of outcomes, in terms of somebody's ability to do or not do
certain kinds of
abstract intellectual work, or when we got into Gardner's multiple intelligences,
whether they could do music, or not music, or they understood bodily movements, or
didn't really,
they were really clumsy, versus kind of the traditional things that we measure with
intelligence tests, which map on to academic work.
So, if you score high or low, that should predict certain kinds of outcomes,
and if it does predict the predicted outcomes,
then it's probably valid, and if it's valid, it
should be reliable, right? But if it's reliable, it does not necessarily mean
it's valid. So one of the nice things about objective tests
is they're empirically keyed, and they are self-report. You're
measuring everybody on the same standard which enables comparisons.
However, there are some problems.
You've taken these studies on Sona, right? Most of you have taken at least
one of these online studies. Well, that's what they're measuring, various kinds of
self-reported information to see how things
relate to one another. Well, when you have somebody ask you
questions about your personality, are you really, do you like to go to parties?
Very much like me, very much not like me, true, false,
strongly agree, strongly disagree. When you have everybody
looking at the same stimulus, they're then introspecting, that thing we talked about
with Willhelm Wundt, so long ago, right?
I don't know. Me? Hmmm. Neutral.
A little bit yes, maybe a little bit no, each person
is now empirically responding to the same stimulus,
right? And if they're being totally honest with themselves,
and with the measure, then you have excellent reliability and probable good
validity,
and you have the ability to discern relationships
as they exist or determine when they don't exist.
Or when one variable modifies or modulates another variable,
mediates, or moderates another variable.
But one of the problems with these is that they're subject to deliver deception. So
that's really nice, you're taking a
study on Sona, and it says your data is confidential, and your privacy is
valued, you can be as
honest as possible. Please be as honest as possible, right? Because that helps us
gain precision and validity. But what if I've got a conscientiousness measure for
example?
Do you follow the rules? Do you steal?
Right? Do you ever take office supplies?
Strongly disagree or true/false, right? No, never.
Well, if I go out and try to give that conscientiousness measure
to prospective employees, and it says things, "are you an honest employee?"
Yes or no, or, "I am an honest employee."
Strongly agree to strongly disagree. What are you going to answer if you're trying to get a job?
Of course I'm a good employee, of course. I never steal, I never do anything wrong, I always follow the rules, I'm a
great employee.
So you can just lie on these.
You've got to be careful because a lot of people will take research measures
and take them out into the real world and just assume everybody is going to be honest
but,
not everybody scores high on conscientiousness, right?
Guess who would be most honest? Those who actually score highest on conscientiousness.
People who were scoring low on it would be like, "I'll tell you whatever I think you need to
hear
to get what I need out of this," right? So deliberate deception.
Social desirability bias.
People tend to, this is not a lie, they tend to believe themselves to be
better than perhaps they are objectively warranted in calling themselves. So we look at
people
and you ask, for example,
are you above-average, average, or below average on honesty?
And you see about 90 percent of people think they're above average, right?
But you can't have ninety-four percent of people be above average. Does that make sense?
But it's not that they're lying. They just tend to see themselves. What is
above average? That's just,
it's just a stem, an item. You see it and you get three choices.
People tend to skew themselves toward the positive. So,
in other words, they're not completely objective with themselves, which is one of the
problems with
introspection, right? People are subjective with themselves.
Now, some people's, very few relatively speaking, actually
characteristically see themselves toward the negative. They bias themselves on the
downside but
more often than not people bias themselves toward the upside of anything
that they see as socially desirable and you've got response sets. Please don't go
through Sona
going, agree, agree, agree, agree, agree, agree, agree, agree, agree, agree, agree. Give
me my credit.
That doesn't tell anybody anything. All it does is screw up
the research. But you can see how it would be easy to do that.
I work with a colleague who does screening for
let's just say a nuclear facility in the vicinity
where you have to go through psychological screening to get a job
and this person got given a very, very long
screening measure. The screening measure
that was given was the MMPI, the Minnesota multi-phasic personality
inventory,
the most widely used clinical personality assessment inventory.
It's got 567 statements on it.
That's a lot of statements to read. And then you answer true or false.
Now if you answer true or false on any one statement, what does that tell you about some-
body's personality?
Virtually nothing. But when we aggregate
factor after factor after factor after factor,
lots and lots and lots of items on lots and lots and lots of different measures,
we start to approach a pretty good picture of a trait or a characteristic.
What happened with this fellow is he got bored,
and he didn't think this really mattered. And so he just started going
down the down the thing just putting stuff in randomly he said.
