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It’s been awhile since we’ve posted something new. We’ve been taking some time to get our bearings and to discuss some new possibilities for this blog space, beginning with some different voices and and expanded content scope.

To kick things off, we’re linking to a recent article on changeboard.com that discusses the use of Hogan assessments in preparing participants for 2009’s Rivers of Ice expedition in Patagonia.

While it’s true that Hogan’s assessment tools were primarily developed for (and are associated with) workplace applications, they’ve proved extremely useful over the years in a variety of “extracurricular” environments ranging from professional athletics to reality television to high adventure.

From the changeboard article Applying the Hogan tests to extreme conditions:

The 2009 Rivers of Ice expedition was the first attempt at an unsupported crossing of the Southern Patagonian Ice Cap by a team of two adventurers, Tarka L´Herpiniere and Katie-Jane Cooper. For many different reasons and on many different levels this was to be the most extreme and challenging expedition for both of them.

As their coach Sarah Fenwick (a Getfeedback Associate) worked with them on tools and techniques to maximise their strengths and minimise the potentially dysfunctional aspects of their personalities that when stressed, tired, cold, hungry, etc. might potentially have eroded the quality of their relationship, or worse, derailed the expedition.

Read more.

The concept of “engagement” has become a hot topic in applied psychology over the past two years. Like competency modeling and personality assessment before it, HR practitioners have forced the academic community to pay attention to engagement—it is not something that the academics discovered on their own.

The concept of engagement was first described by Yale organizational psychologist William Kahn. Kahn suggests that engagement occurs when a person’s identity and job role “exist in [a] dynamic…relation in which a person both drives personal energies into role behaviors and displays the self within the role.” Such role expression “fulfills the human spirit” at work. Kahn defines engagement in terms of four components: (1) Cognitive (the role is consistent with a person’s identity); (2) Emotional (the person likes the role); (3) Physical (the person will work at the role); (4) Existential (the role provides personal meaning).

There are two big reasons engagement matters. The first is “philosophical”; the second is financial. Concerning the first reason, Karl Marx was right—working in modern business organizations is inherently alienating; in many organizations, people must surrender their humanity in return for a paycheck. When people are not free to defect from organizations, their participation in it is inherently alienating, and engagement is a powerful and humane way to resolve the problem of alienation.

Second, the data overwhelmingly indicate that when the morale of a business unit is low, absenteeism, turnover, and theft go up, and productivity and customer satisfaction go down. Conversely, when morale is high, absenteeism, turnover, and theft go down, and productivity and customer satisfaction go up. Morale and engagement are pretty much the same, and there are clear financial consequences associated with high and low engagement. Engagement is the “g” factor in organizational life; it is correlated with (predicts) every important business outcome at the individual and the business unit level.

The concept of engagement has four important implications for management practice. First, there is such a thing as good and bad management; good management creates engagement, bad management destroys it. Second, because engagement is a function of how managers treat their staff, there are no cookie cutter solutions; engagement depends on building relationships with the staff, one person at a time. Third, not all managers can or will do this. And fourth, not all staff members are willing to engage with their managers.

Assuming that an organization decides to pay attention to engagement, assessment will be at the core of any implementation. Assessment can identify managers who are good at building engagement, managers who could build engagement but don’t, and managers who have no talent for building engagement. Assessment can also identify employees who are capable of becoming engaged, and employees who are, by virtue of their basic psychology, constitutionally alienated.

— Robert Hogan

The following is an excerpt from a fascinating (and often humorous) autobiographical piece that Dr. Robert Hogan wrote for the Journal of Personality Assessment in 2006. During the course of the article, Hogan describes his upbringing, his education, and the curiosity and conviction that led to a life-long career as a preeminent personality psychologist.

My parents were from farm families in the Texas panhandle; they moved to Los Angeles during the great depression of the 1930s with little money or prospects. I was born there in 1937. When I started kindergarten, the little girls could already read, and I realized that they knew something I didn’t. They still do.

In 1942, we moved 50 miles east of Los Angeles to the hard scrabble town of Fontana. Henry Kaiser had built a steel mill there and staffed it with ethnic families from the rust belt—tough, no nonsense people with strong religious convictions. Money was always a problem at home, and I was encouraged to start working early—but such is the tradition of farm families who can’t survive without a stern work ethic. I found my first paying job when I was 13 and have continued to work since then.

