THE CLINICAL TRADITION IN PERSONALITY ASSESSMENTS

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.