Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [210]
In another form of performance testing, the psychologist, face to face with the individual, subjects him or her to problematic or stressful situations and rates the person according to the resulting behavior. Candidates for Air Corps flight training in World War II went through a battery of tests, one of which consisted of the subject’s trying to hold a thin metal rod steady inside a tube (whenever it touched the tube, a light flashed) while the tester made unpleasant or belittling remarks or suddenly snarled at him.
Also during World War II the Office of Strategic Services took candidates for secret service assignments to an isolated estate and there put them through a three-day series of trials. In addition to undergoing the usual interviews and questionnaires, the men faced a sequence of difficult tasks: assembling a hut without proper instructions, scaling a high wall, fording a stream, and keeping their wits under the influence of alcohol. Psychologists rated them on leadership ability, the capacity to withstand stress and frustration, and so on. The method sounded promising, but the team members, in their final report, admitted that they had received almost no feedback from overseas and therefore had little idea how accurate or useful their evaluations had been.37 In any event, as a way to assess individual personality it is too costly, difficult, and demanding for general use.*
Other more practical performance tests have been devised, but because most of them require a tester for each tested individual and many must be performed in a laboratory, they too are unsuited to such large-scale applications as personality testing in schools, industry, clinics and institutions, and the military. A few examples:
—The subject has to trace four printed mazes, each in less than fifteen seconds, without letting the pencil’s track touch the sides. Success is thought to indicate an assertive ego.
—The subject reads a story aloud normally and then backward; the greater the difference in the elapsed times, the stronger the presumption that the subject is rigid and inflexible.
—A group of subjects takes a test of attitudes on some controversial issue; each is then privately informed that his or her view is different from that of the majority. (For test purposes this need not be true.) Somewhat later the subjects are retested; the degree of change in an individual’s stated attitudes is taken as a measure of his or her vulnerability to pressure to conform, or, in some versions, of adaptability.
—The subject sits in a chair and waits for a scheduled event to occur, but it is delayed. Unknown to him or her, the chair is a “fidgetometer” that records all movements; those who do a lot of fidgeting are considered nervous or easily frustrated.38
This is only a small sampling; graduate students in pursuit of a degree and psychologists in search of a marketable product have concocted hundreds of others. They may also have a nonmaterial motive for developing such products: in order for the results to be trustworthy, the real purpose of the tests must be hidden from the subject, and constructing one therefore has some of the quality of playing a game or devising a practical joke. It may be that some of the psychologists who design such assessments find this particularly appealing.
Making Order out of Chaos
Early in the history of personality research, it became evident that the vast amount of data gathered about traits was only raw material. A set of miscellaneous trait scores of an individual did not add up to a picture of his or her personality, and compilations of scores from large samples of people yielded no insights about personality in general.
Allport put his finger on the problem: “It seems clear that the units we seek in personality and in motivation are relatively complex structures, not molecular.”39 But trait measurements are molecular, and it was not apparent how to see a structure in a mass of findings like the twenty-six trait scores produced by the MMPI, much less in the