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  3 Measuring personality

  While the science of measuring personality is relatively young, people have been assessing personality for a long time. The Book of Judges in the Bible describes how Gideon chooses his fighting men for a battle (7:6). He watches all the soldiers drink from a spring after a long march and chooses only those who remain alert and ready to fight while drinking, rejecting those who put down their swords and shields and bend down to the water to drink. He was selecting those who were fully focused on their duty as soldiers over those who were sidetracked by their personal needs, in this case thirst.

  Whenever we meet people we do in some sense assess their personality. When we are introduced to someone we will quite quickly make some judgements about whether they seem friendly and warm or cold and distant, whether they are quiet and reserved or lively and outspoken. These are all personality factors. However, we are not always very accurate in making these judgements. Research suggests that we make judgements about another person within only a few seconds of meeting them and that we are quite resistant to changing these judgements, even if the person’s later behaviour does not exactly match our initial evaluation. One study found that people can make these judgements within milliseconds of seeing a picture of someone yet have no possibility of understanding their personality or behaviour from this exposure.

  Deciding on what sort of personality an employer might be looking for and how this is determined is discussed in Chapter 5. Here we are concerned with how personality can be assessed.

  Selection interviews

  The most common way of evaluating job candidates is through the selection interview. This is used almost universally by employers to check out a candidate’s suitability for a job. Although interviews are versatile selection tools that can provide information on many different facets of a person’s suitability, research suggests that they are not always effective and are neither the most efficient nor most accurate way of measuring someone’s personality. An interview allows the employer and the candidate to interact and evaluate each other. It allows the interviewer to ask about any relevant topic – the candidate’s education and experience, previous employers, ambition and motivation and expectations of the workplace. Many employers will also say that they want to evaluate the ‘fit’ of the candidate to the job and the organization through the interview. This often means that they are trying to assess something about the person’s personality and whether it is suitable. The interviewer wants to know if this is the sort of person who would work well within the organization, get on with other people and respond well to the way things are done in the organization.

  There are, however, some problems, both general and specific, about using an interview to assess a person’s personality. Research suggests that the interview is not always an effective way of collecting information about candidates. Unstructured interviews in particular are poor at differentiating promising from unlikely candidates. One reason for this could be the skill of the interviewer. Many interviewers are affected by our tendency to make quick evaluative judgements about people (see above). It has been found that typically interviewers decide quickly whether they think that the person they are interviewing is a likely candidate. If they think the person has potential they tend to concentrate on collecting evidence to support this view. They might, for example, ask the candidate to tell them about a successful project. On the other hand, if their initial judgement is that the candidate is poor they will look for evidence to confirm this view. They might for example, ask the candidate to tell them about a project that went wrong.

  This seeking for evidence that confirms preconceived ideas is a typical strategy for evaluating information. Used alone, however, it is quite a poor strategy. People have to be trained to look for evidence that might contradict their initial impression to avoid making mistakes. Interviewers look for failings in people they expect to fail and successes in people they expect to succeed but not always vice versa. They need to be trained to look for success and failings in all candidates.

  Structured interviews by trained interviewers are much better tools for identifying effective workers. However, even here there can be problems. Not all candidates are able to express themselves well at interview. Some people find it difficult to put into words their past experience and suitability for a role, whereas others are willing to sing their own praises and give a positive image at interview. Some people are more modest and underrate their skills and suitability. Some people become anxious at interview or when they are meeting new people, and this can affect the impression they make even when social skills are not required in the role. If you are the sort of person who finds it difficult to ‘sell’ yourself at interview you will appreciate the problem.

  If the interview is the only method used to evaluate candidates, those who are poor communicators will lose out, even if good communication is not an important factor in the job. Using a number of different methods of assessing candidates means that the employer can get a more rounded picture of the candidate, which will not be biased by how well a candidate performs in a particular type of exercise. Using personality questionnaires, written exercises or role plays are all ways of extending the selection process to look at candidates in different ways and gain more information about them.

  A further problem with interviews is that they can be quite subjective. An interviewer may have a personal response to something the candidate says. For instance, an interviewer may dislike a particular turn of phrase and make a negative evaluation of a candidate who uses it a great deal in speech or dislike a candidate because they have a hobby to which the interviewer has an aversion. It is quite difficult not to be swayed by your own personal likes and dislikes in evaluating another person.