By the second grade, I was a voracious reader. School, however, was boring, and I was an indifferent and disruptive pupil for several years; I became quite familiar with paddles and principal’s offices. From early childhood, however, I was fascinated by “animal behavior” and spent a lot of time gathering and watching insects and various critters. In the sixth grade, I started a Biology Club and persuaded other kids to bring in specimens—mostly desert reptiles. In high school, I discovered girls, alcohol, and geometry and found them all as interesting as animal behavior but for different reasons.

I began reading evolutionary theory (George Gaylord Simpson), which seemed intuitively correct and thrillingly controversial from the perspective of Christian fundamentalism— which I had abandoned when I was 10. During the summer before the 12th grade, I read Freud’s (1900) The Interpretation of Dreams, and I was hooked. Many of Freud’s claims were implausible, but the idea that the mind can operate outside awareness seemed obvious, and the notion that one could trace errors and mistakes that seemed random back to underlying erotic preoccupations was a revelation. I wanted to be a psychologist and decode the secrets of other people—to what purpose, it wasn’t clear.

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It is hard to overstate the importance of the concept of intelligence for applied psychology; intelligence testing may be the most important single contribution psychology has made to larger society. Advocates of intelligence testing provide data showing that IQ predicts virtually every significant life outcome from income and occupational status to life expectancy. Nonetheless, the concept continues to make some of us uncomfortable for three reasons. First, the concept of intelligence is still poorly defined; the default definition is, “intelligence is what intelligence tests test”. Second, all of us know people who have received very high scores on standard IQ measures who nonetheless have trouble functioning in the world. And third, in standardized cognitive assessment, problems are fully defined; in the real world, problems are almost always poorly defined.

The term “intelligent” is a judgment that we use to evaluate performance; for example, in athletics, certain people are known as smart players and others are not. A moment’s reflection suggests that the term “intelligent” mostly applies to decisions—smart decisions precede smart actions and vice versa. Decision making is particularly important in business, politics, and warfare where money and lives are on the line and bad decisions affect the welfare of many people. Decision making is also typically difficult in business, politics, and warfare because there is almost never enough time or information to make a carefully reasoned decision. The term “good judgment” applies to the ability to make sound and defensible decisions with limited time and information.

The book, “Why Smart Executives Fail” by Sydney Finkelstein (2003), contains a large number of richly detailed case studies of failed business enterprises and is a superb data base for thinking about good (and bad) judgment. At the surface level, businesses fail for a variety of reasons—technology shifts, new competitors, ill-advised acquisitions—but at a deeper level, bad judgment appears to be the cause of the problem in every case. And in every case, the bad judgment was exercised in two stages. In the first stage, the company’s CEO chose the wrong means to accomplish a desired end. In the second stage, the CEO stayed with his/her choice despite information that the choice was a bad one.

For example, in the 1980s, General Motors (GM), the world’s largest automobile manufacturer, faced two looming problems. The first was competition from low cost, high quality Japanese cars. The second was labor unrest at home. The CEO of GM, Roger Smith, decided he could solve both problems by replacing his workers with robots. He invested more than $45 billion in robots—enough to buy both Toyota and Nissan—but the investment failed because the key to the Japanese success was the manner in which they integrated their technology with their workforce, rather than their robotic technology per se. As one industry insider noted, by using technology without the prepared workforce, all Roger Smith did was automate confusion. However, he persisted in his decision, and GM’s productivity continued to decline relative to Toyota.

Again, bad judgment is a two stage process. In the first stage, a person chooses the wrong means to get to the desired end. In the second stage, a person persists with the choice despite evidence that it was wrong. For persons familiar with the structure of the Hogan Business Reasoning Inventory (HBRI), choosing the wrong means to get to a desired end is a failure in Strategic Reasoning, while persisting in a bad choice after data are available is a failure of Tactical Reasoning.

At Hogan, we believe that leadership is the most important problem in management science. When good leaders are in place, organizations and their members prosper, when bad leaders are in place, organizations and their members suffer. At the same time, the academic study of leadership has largely failed to deliver any real-world generalizations about leadership or recommendations regarding how to find it or develop it. The academic study of leadership has failed for three reasons: (1) Leadership is poorly defined; (2) Mainstream literature ignores personality; (3) Nobody pays attention to return on investment (ROI).

Let’s consider these points in turn.

