Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [207]
Although the MMPI has been the single most widely used personality questionnaire for more than a half century, it has limitations and flaws. For one thing, it is very long. For another, respondents feel that many items, if answered honestly, are embarrassingly revealing (“Bad words, often terrible words, come into my mind and I cannot get rid of them,” “I am very strongly attracted by members of my own sex”). For a third, other items are so obviously aimed at pathology as to strike many normal people as either funny or insulting. Some time ago the humorist Art Buchwald lampooned the MMPI by suggesting additional questionnaire items like:
A wide necktie is a sign of disease.
When I was younger, I used to tease vegetables. I use shoe polish to excess. 24
In 1949, a small group of personality psychologists got a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to set up within the University of California at Berkeley a new research unit, the Institute for Personality Assessment and Research. Its original purpose was to develop better methods of personality assessment.* Over the next forty years it produced a phenomenal number of studies and new psychological tests; but the best known and most widely used of them to this day, the California Psychological Inventory (CPI), was completed within the organization’s first two years.
The CPI was the work of Dr. Harrison Gough, an institute member and Berkeley professor, who set out to improve on the MMPI by using material appropriate to a normal population. As raw material, he assembled a pool of a thousand items, some taken from the MMPI, others written by him and some of his colleagues. With the help of associates and collaborators, he tested the items, first on eighty graduate students, then on eighty medical school seniors, and, over the years, on a total of thirteen thousand males and females of various ages and socioeconomic status. To assess the validity of the items—or, rather, of the answers they elicited—Gough and his colleagues had a sample of respondents rated by friends, and then compared the ratings with the subjects’ own answers, weeding out those items which proved untrustworthy.
The final form of the CPI included 480 items (the 1987 revision had 462), such as:
People often expect too much of me.
It is hard for me just to sit still and relax.
I like parties and socials.
The respondent answered “true” or “false” to each; the answers yielded scores on fifteen personality traits ranging from dominance and self-acceptance to self-control and empathy.† By every measure—sales, number of versions in other languages (thirty-six, including Arabic, Mandarin, Chinese, Romanian, and Urdu), a research bibliography of more than two thousand entries, and importance ascribed to it by experts in assessment—it is among the top five personality tests in use today, five decades after it was developed.25
Many other personality tests offer the respondent a wider choice of answers to questions than the MMPI or CPI, as in these three examples:26
Responses scaled in this fashion yield more precise measurements of attitudes and feelings than “yes-no” responses.
Over the years, hundreds of personality inventories have been devised by psychologists and published by research institutes and commercial publishers; some embody good scientific practice, others do not, but many of each kind are good business properties. The sales figures for the CPI, for instance—guidebook, reusable test books, answer sheets, and other items—though a secret, can be assumed to be fairly large.
Projective tests: From the early 1930s on, a growing number of psychologists accepted the psychoanalytic doctrine that unconscious processes are major determinants of personality and, pace Gordon Allport, sought ways of testing that would measure those processes as well as the traits they generated. The most feasible way to do so was to present the