Personality Assessment in WWII and the OSS

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.

References
Eysenck, H. J. (1953). Uses and abuses of psychology. Baltimore: Penguin Books.
Murray, H. A. (1938). Explorations in personality. New York: Oxford Books.
OSS Staff (1948). The assessment of men. New York: Rinehart.
Simoneit, M. (1940). Deutsches Soldatentum. Berlin: Junker & Duennhaupt.