The Definition of Leadership.
Leadership is defined in academic literature primarily in terms of the people who are in charge. The assumption is, if a person is a manager, president or CEO, he/she is by definition a leader. This is a big mistake for at least two reasons. First, ask yourself how a person rises in a large, hierarchical, bureaucratic, male-dominated organization. The answer is, by playing politics, not by exercising leadership. It was said of Dwight Eisenhower, “He didn’t become a politician because he was a general, he became a general because he was a politician.” People typically rise in large organizations by pleasing their superiors with their loyalty and technical knowledge, not by displaying leadership skills. Second, the base rate of failure for managers in America is about 65%; thus, 65% of the people in “leadership” positions today will fail in one way or another. To the degree that leadership is defined in terms of who is in charge, the research won’t lead to replicable conclusions—because success in any organization is idiosyncratic. Who wins in such pursuits will largely depend on the circumstances—the nature of the competition, the team of judges, the climate of the times, etc.

Situations versus Personality.
Most major organizations in the United States, public or private, military or civilian, assume that almost anyone can be (or can learn to be) a leader, and will perform appropriately when put in charge of other people. People are promoted based on time in service and technical talent, with no consideration given to the possibility that some people have more talent for leadership than others. Sometimes this assumption is based on intellectual laziness, but among psychologists the assumption reflects the lingering effects of behaviorism and situationism—the view that what people do depends on where they are not who they are. However, the average person understands that some people perform better in leadership positions than others, and the reason has to do with the kinds of persons they are—i.e., their personalities.

ROI-based Research.
Most managers are evaluated by their bosses—the people who hired or promoted them and who have a vested interest in their doing well. But many bad managers are skilled at pleasing their bosses, which drives the bosses’ evaluations. It seems obvious to us that managers ought to be evaluated in terms of the performance of the group that they manage. Although this is rarely done, it is easy to do, and when done correctly, it turns out that effective managers have a distinctive personality style which varies systematically with the industry and their level in their organization. We discuss this in more detail below.

The remainder of this discussion is organized in six parts. We define personality, we define leadership, then we show how personality impacts leadership, and how leadership (properly defined) impacts business unit performance. We then analyze the crucial role of followers for business unit performance, and how to enhance their engagement.

1. Defining Personality.
We believe that personality is related to leadership—who you are determines how you lead. But we need to define personality, and it should be defined from two perspectives: how a person thinks about him/herself and how others think about that person. We refer to this as the actor’s and the observer’s perspectives on personality, and it is important to keep them distinct. The actor’s perspective is a person’s identity, the story that he/she tells others about him/herself—it is an idealized self view. Although identity has been the major focus of personality research from Freud to the present, it has been a non-productive focus. After 150 years of research, there are no reliable generalizations to report, there is no measurement base, there is no taxonomy to organize the subject matter. How people think about themselves is almost impossible to study in a rigorous way; hence that study has led to no conclusions.

On the other hand, personality from the observer’s perspective—a person’s reputation—is easy to study and leads to some very useful generalizations. First, unlike identity, reputation is quite stable over time. Second, reputation has a well recognized taxonomy—it is called the Five-Factor Model (sometimes “the Big Five”). Everyone’s reputation can be described in terms of five dimensions: (1) Anxious vs. Confident; (2) Shy vs. Assertive; (3) Tough vs. Charming; (4) Careless vs. Conscientous; and (5) Narrow- minded vs. Open-minded. And third, these five dimensions predict a wide range of performance outcomes, including leadership, better than measures of cognitive ability. There is almost complete consensus in the research community that personality should be defined in terms of these five (large) dimensions, with finer distinctions within the five being possible and useful.

2. Defining Leadership.
Conventional leadership literature focuses on charismatic or transformational leadership, and this focus has led to few reliable generalizations. We prefer a functional definition—because leadership has a job to do. The leader’s job is to persuade otherwise selfish people to work together for a period of time to accomplish a common objective. Thus we define leadership in terms of the ability to build and maintain a high performing team, and we think leadership should be evaluated in terms of the performance of the team, relative to the competition. Defining leadership this way has two useful consequences. On the one hand, the research literature becomes interpretable. On the other hand, this definition brings the issue of ROI into focus.

