Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [205]
Although Allport modified his theory of personality over the years, he always considered traits the fundamental and relatively stable units of personality. His trait research earned him acclaim and honors in his time; he would be gratified to know that despite the advent of genetic, neurological, cultural, sociological, and other factors affecting personality, many psychologists still regard personality psychology as all but synonymous with the study of traits.17
Measuring Personality
Since traits are neither visible objects nor specific actions but personal qualities, the central problem for researchers is how to measure them.
First they have to decide exactly what it is they mean to measure. Early personality researchers chose a handful of intuitively obvious traits such as introversion, dominance, and self-sufficiency. But soon they began looking farther afield and attempted to measure many others, so many, indeed, that the field rapidly became chaotic.
For there are all too many possibilities. The hardworking Allport and a colleague once counted all the words in the dictionary that designate distinctive kinds of human behavior or qualities; the total was about eighteen thousand. Not all refer to traits: some are the observer’s reactions to another person rather than that person’s traits (“adorable,” “boring”); some describe temporary states rather than enduring traits (“abashed,” “frantic”); and some are only metaphors (“alive,” “prolific”). But that still left four to five thousand terms denoting traits.18 And even after nearly seven decades of research had winnowed out most of these as unfruitful, a relatively brief review article in 2001 still listed forty-one topics as just “some” of the significant traits or manifestations of personality:
The ability to delay gratification, the ability to process social information, aggressiveness, agreeableness, behavioral inhibition, carelessness, coercive behavior, conformity, conscientiousness, criminal behavior, curiosity, distractibility, driving while intoxicated, emotional expressiveness, extraversion, fearfulness, impulsiveness, industriousness, irritability, job satisfaction, leadership ability, moodiness, narcissism, neuroticism, openness, political attitudes, religious attitudes, restlessness, self-confidence, self-control, self-directedness, shyness, sociability, social potency, social responsibility, spouse abuse, submissiveness, substance use, the tendency to feel mistreated or deceived by others, the tendency to have temper tantrums, and the tendency to seek or avoid danger.19
Many of these and hundreds of Allport’s list have been explored by means ranging from subjective impressions to laboratory experiments and from psychoanalytic interpretations to behavioral data. These are some of the major methods:
Personal documents and histories: Letters, memoirs, autobiographies, diaries, and the like are full of information—and misinformation— about the personality of their subject, since a self-portrayal meant to be read by others is apt to present a dressed-up self rather than naked reality. (Pepys’ diary, full of licentious episodes and shameful thoughts, was meant only for his own eyes and was written in code.) Certain celebrated interpretations of famous personalities have been based on personal documents, but tastes and theories change from generation to generation, and the same sources can yield widely differing portraits of the writer. Analyses of personality based on such sources are sometimes good literature but rarely, if ever, good science.
The interview: This is perhaps the most common method of personality assessment but one of the least effective. Some employment interviewers, college admissions personnel, and psychotherapists can glean a good deal about a person from an interview, but many others cannot. Even skilled interviewers, studies have shown, may evaluate the same person quite differently. Moreover, interviews yield descriptions