The History of Personality

The Germans
Using personality assessment to select personnel begins after World War I. Simoneit (1940) thought the Germans lost due to poor selection and training. The German government established a program for selecting officer candidates in the 1920s. By 1936, they had 15 psychological laboratories, with 84 psychologists, evaluating over 40,000 candidates per year. Thus, the Germans invented the modern assessment center in which 4 or 5 candidates are intensively evaluated with interviews and realistic job simulations for two days. At the end, a committee judged the potential of each candidate. The German method examined the "total personality" and produced an overall evaluation of suitability.

The English
Historically, the English selected military officers using interviews focusing on a candidate's social class-the higher, the better. When the war started, the supply of upper class candidates was quickly exhausted. The British government then established War Office Selection Boards (WOSB)-assessment centers modeled on the German method. They compared their traditional interview with the WOSBs, and found the assessment centers were superior at identifying good leaders in combat.

The Harvard Psychological Clinic
The Harvard Psychological Clinic was established to teach personality psychology to Harvard undergraduates in the 1930s. The director was brilliant dilettante, Henry Murray, who adopted the German assessment center and used it to study Harvard students. The research is described in Explorations in Personality (Murray, 1938), a book that is still interesting reading.

The OSS
The U.S. was unprepared for WWII. To enhance its intelligence capabilities, Congress created the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in 1942; William Donovan, a W.W. I hero and Wall Street banker, was the director. Donovan and Murray used the German assessment center to screen applicants for the OSS. The Assessment of Men (1948) provides evidence regarding the effectiveness of this process.

Lessons Learned
Three points about this assessment tradition should be noted. First, it selected candidates based on evaluations of competence, not the absence of psychopathology. Second, the researchers consistently evaluated the validity of their process. And third, Eysenck (1953) showed that one hour of paper and pencil testing yielded results fully comparable to those obtained from the two and one half day assessment center. The same would be true today.

Personality psychology begins with European psychiatry in the late 19th century; famous names include Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Alfred Adler, and Karen Horney. Despite their theoretical differences, these writers all agreed on two points: (1) the most important generalization we can make about people is that everyone is neurotic; and (2) the most important problem in life is to overcome one's neurosis. Even today, the field of personality psychology is essentially synonymous with their ideas.

These people set the theoretical agenda for personality psychology for 100 years and they drove the measurement agenda as well. In this tradition, personality measurement concerns detecting psychopathology. Clinical personality measurement falls neatly into two schools: the projective and the objective traditions. Projective tests present people with ambiguous stimuli and ask them to tell a story; the story then reveals neurotic tendencies.

The Rorshach
Hermann Rorschach experimented with ink blots by showing them to people and asking what they saw. His book, published in 1921, made him famous. Rorshcach died young; the charismatic Bruno Klopfer brought the inkblots to America and popularized their use for all personality assessment, including employment selection. John Exner formalized the Rorschach scoring procedures, and it became the most widely used personality measure in the world.

The Thematic Apperception Test (TAT)
Henry Murray developed a set of ambiguous pictures, called the TAT, in the 1930s. People tell stories about the pictures and the stories reveal unconscious motives. David McClelland famously adapted the TAT cards to study power and achievement motivation. Today the TAT is widely used for executive assessment, especially in the Boston area.

Robert Woodworth developed the first objective personality measure, the Personal Data Sheet, in 1917 to screen Army recruits for psychiatric problems. The test contained 116 true-false items and had a standardized scoring key. In 1935 the Humm-Wadsworth Temperament Scale became the preferred test for psychiatric screening. Hathaway and McKinley introduced the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) in 1940. The MMPI is the most popular objective personality measure in the world; it is used by police departments and agencies such as the FBI and CIA to screen job applicants for "emotional maturity".
The problem with this form of personality assessment is that the tests don't predict occupational performance. Despite their poor performance, they symbolize personality assessment in the popular mind. When people criticize personality assessment, they usually have these psychiatric tests in mind.