3. Personality and Leadership.
We have now defined personality (as reputation) and leadership (as the ability to build a team). The next question concerns the links between personality and leadership. (We should note that, as recently as 1990, academic researchers maintained that this question was nonsense—because leadership was deemed to be a function of “the situation”—e.g., situational leadership.) In 2002, Tim Judge, a researcher at the University of Florida, published a landmark study. Using 20,000 managers from 5,000 organizations, representing every industry sector, he showed that personality, defined in terms of the Five-Factor Model, predicts rated leadership performance very substantially, and much better than measures of cognitive ability. For those of us who believe in data, this seals the case—personality and leadership are rather tightly connected. Good managers are Confident, Assertive, Conscientious, Open-minded, and not necessarily Charming.

4. Leadership and Business Unit Performance.
In 2002, James Harter, Frank Schmidt, and Ted Hayes, three researchers funded by Gallup, published another landmark study that shows three things. First, the personality of the manager impacts the morale of the work group. Second, when morale is up, good business results follow; when morale is down, bad results follow. And third, the link between the manager’s personality and business unit performance is mediated by staff morale. This means that leadership is indirectly, and staff morale is directly, connected to ROI.

5. Understanding the Role of the Follower.
Leadership involves getting results through other people—it is not about the charisma of individual leaders, it is about persuading followers to adopt the leader’s agenda. Work is a (sometimes painful) extension of everyday life. Personality psychology tells us that people have three overriding needs that govern their lives: (1) People need acceptance and respect, and they dread criticism and rejection; (2) People need status and the control of resources, and dread the loss of status and resources; (3) And people need structure and predictability in their lives, and find the lack of structure to be stressful. These needs are operating at work, during interaction with peers and management. Thus, good managers provide their staff with respect, allow them to control their own work, and make sense out of business activities. Bad managers do the opposite, and are unable to build a team.

6. The Lessons of Engagement.
Engagement is the central factor underlying employee performance in modern business, and it is almost entirely a function of leadership. Senior leadership needs to establish a culture that recognizes, values, and facilitates engagement. First line supervisors and managers need to treat their employees in ways that minimally don’t actively alienate them, and ideally in ways that encourage engagement. But there is no cookie cutter approach to this. Rather, encouraging engagement puts specific demands on individual leaders, who must establish and maintain working relationships with their employees, one employee at a time. Some people are better able to do this than others, such people can be identified by their personality signature, and to the degree that organizations value ROI, they will pay attention to this research-based conclusion.

— Dr. Robert Hogan

A small number of psychologists, economists, and management theorists have been enthusiastically trying to determine how modern evolutionary theory can be used to understand the dynamics of organizations. Traditional evolutionary theory—the survival of the fittest model—supports selfishness, predatory capitalism, and the importance of individual self-interest. However, some economists have begun to test people using variants of competitive games (of which the Prisoner’s Dilemma is the best known). This research has led to two important findings.

First, the strategies that people use in these competitive bargaining games fall into three robust and replicable categories. About 15% of every population consists of altruists—people whose first instinct is to cooperate, to extend benefits to others, to work for the common good. About 20% of every population consists of free riders—people whose first instinct is to take advantage of other people, act selfishly, and contribute nothing to the common good. And finally, about 65% of every population consists of people who tailor their actions to those of the other person—they will cooperate when others cooperate, and compete when others compete. Second, these data show quite clearly that the selfishness model proposed by traditional evolutionary theory is wrong, it does not characterize the behavior of most people.

The new thinking argues that traditional evolutionary theory needs to be augmented with insights from: (1) multi-level selection; and (2) gene-culture co-evolution theory. Putting the three lines of analysis together tells us that people evolved as group living animals, and that the groups competed with one another for scarce resources. This, in turn, leads to several interesting insights regarding organizational dynamics. The first insight is that the percentages of altruists, free riders/cheaters, and switch hitters described above are about what we should expect to find in any normal population.

The second insight is that people are best understood in terms of their relations to the other members of their groups. Thus, although traditional psychoanalysis and psychology has focused on isolated individuals and how they deal with their private demons, this has been a big mistake because what is inside, in people’s psyches, started outside in their relations with others.

Third, human evolutionary history has designed people so that they are pre-programmed in two main ways. On the one hand, they are from birth ready to compete with the other members of their group for status and resources. On the other hand, they will cooperate with the other members of their group when faced with external competition. Thus people live in a state of internal tension and must learn to balance their desires to compete with others against their needs for the support of others.

