Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [202]
While psychodynamic concepts thus suggested how personality develops, they did not provide psychologists with a way to measure personality quickly and precisely, as had become possible with intelligence. The lineaments of personality revealed by psychoanalysis appeared only after scores or even hundreds of clinical sessions; even then, the process yielded impressionistic evaluations, not quantitative measurements. As Raymond Cattell, one of the great names in personality measurement, said, the clinical method was “nothing more than a reconnaissance” and what psychology needed was a “quantitative taxonomy.”4
The first such taxonomy was a product of World War I. When the United States entered the conflict in 1917, Robert S. Woodworth (1869–1962), an eminent experimental psychologist and professor at Columbia University, was commissioned to devise a quick, simple way to identify emotionally disturbed recruits. With no time to spare, he threw together one of the first tests of personality, the Personal Data Sheet, a questionnaire that asked the respondent a number of unsubtle questions about symptoms, such as, “Did you ever walk in your sleep?” and “Do you feel like jumping off when you are on high places?” The score was arrived at by adding up the number of symptoms admitted to.5
As personality assessment, the Personal Data Sheet was primitive and limited; it gathered only such information or misinformation as the subject offered and only about neurotic symptoms. Yet it had “face validity”—one intuitively felt that its questions did distinguish between normal and neurotic people. And, in fact, a later effort to validate the test found that diagnosed neurotics averaged thirty-six unfavorable (“Yes”) answers, normal people only ten.6
Woodworth’s pioneer effort set a pattern; after the war, many psychologists developed other questionnaires that similarly asked subjects to evaluate themselves. But these soon went beyond symptoms to include questions about a few general personality traits. The best known of the early tests, developed in 1931 by the psychologist Robert Bernreuter, asked 125 questions and scored the answer to each for four traits: dominance, self-sufficiency, introversion, and neuroticism. If, for instance, a respondent answered “?” (“Don’t know” or “Can’t say”) to the question “Do you often feel just miserable?” he or she got three points on intro-version, one on dominance, zero on neuroticism, and zero on self-sufficiency. These scores were only educated guesses—Bernreuter had no empirical evidence for each answer’s relation to the four characteristics—but such was the national fascination with psychological testing that over a million copies of the Bernreuter Personality Inventory, and large quantities of similar tests, were marketed and used during the 1930s.7
By then personality was a distinct field of psychology and was dominated by trait theory, a scientific version of the commonsense view that each person has a recognizable set of characteristics and usual ways of behaving in particular situations. Traits describe the elements of a given personality, though they say nothing about underlying psychodynamic structure or how that personality developed.8 The Bernreuter and other early personality tests were efforts to measure some of those elements.
An important study that appeared in 1928 and 1929 seemed to cut the ground out from under trait theory. The Reverend