Personality Assessment
A new P.T. Barnum Psychology Clinic has just opened at your local shopping mall and is offering a Grand Opening Special on personality tests. You have always wanted to know more about yourself, so you sign up. Here is Barnum’s true-false test.
Questionnaire for Universal Assessment of Zealous Youth (QUAZY)
| 1. | I have never met a cannibal I didn’t like. | T F |
| 2. | Robbery is the only major felony I have ever committed. | T F |
| 3. | I eat “funny mushrooms” less frequently than I used to. | T F |
| 4. | I don’t care what people say about my nose picking habit. | T F |
| 5. | Sex with vegetables no longer disgusts me. | T F |
| 6. | This time I am quitting glue-sniffing for good. | T F |
| 7. | I generally lie on questions like this one. | T F |
| 8. | I spent much of my childhood sucking on telephone cords. | T F |
| 9. | I find it impossible to sleep if I think my bed might be clean. | T F |
| 10. | Naked bus drivers make me nervous. | T F |
| 11. | Some of my friends don’t know what a rotten person I am. | T F |
| 12. | I usually find laxatives unsatisfying. | T F |
| 13. | I spend my spare time playing strip solitaire. | T F |
You turn in your answers. A few minutes later a computer prints out your individual personality profile:
You have a need for other people to like and admire you, and yet you tend to be critical of yourself. While you have some personality weaknesses, you are generally able to compensate for them. You have considerable unused capacity that you have not turned to your advantage. Disciplined and self-controlled on the outside, you tend to be worrisome and insecure on the inside. At times, you have serious doubts as to whether you have made the right decision or done the right thing. You prefer a certain amount of change and variety and become dissatisfied when hemmed in by restrictions and limitations. You also pride yourself as an independent thinker and do not accept others’ statements without satisfactory proof. But you have found it unwise to be too frank in revealing yourself to others. At times you are extraverted, affable, and sociable, while at other times you are introverted, wary and reserved. Some of your aspirations tend to be rather unrealistic. (Forer, 1949, p. 120)
Do you agree with this assessment?
An experiment along these lines has been conducted a number of times with psychology classes (Forer, 1949; Marks & Kammann, 1980; Ulrich, Stachnik & Stainton, 1963). Students started by filling out a questionnaire - one that looked fairly reasonable, not something as preposterous as the QUAZY. Several days later, each student received a sealed envelope with his or her name on it. Inside was a “personality profile,” supposedly based on the student’s answers to the questionnaire. The students were asked, “How accurately does this profile desribe you?” About 90% rated it good or excellent. Some expressed amazement at its accuracy: “I didn’t realise until now that psychology was an exact science.” Of course, none of them realised that everyone had received exactly the same personality profile - the same one you just read.
The students accepted this personality profile party because it vaguely and generally describes almost everyone and party because people tend to accept any statement that an “expert” makes about them. Richard Kammann repeated the experiment but substituted a strange, unflattering personality profile that included statements like “Your boundless enthusiasm is a little wearisome to your friends” and “You seem to find it impossible to work out a satisfactory adjustment to your problems.” More than 20% of the students rated this unlikely assortment of statements a “good to excellent” description of their own personality (Marks & Kammann, 1980).
The moral of the story is this: Psychological testing is tricky. If we want to know whether a particular test measures a particular person’s personality, we cannot simply ask whether or not that person thinks it does. Even if a test is totally worthless - horoscopes, palm reading or the QUAZY - many people will describe the results as a “highly accurate” description of themselves. To devise a psychological test that not only appears to work but actually does work, we need to go through some elaborate procedures to design the test carefully and to determine its reliability and validity.
Introduction to PSYCHOLOGY 6edamazon.com
James W. KALAT
ISBN 0-534-53988-2
Chapter 13 : Personality
pp 562-563 (in 3ed)