Fourth, every human group is faced with two unavoidable problems. On the one hand, there is a strong tendency for “leaders” to exploit their groups for their own selfish purposes, and subordinate group members must maintain a watchful eye to avoid being exploited. On the other hand, there is a strong tendency for the members of any one group to begin fighting with their neighboring groups. Thus, organizations that are composed of several groups will compete with one another based on the degree to which they can persuade their constituent groups to stop the internal fighting. Think, for example, of the two major U.S. political parties.

Finally, then, good leadership is a resource for the group rather than a source of privilege for the leader(s). Good leadership is able to: (1) persuade the subordinate group members that the leadership won’t exploit them; and (2) persuade the subordinate group members to stop fighting with one another and concentrate on the competition.

— Robert Hogan

From the beginning of personality psychology as an academic discipline in the 1930s, the conventional wisdom has maintained that reputation is an epiphenomenon of no real psychological significance or interest. Instead, according to Gordon Allport, personality psychology concerns the factors that make each person distinctive and unique. This was a mistake for two reasons: (1) it is impossible to generalize from uniqueness; and (2) reputation is easy to study and is a powerful predictor of behavior.

Another suspect topic is gossip. Conventional wisdom has maintained that gossip is little more than character assassination, and is something that right minded people will avoid. In the 1970s researchers began studying normal conversations and discovered that when real people (as opposed to academic psychologists) talk, they mostly (about 70% of the time) engage in gossip—they talk about other people.

That which reputation and gossip have in common is language. Robin Dunbar, a British anthropologist, is credited with the view that language evolved as a mechanism to organize and smooth social interaction. Dunbar thinks conversation among humans takes the place of social grooming in chimpanzees (our nearest relative); he thinks conversation serves to create social bonds.

I have argued for a long time that much conversation is actually about gossip and gossip is mostly about coming to a common agreement about another person’s reputation—hence the link between gossip and reputation. Knowing another person’s reputation is quite helpful in deciding how to deal with that person in future interactions. Gossip tells us who we can trust; conversely, the prospects of acquiring a bad reputation serves to control people’s otherwise selfish tendencies—gossip functions as a mechanism of social control.

Ralf Summerfield and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology published a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that is an interesting contribution to this line of thinking. They used the standard game theoretical paradigm in which two people interact, and each has the option of competing or cooperating. If both cooperate, both win; if one competes while the other cooperates, the selfish person wins even bigger. In this study, participants were provided information regarding the other person’s reputation as either selfish or cooperative. As expected, they found that if a person expected to interact with someone with a reputation for selfishness, he/she would behave selfishly, but if a person expected to interact with someone with a reputation for cooperation, he/she would tend to cooperate.

The real news in the study, however, concerned a particular wrinkle. In some cases they would provide the participants with both data regarding other person’s performance and a description that person’s reputation. Participants invariably believed the gossip rather than the data. As Sommerfeld noted: “It could be that we are just more adapted to listen to other information than to observe people, because most of the time we’re not able to observe how other people behave. Thus we might believe we have missed something.”

There are two points about this that are worth remembering. First, people believe gossip over actual data regarding a person’s performance. And second, smart people will try to keep their reputations in good shape.

— Dr. Robert Hogan

In 1982 I undertook a self-taught crash course in I/O psychology, with a special emphasis on leadership. At that time, I concluded that LMX theory was the only model of leadership that made any sense; the alternatives seemed hopelessly academic. I have recently had the opportunity to meet George Graen, the author of LMX theory and to confirm my initial reactions. George is smart, productive, perceptive, and an artist— which means that he is constantly fiddling with his ideas. At its core, however, LMX theory is, in my judgment, exactly right. I would like to summarize the highlights of the theory, as I understand it.

First, LMX stands for “leadership motivated excellence”, although Graen has changed the meaning of the term three times. Nonetheless, leadership motivated excellence is the “real” definition of the term.

Second, and in contrast with most discussions of leadership, Graen understands that it is not about the person in the role, leadership is about the performance of the team or business unit of which the “leader” is in charge. Graen evaluates leadership in terms of the team’s performance, and this is rarely done in the academic literature.