Behaviorism, invented by J. B. Watson in the early 20th century, has been the dominant perspective in American psychology for about 100 years. Behaviorism appeals to two core aspects of American culture, pragmatism and democracy. The pragmatic appeal comes from the view that what matters in life is what people do, not what they say, or what they say they think or feel. The democratic appeal concerns the behaviorist view that there are no innate characteristics inside people that set them apart from one another. Everyone begins life on the same footing, with the same innate capabilities. At any time, people are just the sum of their experiences, which means that change is always a possibility.

Behaviorism takes a variety of forms from the micro to the macro level. At the micro level, there is the cerebral rat psychology of the Skinner box which explains behavior in terms of reinforcement contingencies. At the intermediate level is social psychology, which explains behavior in terms of situational and contextual variables. And at the macro level is sociology, which explain behavior in terms of social class and demographic variables such as age, gender, and ethnicity.
Behaviorism has some useful applications. It is the method of choice when training animals, small children, and people with cognitive deficits. For example, my dog usually comes when I called him, but a behaviorist pointed out that the dog would come more reliably if I gave him a treat when he returned to me. And indeed, that is exactly what has happened. The intellectual history of personality psychology over the past 100 years can be seen as an on-going quarrel with the key advocates of behaviorism, and for most of that time the behaviorists won the popular debate.

The argument about the deep causes of human action, forces inside or forces outside the individual, can be seen clearly by contrasting the views of Sigmund Freud, the father of depth psychology, and Franz Boas, the father of cultural anthropology. For Freud, character is fate; character is defined in terms of each person's superego, which develops around age 5. Superego is conscience, a sense of right and wrong and a capacity for guilt, and Freud thought the development of the superego was a

universal process, rooted in evolution and human nature. For Boas, peoples. actions are determined by the culture in which they live, the contents of culture are quite varied, and any generalization about human nature is inherently false, including Freud's view that the process of character development is universal.
Freud was the prototypical personality psychologist, Boas was the prototypical cultural determinist, and behaviorism is nothing but cultural determinism writ small. To summarize this discussion, the most important claim of personality psychology is that peoples. actions are determined by stable and enduring structures inside them; the various personality theorists differ in terms of what they think these structures are, but they all agree about the existence and importance of the stable structures. The most important claim of the behaviorists is that such stable structures do NOT exist, that peoples. actions are determined by situational, cultural, historic, and even economic factors. In their pure forms, these two views are irreconcilable.

The first textbook in personality psychology, written by William McDougall in 1908, was oddly titled Social Psychology. That strategic mistake robbed McDougall of being recognized as the true founder of the discipline. Most people believe personality psychology began with the publication of Gordon Allport's textbook in 1937. However, Allport knew McDougall at Harvard, and anyone familiar with McDougall's work will immediately realize how heavily Allport drew on his ideas. From the outset, personality psychology was a kind of outlaw discipline, very much outside the mainstream of American psychology. In the mid-1920s McDougall debated Watson on nationwide radio. Although observers declared McDougall the winner, the criticism of personality psychology (especially from social psychologists) came in volleys until finally, in the 1960.s, personality psychology seemed on the verge of simply disappearing from the intellectual radar. Personality psychologists couldn.t publish in mainstream academic journals, couldn't obtain federal grants to support their research, and couldn't find academic jobs.

Matters gradually began turning around in the 1980s, and by the 1990s a full scale renaissance in personality psychology was underway. Four factors seem largely responsible for this sea change in opinion. First, research in human behavior genetics in the 1970s showed that scores on well-validated personality measures had a substantial genetic component, the scores reflected something stable and enduring. More importantly, the same research showed (or failed to show) any evidence for family influence on these scores, there was no evidence for the environmental effects on personality that the behaviorists would predict.