But he got flagged because it turns out
it's got validity scales built into it, and it tells you want somebody is faking
bad,
or faking good, or has a really bizarre profile
that's not something we could have any confidence in whatsoever,
right? So, you might spike high or you might be low
on various traits, but if you just fill in stuff randomly,
this measure will know because, guess what, 567 items, some of them are redundant.
But when you get to item 13 and it says, you know,
I enjoy parties, true, and you get to item 432,
and it says, I hate parties.
To be consistent, you'd have to put false, right?
Because you said true to loving them, so hating them, you'd have to say that's not like me.
So, guess what? People who are filling in things randomly don't catch things like
that.
And, did it matter? Yeah. He wasn't going to get a job. But my colleague said,
let's talk to this person. Talked to the person and my colleague, she said, what were you
doing? He said, I just got really bored.There's a lot of paperwork and I just didn't think that
mattered. And she's like, well,
only if you want a job does it matter. And he's like, oh, I want a job. And she's like, well let's let
you do it again.
And he had to do the whole thing again and then we were able to see, that yes,
he was fine. Just as he conjectured that he was fine.
I also worked as a, oh well!
Y'all have a great weekend. BucStock is tonight and tomorrow and
Sunday. Get out there and enjoy your Buc Entertainment.
Last class we talked about objective tests, objective personality tests,
and I wanted to just finish up talking about the MMPI which you would want to
know, of course, for your test
as the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory. It's a long term but
MMPI makes it easy to remember and that's how most people know it.
And I was talking about validity scales and how you know
whether you are actually measuring what you think you're measuring.
And, in fact, I had this experience by chance where I was
an instructional league coach for baseball here in Johnson City
and we had to get training and it was conducted by an EMT. So we were doing CPR
training. It was a pretty cool thing to be able to do,
and by chance I was sitting there and the EMT starts talking about some
experiences he had had
where he had to do some some testing, some psychological testing,
and I didn't tell, I don't tell people I'm a psychologist. It's irrelevant. When I'm
coaching baseball, I'm coaching baseball.
So I'm in there doing my training like everybody else and he starts talking about
the psychological test that he had to go through as part of his job,
and he said, you know, when I got done with it, they said I was crazy,
and I said, what? And they said, well you know, they talked to me some more and like what kind of job you doing
here, and like I'm an EMT. The guy said I'm an EMT,
and they said, oh, well we need to re-score it then. And they go back and they re-score it and he said they
come back and tell me I'm perfectly normal.
He goes, that shows you what a bunch of BS that is, and at that point I couldn't
help myself. I raised my hand. I'm like actually that shows you how good it is
because the fact that you re-scored it based on your profession which indicates
something about your personality
changed the outcome tells you a little something about the validity. So, the first time
you look at this this test and it asks you all kinds of questions.
So, most people run from tragedies. They don't run into tragedies.
They run away from things that are dangerous, or threatening, or gory,
and EMT's by definition, police, fire personnel,
they run towards it, right? So it takes a certain kind of personality to do that
and if you're going to have somebody who does that characteristically,
they're going to score in a very odd direction on certain scales
of something like the MMPI. However, when you look, and if you'll remember norms, we
talked about
getting a standardization sample. If you look at the norms for people who do that
kind of work,
then he's perfectly normal, which actually demonstrated the validity
of the test, not the invalidity, which as a lay person is what he took it to be.
And, of course, I know they didn't tell him he was crazy. They probably said you spiked
on a couple of scales which make us
give us pause for concern. They had a conversation. They re-scored him. They said, ah,
within this norm,
you're perfectly well within parameters that we would consider
normal. So, that's a a way of showing the validity
of some psychological tests. There are lots and lots and lots
of personality tests but not all of them are very good.
Most of the ones you see in magazines are total bunk. In other words, they haven't
been developed systematically. They haven't been tested and
normed on a standardized sample. They don't give you means and standard deviations. They don't
give you,
they give you scoring cut offs, but they make those up. To have a true,
valid, reliable measure you go through a very rigorous process
and then you don't stick that into magazines. It's something that should be
done by professionals
and interpreted by professionals and be used very carefully
in a holistic assessment of people's lives, not just
a number. You can't reduce people to numbers. Another one to remember is
based on the big five model of personality which we talked about, right,
just the other day. The big five model is called the five-factor inventory and it's
by Costa and McCrae,
and there's many, many, many others but you don't need to know them all. I just wanted to
give you a sense that there are
plenty of them out there.