  Finally, assessing personality at interview can be particularly difficult. It requires great skill as an interviewer and a deep understanding of personality and how it affects behaviour. In particular, as the interviewee is trying to make a positive impression, they are probably not behaving in a typical manner. For instance anxiety and tension can affect how the person comes across.

  Psychological measures of personality

  There are many different ways of measuring personality. Some personality measures were developed for use in clinical and educational psychology. Many people have heard of the Rorschach inkblot test, which is a measure of personality and which belongs to the category of projective tests. The person being assessed is shown an inkblot and asked to say what it looks like. The task is vague, and the person being assessed projects their own ideas of what type of response to make. Another projective method of assessment is the sentence completion, in which the person being assessed is provided with the beginnings of sentences and asked to complete them. For instance:

  When I think of my mother I . . .

  I am most happy when I . . .

  Projective tools are primarily designed for use in understanding psychological problems and pathology, and highly trained psychologists are required to interpret the results. They are not intended for use in selecting people for work or in other occupational contexts. The types of questionnaire used by employers that you might meet when applying for a job tend to be much more straightforward and focus on typical personality characteristics, not abnormal ones.

  Personality questionnaires

  You might have come across psychological questionnaires in newspapers and magazines. These are usually not professionally developed questionnaires, but rather a selection of questions put together to illustrate a particular issue. The questions are often poorly written, and it is not unusual to find that none of the responses really describes how you would behave. These are not the kind of questions that are put in properly developed questionnaires that are designed for use in staff selection and development.

  Example of a magazine type quiz: ‘Are you a good “best friend”?’

  1. How often do you call your best friend?

  a. Once in a while

  b. E
veryday

  c. Every hour

  d. Never, my friend calls me

  2. On meeting your best friend after a long time apart what do you say?

  a. Let me tell you what has happened to me!

  b. Tell me all about what you have been up to

  c. Why haven’t you been in touch?

  d. You don’t say anything special, it’s as if you hadn’t been apart

  3. Your best friend does not like you new boyfriend/girlfriend. What do you do?

  a. Find a new best friend

  b. Trust your best friend’s judgement and drop the new boyfriend/girlfriend.

  c. Try to find time to see your best friend separately.

  d. Expect your best friend to put up with your new boyfriend/girlfriend as a loyal best friend.

  4. You have just got back from work after a late shift, you are hungry and tired and you still have a pile of preparation to do for tomorrow. Your best friend rings in tears. Do you

  a. Arrange to see your friend later in the week when you are not so busy and tired and can be more help

  b. Drop everything and rush round to be with your friend

  c. Talk to your friend on the phone while you get something to eat

  d. Tell your friend you will ring back later when you have done your work

  There are various names for personality questionnaires. Some people refer to them as tests, but this is not accurate because the word implies something that can be passed or failed. The word ‘test’ is usually reserved for assessments of ‘maximal performance’ – that is, where a skill, knowledge or ability is being measured and the focus is to find out how well a person can perform. Most school tests are assessments of maximal performance, as are psychometric ability tests commonly used in staff selection – verbal or numerical reasoning tests, for example. You may be asked to complete ability tests together with, or instead of, a personality questionnaire when you are applying for a job. The word ‘inventory’ is often used instead of questionnaire, and it suggests going through all the elements of a person’s personality and listing them. Inventory can be used interchangeably with questionnaire. Sometimes a questionnaire is called a ‘survey’. This can be misleading, because it suggests market research rather than personality assessment. Personality questionnaires can also be referred to as ‘personality measures’ or ‘personality instruments’. These different titles do not have any specific implications for the content of the questionnaire.

  The proper development of a personality questionnaire requires the involvement of a team of psychologists, including experts in questionnaire design, in personality theory and in psychometric statistics. It is a process that takes, at the least, many months and often a number of years. The project includes conceptual phases, when the ideas of what is to be measured and how to measure it are developed, writing and reviewing phases, when the questions are created, trialling phases, when the embryo questionnaire is completed by hundreds of people, and statistical analysis phases, when the results of trials are reviewed to check whether the results meet the appropriate psychometric benchmarks. If necessary, the questionnaire is revised in the light of the results and retrialled. There are rarely fewer than two revisions, and often many more. In addition to this basic process of questionnaire development, research is performed to understand in more detail how well the questionnaire works and how to use it most effectively.