Second, social psychologists discovered that they could significantly improve the power of their experimental manipulations by including measures of individual differences (i.e., personality) in their research. Third, the emergence of the Five-Factor Model provided a desperately needed degree of order to the field of personality measurement. From the beginning of personality measurement in the 19th century and for the next 75 years, personality psychology was awash in a bewildering number of scales to measure an equally bewildering number of personality concepts. The FFM showed that there was a surprising degree of order beneath this psychometric tower of Babel. And finally, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and its enforcement arm, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, made it illegal for employers to discriminate against women and minorities in the hiring process for gratuitous reasons. In particular, this made the use of measures of cognitive ability for hiring purposes very dicey. This in turn set of a scramble among I/O psychologists to find alternative ways of conducting pre-employment screening. As it turns out, well-validated measures of personality, organized in terms of the FFM, predict occupational performance about as well as measures of cognitive ability, but without the adverse impact.

Personality has now returned with a vengeance, but whatever happened to behaviorism? It is still alive in modern social psychology with its emphasis on situational and contextual influences. In clinical psychology, under the influence of Albert Bandura and Walter Mischel, it has morphed into cognitive behaviorism, a term that would cause poor old J. B. Watson to turn in his grave.

This generally accepted model of the structure of normal personality is also referred to as the Big Five theory of personality or the Big Five. It is not a theory; however, it is a description of the components of reputation. Those components are commonly referred to as emotional stability, surgency, agreeableness, conscientiousness and intellectance.

Emotional stability concerns the degree to which an individual seems calm, steady, cool and self-confident versus anxious, insecure, worried and emotional. Personality traits associated with emotional stability include neuroticism, emotional stability, negative affectivity and affect.

Surgency concerns the degree to which an individual seems sociable, gregarious, assertive and leader-like versus quiet, reserved, mannerly and withdrawn. Some common personality traits associated with this dimension include dominance, capacity for status, or social presence, the need for power, sociability, surgency, or assertiveness.

Agreeableness concerns the degree to which an individual seems sympathetic, cooperative, good-natured and warm versus grumpy, unpleasant, disagreeable and cold. Personality traits associated with this dimension include likeability, friendly compliance), need for affiliation and love.

Conscientiousness concerns the degree to which an individual seems hardworking, persevering, organized and responsible versus impulsive, irresponsive, undependable and lazy. Personality traits associated with this dimension include prudence and ambition, will to achieve, need for achievement, dependability, constraint and work.

Intellectance concerns the degree to which an individual seems imaginative, cultured, broad-minded and curious versus concrete-minded, practical and has narrow interests. Personality traits associated with this dimension include culture and openness to experience.

Modern Multivariate Personality Assessment
The history of applied multivariate personality assessment can be described in terms of eleven milestones as follows:

Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of Charles Darwin and Francis Galton, proposed in 1794-1796 that the variations in all important human characteristics are rooted in human evolution. This is the starting point for modern personality assessment.

Francis Galton published Hereditary Genius in 1869. The book is the foundation for the modern study of behavior genetics; it demonstrated that talent and success runs in families and must, therefore, have a biological basis.

Karl Pearson, a mathematician who was appointed to the chair of eugenics, endowed by Francis Galton at University College London, invented the statistical index called the correlation coefficient in 1896.

Charles Spearman, at University College London, invents the statistical method called factor analysis based on Pearson’s correlation, and shows (1904) that one major factor underlies scores on all measures of mental ability.

Raymond Cattell, Spearman’s most famous graduate student, adapted factor analysis to study the structure of personality (1933), and founded modern multivariate personality assessment.

G. W. Allport and H. Odbert (1936) assembled a comprehensive lexicon (or list) of “trait terms”, words used to describe other people. This becomes the source for the later development of the Five-Factor Model (FFM).

Raymond Cattell (1946) and Hans Eysenck (1947) propose competing models of the structure of personality based on factor analysis. They also publish the first multivariate inventories of normal personality . Eysenck’s test purports to measure three traits; Cattell’s test purports to measure 16 traits.

