Read The Story of Psychology Online
Authors: Morton Hunt
The Story of Psychology (62 page)
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.
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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.
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Many other personality tests offer the respondent a wider choice of answers to questions than the MMPI or CPI, as in these three examples:
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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 respondent with ambiguous stimuli—vague or suggestive shapes or pictures—and ask him or her to describe them; presumably, the answers
would reveal partially or completely unconscious fantasies, fears, wishes, and motives.
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The best-known such test had been developed many years earlier— between 1912 and 1922—by a Swiss psychiatrist, Hermann Rorschach. He created a number of inkblots and asked patients to say what each looked like; after years of experimentation he had narrowed down the test to ten blots, some black-and-white and others colored. In administering the Rorschach, the tester shows a card to the subject, asks him or her what the blot may be or what it brings to mind, writes down the response and, after showing all the cards, scores the answers. Scoring, which requires careful training and the use of a manual, is based on such criteria as whether the subject responds to the whole blot or only part of it, what part of the blot is attended to, and whether the answer deals with the blot itself or the shape of the background.
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Here are some blots similar to those in the test (the actual Rorschach blots may not be reproduced), along with brief interpretations of typical responses:
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FIGURE 15
Rorschach-type blots and typical interpretations (from Kleinmuntz, 1980, by permission)
The Rorschach test became extremely popular among psychologists in the United States in the 1930s and was used widely. For several decades it was the leading topic of Ph.D. dissertations in clinical psychology, and thousands of research papers have been written about it, but the net verdict is mixed. Some have found the prescribed interpretations reliable and valid, others have not.
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Nonetheless, it remains one of the tests most often used by clinical psychologists and psychiatrists.
Another well-known projective test is the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), created by the psychologist Henry Murray and an assistant, Christiana Morgan.
Murray, coolly patrician in appearance but driven by some demon, had traveled a tortuous road before finding himself. He began as a history major, went through medical training, specialized in surgery, and then spent five years in physiological chemistry. Still searching, he visited Jung in Zürich and for three weeks had daily sessions and long weekends of psychotherapy with him, from which “explosive experience,” as he calls it, he “emerged a reborn man.”
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Freed of hitherto incurable stuttering and immensely attracted to psychology, he turned to the study of that subject, became a psychoanalyst, and eventually found his calling as a psychoanalytically oriented researcher at the Harvard Psychological Clinic. He briefly collaborated with Allport, but thereafter his psychodynamic view of personality kept them, according to Allport, “in a state of friendly separation.”
Murray’s most significant contribution to personality research was a three-year project that he and some two dozen other psychologists conducted at the clinic. They intensively studied the personalities of fifty-one men of college age by an assortment of evaluation techniques, including depth interviews, frustration tests (such as a jigsaw puzzle that could not be solved), the measurement of finger tremor when the experimenter uttered provocative words like “cheating” and “homosexual,” and projective tests, of which the TAT was the most revealing. (It is remarkable that Murray was able to carry on and complete this major project despite falling madly in love with co-worker Christiana Morgan, and flagrantly conducting a somewhat perverse affair with her for many years.
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In administering the TAT, which Murray and Morgan developed in 1935 for the research project, the tester shows the subject nineteen black-and-white pictures in which it is not clear what is going on or why,
and asks him to make up a story for each, giving his imagination free rein and spending about five minutes per story. The psychological interpretations of the stories are based largely on a list of thirty-five personality “needs” or motives compiled by the project research team, among them the needs for achievement, dominance, and order, and the need to be succoring.
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Murray and Morgan, in a report describing their development of the TAT, printed several pictures as examples. In one, a middle-aged woman is seen in profile facing to the left, and near her, closer to the viewer, and turned partly away from her, is a decently dressed young man, his head slightly bowed, a faint frown on his face. (The description will have to suffice; the publisher of the test does not allow reproduction of the pictures.) This is the story that Murray and Morgan said one subject made up about the picture:
Mother and boy were living happily. She had no husband. Her son was her only support. Then the boy got in bad company and participated in a gang robbery, playing a minor part. He was found out and sentenced to five years in prison. Picture represents him parting with his mother. Mother is sad, feeling ashamed of him. Boy is very much ashamed. He cares more about the harm he did his mother than going to prison.
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The boy (the story goes on) gets out for good behavior; his mother dies; he falls in love but drifts back into crime; he goes to prison again; and he emerges as an old man and spends his remaining years repentant and wretched.
Murray and Morgan interpreted the story as indicating the narrator’s perception of the dominance of bad external influences over one’s behavior; it also revealed several deep needs, among them to be nurturing (to his mother), to acquire money, and to suffer abasement. The example, said Murray and Morgan, illustrates the special value of the TAT:
The test is based upon the well-recognized fact that when a person interprets an ambiguous social situation he is apt to expose his own personality as much as the phenomenon to which he is attending. Absorbed in his attempt to explain the objective occurrence, he becomes naively unconscious of himself and of the scrutiny of others
and, therefore, defensively less vigilant… The subject reveals some of his innermost fantasies without being aware that he is doing so.
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Despite its value, the TAT is cumbersome to use, and with some people yields lengthy stories and too much information but with others barren stories and too little. Still, it has proven to be a reliable and valid tool for measuring personality traits, and has been shown to have predictive power. Fifty-seven Harvard graduates who took the TAT in 1952, when they were about thirty years old, were studied fifteen years later; those whom the 1952 tests showed as having high motivation for intimacy were significantly better adjusted in their marriages, work, and other areas of interaction.
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The TAT, despite some trenchant criticisms, has continued to be widely used, though less often than the Rorschach, and has spawned many similar tests.
A large number of projective tests have been created in recent decades, and many are in current use. They include the Blacky Test, a set of picture stories about a little dog (the child makes up a story to fit each picture); word association tests (in some tests, the subject, on hearing or reading a word, mentions the first word that comes to mind; in others, uses the given word in a sentence); sentence completion tests (“I only wish my mother had __ _____ ____,” “The thing that bothers me most is __ ____ ____.” and so on); drawing tests (in one, the subject is asked to draw a house, a tree, and a person; the drawings are interpreted psychodynamically, a dead tree, for example, suggesting emotional emptiness, a leafy tree liveliness, a spiky tree aggressiveness).
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Conduct sampling or performance testing:
In this category of assessment, a trained psychologist observes the individual in particular situations and measures or rates his or her behavior. Through a one-way mirror, an observer may watch children in a classroom working together on a project, playing, or responding to a contrived stimulus, like cries for help from an adjoining room. Or the unseen observer may watch a group of individuals in a special situation, like attempting to solve a problem that requires cooperation.
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.
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In any event, as a way to assess individual personality it is too costly, difficult, and demanding for general use.
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