Third, Graen makes a crucial distinction between leadership models that concern between group performance, and models that concern within group performance. Between group models evaluate managers using ratings by a few members of the manager’s team (e.g., the typical 360 subordinate evaluation). Managers of successful teams are compared with managers of less successful teams, based on these averaged ratings, and those data are used to identify the characteristics of successful managers. This methodology has led to inconsistent results over time. In contrast, LMX theory uses ratings from everyone on the team to evaluate a manager, and the evaluations concern the relationship between each team member and the manager. These dyadic relationships tend to be very stable over time, and lead to convergent research findings.

Fourth, consistent with best practices of managers of real teams, Graen says leadership is not about how a manager treats his/her team in general or on average. Leadership is about building relationships between each member of the team, one person at a time. This is the key insight of Red Auerbach, the legendary coach of the Boston Celtics of the National Basketball Association—you motivate a team one player at a time. Rob Kaiser points out that the principle source of variance in 360 ratings is the ratings provided by single individuals—exactly as LMX theory would predict.

LMX theory is rooted in social exchange theory—the leader and the member each get something from the relationship, otherwise defections will occur. Thus, followers can influence leaders as much as the reverse. Each dyadic relationship (between the leader and an individual member of the team) is unique and determined by the personalities of the two people involved. The quality of the dyadic relationship is the key factor affecting the member’s motivation. Inevitably, the members who are in a leader’s “in-group” contribute more to the team than those who are not.

Fifth, Graen has a standardized rating form that can be used to evaluate the quality of the LMX dyads that make up any team. Higher scores on this rating form are associated with more effective teams that communicate, cooperate, and coordinate better, and have lower turnover intentions.

Sixth, Graen has standardized (and proprietary) protocols for training managers in the kind of relationship building that LMX theory spotlights. Furthermore, he says that he has data showing that managers who are trained on this LMX model do better, in the sense that their teams perform better after they have undergone training.

Seventh, the standard criticism of LMX theory in the I/O literature is that LMX is all about likability, that subordinates give higher ratings to supervisors that they like, so that LMX theory only concerns “halo or nuisance variance”. But Graen is quite clear that the LMX relationship depends on three elements: (1) the subordinate trusts his/her manager; (2) the subordinate respects the competence of his/her manager; and (3) the subordinate believes his/her manager is concerned about the welfare and performance of the team. These elements might result in likeability, but likeability is not necessarily entailed by these elements. As Graen notes, many aspects of a successful manager’s behavior make that person likeable, but the three criteria listed above are what predict team performance.

Finally, as far as I can tell, every aspect of LMX theory is supported by data, and every aspect of LMX theory is consistent with the way I think about leadership, starting with speculations about the role of leadership in the evolution of our species, and ending with what is wrong with modern corporate leadership.

About 10 years ago, academic researchers rediscovered personality and its relationship to job performance. More recently, after the events symbolized by the collapse of Enron and MCI, the business community seems to have rediscovered the importance of character as a determinant of job performance—especially in the senior ranks. These represent different insights in the popular literature, because personality and character are usually considered separately. Nonetheless, the concepts of “character” and “personality” are closely linked; for example, Aristotle defined character in dispositional terms that are synonymous with the contemporary concept of personality. Moreover, the first academic journal devoted to personality research, established in 1932, was called Character and Personality. Gordon Allport, one of the founders of personality psychology in the U.S., remarked in his influential 1937 book that “character is personality evaluated, personality is character devaluated.”

Personality psychology has always been outside the mainstream of academic psychology because it explicitly assumes that values are an inherent part of social life, and that character is part of personality. Lee J. Cronbach, grand arbiter of psychological fashion for 50 years, denounced personality and personality assessment in his 1960 textbook because some of the concepts (i.e., integrity) are “value laden.” Like all good behaviorists, Cronbach wanted psychology to be like the physical sciences—values free. Poor old Cronbach never understood that the physical sciences, like the human sciences, are shot through with value considerations. Values are about preferences, they concern rules that people use to make choices in ambiguous circumstances. Tycho Brahe, Copernicus’ teacher, was a religious nut who thought the sun was God, and therefore belonged at the center of the universe. His arbitrary value system set Copernicus on his quest to demonstrate that our universe revolves around the sun.

Character is a term that summarizes a set of values. Values are indispensable for navigating social life. The only question concerns how to justify one’s values. Most people justify their values by appealing to authority—legal or religious. The framers of the U.S. Constitution justified their value choices in terms of the welfare of society, a pragmatic decision that informs our thinking as well.