H. G. Gough (1957) publishes the first multivariate inventory of normal personality designed to predict outcomes rather than measure traits. The test becomes the gold standard for predicting effective occupational performance.

E.C. Tupes & R.E. Christal (1958) argue that personality can be adequately described in terms of five general factors—this is seen as the first statement of the Five-Factor Model, now generally accepted as reflecting the structure of personality.

Robert and Joyce Hogan proposed that the multivariate personality inventory of the future should be based on the Five-Factor Model and Gough’s measurement goals—it should predict outcomes rather measure traits. They published the Hogan Personality Inventory in 1986.

Murray Barrick and Michael Mount publish the first in a series of meta-analyses showing that personality measures, organized in terms of the Five-Factor Model, predict occupational performance across a wide range of jobs and industries.

Personality concerns the characteristics inside people that explain why they do what they do. The conventional wisdom of the human resources community for many years has been that personality is largely irrelevant for understanding occupational performance, that what really matters are the reward structures where people work. Over the past few years, personality has made a comeback in organizational psychology. What are the signs of the comeback? There are three.

One is the widespread popularity of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) in the business community today; although the MBTI has all the intellectual power of elevator music, many people nonetheless find MBTI results helpful. Their intuitions are correct; even superficial knowledge of another person's personality is useful for understanding how to manage and work with that person. The second sign of the return of personality is the current enthusiasm for Emotional Intelligence (EQ). The lessons of the EQ movement are also pretty superficial, but the movement makes the useful point that there is more to career success than cognitive ability. Third, within academic psychology, it is now generally accepted that components of the Five-Factor Model predict occupational performance above and beyond what is predicted by measures of cognitive ability.

The fact that personality is now back is a political reality, not an intellectual achievement. But, given that personality is now back, how should it be conceptualized? Historically, Freud set the agenda by arguing that the most important generalization we can make about people is that everyone is somewhat neurotic, and the most important problem in life is overcoming one's neurosis. This was the wrong agenda. In our view, the most important generalization we can make about people is that they always live in groups, and that every group has a status hierarchy. Based on this, we can conclude that the big problems in life concern getting along with other people while attaining some status in one's community, i.e., getting along and getting ahead. The rest of this viewpoint, called Socioanalytic Theory, can be summarized in terms of three broad points.

1. What do people really want?
People want three things: (a) acceptance, respect, and approval; (b) status and the control of resources; (c) predictability. This very simple model of motivation tells us what bad managers do to de-motivate their subordinates. They treat their staff with disrespect. They micromanage their staff and take away their sense of control and autonomy. And they don't communicate or provide feedback. These three practices violate the most important human needs, as forecast by our model of motivation.

2. What is personality?
Personality should be defined from two perspectives. First, there is personality from the inside, which is called identity. This is the person you think you are and it is best defined by your hopes, dreams, aspirations, goals, and intentions — i.e., your values.

Second, there is personality from the outside, which is called reputation. This is the person that others think you are and is best defined by the Five-Factor Model — i.e., in terms of self-confidence, sociability, integrity, charm, and creativity, or their opposites. There are often important disparities between a person's identity and his/her reputation, and the size of the disparity is related to career success.

3. How to measure personality?
It is important first to stipulate the agenda for personality assessment. In our view, the agenda concerns forecasting individual differences in a person's potential for getting along and getting ahead. Next, we must decide which aspect of personality we want to measure. If we want to assess personality from the inside identity then we need a measure of values. And the optimal use of such an assessment is to evaluate how well a person will fit into the culture of a specific organization, as opposed to trying to predict occupational performance. If, however, we want to assess personality from the outside reputation then we should use observer ratings (e.g., a 360-degree feedback instrument). The optimal use of assessments of reputation is to forecast occupational performance, as opposed to trying to predict person/culture fit.

If the foregoing distinctions are appropriately observed, personality and personality assessment will be indispensable tools for making decisions about people in organizations.