The most fundamental requirement for a functioning society is order—a system in which people comply with the established rules and customs of the group. However, in any functioning group, cheaters inevitably emerge and take advantage of those who are more compliant—this is an important principle in evolutionary theory: cheaters inevitably emerge. Cheaters threaten the integrity of their groups with varying degrees of severity. People of good character, people with integrity, people who support the rules and customs of their group, are the foundation of a viable community.

Psychoanalysis argues that the fundamentals of character are set by about age five. And, as Freud noted, character is fate. Specifically, by about age five, a child’s core self-esteem—guilt and self-doubt versus self-confidence and optimism—is largely settled. In addition, by about age five, a child’s orientation toward rules and authority—rebellion and defiance versus effortless compliance—is largely set. Measures of self-esteem and attitudes toward authority powerfully predict job performance in adulthood. More importantly for a discussion of character, low scores on these measures powerfully predict delinquent conduct in adulthood. Poor self-esteem and defiance of rules and authority also predict some white collar crime. However, white collar crime is better predicted by adding values—specifically measures of selfishness and greed.

Finally, to put a practical end to this abstract discussion, researchers at Hogan have been studying crime and delinquency for over 30 years. They have accumulated solid data showing that the HPI and the HDS are robust predictors of both blue collar and white collar crime and delinquency. The MVPI can be used to evaluate selfishness and greed. Personality, character, and personality assessment come together to predict important life outcomes with an accuracy that rivals the best in medical diagnosis, an outcome that would have given Cronbach fits.

The talented and charismatic Swiss psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach published Psychodiagnostik in 1921. Rorschach’s inkblots soon attracted a cult-like following and became the most widely used projective test in the world. The theory behind projective tests is that, when people are asked to describe an ambiguous stimulus, their descriptions will reveal their private thoughts and fantasies—a theory that seems plausible on its face.

In the summer of 2009, Wikipedia published Rorschach’s ten inkblots and the most common responses to them. In the July 30th, 2009 issue of Newsweek, Wray Herbert describes the firestorm that resulted. His article raises a number of issues that are worth additional comment; I will mention four. Click here to read the article.

First, the article confuses personality measurement with the assessment of psychopathology. This is a common mistake because, from the beginning of personality measurement in the late 19th century until after World War II, every major measure of personality was also a measure of psychopathology; these measures included the Rorschach and the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI)—the most widely used objective measure of personality in the world. Research on performance in combat during the war showed that the absence of psychopathology does not predict effective performance—many people with problematic MMPI profiles perform well under pressure and many people with normal profiles perform poorly. Realizing that psychopathology is not necessarily related to effectiveness, pioneers such as Harrison Gough (author of the California Psychological Inventory in 1954) developed measures of normal personality to predict competent and effective performance. The point is, it is possible to assess personality without assessing psychopathology; and it is necessary to do so if one wants to predict effectiveness.

Second, along with many professional psychologists, the Newsweek article misrepresents the concept of test reliability. The reliability of any measure is a key issue in science. In the physical sciences, the reliability of a score is estimated by taking the same measure two or more times and comparing the scores. In contrast, many psychologists think that reliability should be estimated by how closely the items on a test cohere in a statistical fashion—but this has nothing to do with the reliability as defined in the physical sciences. The Newsweek article defines reliability in terms of the degree to which two people who score the same responses on the same test, get the same results. Although this definition is mistaken—because it concerns the reliability of the scoring method not the test scores—it is still closer to the scientific meaning of reliability than the definition used in academic psychology.

Third, there is nothing wrong, in principle, with the Rorschach. Like any test, it is a collection of (10) test stimuli, which by themselves mean nothing. The utility of any test depends on its scoring key. More specifically, the utility of a test depends on validity—the degree to which scores on the test predict real world outcomes. It is possible to develop scoring keys for the Rorschach that predict outcomes, but first it is necessary to understand what the purpose of assessment is. Assessment has a job to do, and that is to predict significant non-test behavior.

Finally, unlike many psychologists, Wray Herbert (the Newsweek writer) understands the importance of validity. At the close of his essay he notes that “This dust-up over the Rorschach could be just the beginning of a major intellectual housecleaning in a field that has drifted from its scientific roots.” As this comment indicates, validity is the scientific raison d’etre for assessment, but it is something that many test publishers ignore. This fact is a public scandal and one that will ultimately come to haunt the entire test publishing enterprise.