  The result of this is that well-developed questionnaires encapsulate a great deal of knowledge and expertise in personality assessment and make this accessible to a much less expert user. They are sophisticated tools that enable a relatively unskilled person to assess personality effectively and accurately. While questionnaires are sophisticated tools, most questionnaires are essentially straightforward. They provide job candidates, or others completing them, with a way of describing their personality that is simple and easy to understand. The detailed development work is to create an instrument that is clear and unambiguous.

  The last stage of development is the creation of a comparison group to use in interpreting the questionnaire results. Most questionnaires are interpreted by comparing an individual’s results with that of a large relevant population, such as working adults or managers and professionals. Rather than looking at people’s absolute score on a scale, their relative position is considered. This helps to put the score in context and enables more accurate differentiations between different scores on a scale. A typical scale score will be assigned to between 5 and 10 score categories or bands for the purpose of interpretation.

  The information that questionnaires provide is typically straightforward. The purpose is to elicit from the people completing the questionnaire the knowledge they already have about their personality. However, the questionnaire helps to structure the knowledge and provide a metric, or a scale, in which to understand it. If you know yourself well, the results of the questionnaire will probably tell you what you already know. What it will do is put this information into a structure that may allow you to make better use of it. It will also help another person to understand you. Questionnaires used in staff selection will restrict themselves to appropriate aspects of personality. You will not be revealing information about yourself that a normal person would not be happy to reveal in other job selection contexts such as an interview or application form.

  Advantages of the questionnaire approach

  All psychometric tests and questionnaires have a number of attributes that make them effective measures of people’s qualities. They are standardized tasks to which people can respond on the basis of their own skills, abilities and characteristics. Each person receives the same questions or tasks and is given exactly the same instructions. All responses are scored in the same way to provide the personality profile or type. This standardization allows us to infer that the differences in the way that different people respond are due to differences between them rather than the task itself or particular circumstances. This is not true of much other information collected during the selection process, when the interviewer might phrase questions differently for different candidates, or the ‘chemistry’ between the interviewer and the interviewee will differ, which can affect the way questions are asked and how the candidate responds.

  Questionnaires are developed by experts who understand what it is they are trying to measure and how to measure it. They structure information about personality so that it is easier to understand. Rather than a series of stories or disconnected facts, personality questionnaires provide structured information within a profile that can be meaningfully interpreted.

  Questionnaires also provide objective information about the individual. Because their administration and scoring are standardized there is no place for the opinions or biases of any individual to affect the results. While most employers attempt to make their selection processes as objective as possible, the reality is that every assessor or interviewer has their own personal prejudices and preconceived notions about people. They may, consciously or unconsciously, find a particular accent suggestive of competence or incompetence, or they may discount some experiences and overvalue others – for example, they may not realize the experience that can be acquired in helping in the home but overestimate what can be gained from participating in team sports – or they may be more likely to believe someone who is attractive over someone who is plainer in looks. A common finding of people who have unclear speech because of a disability is that other people underestimate their intelligence. This type of subjective attitude can lead to errors in assessing people, but objective questionnaires help to counter this subjectivity.

  Research shows that well-developed questionnaires can be effective tools in selecting people for jobs. The use of questionnaires can help in the appointment of people who are likely to be more successful in jobs, who fit in better to organizations, who are less likely to fail in the job, who are easier to train and who are less likely to leave after only a short period of service. This makes them very useful for
employers. It is also in candidates’ interests to be selected for a job in which they are likely to succeed. Candidates are likely to be happier and more satisfied in their roles, and being successful in a role is, in itself, a benefit. We would all rather succeed than fail.

  Questionnaires are developed to provide a high degree of consistency – that is, if you take a questionnaire twice, your results should be very similar. If two people who are similar in personality both complete a questionnaire they should each receive similar results. Typically, questionnaires are more consistent or reliable than other types of assessment. Different interviewers can come to different opinions about the same candidate, and candidates may perform better in one interview than in another. This can be because they get on better with one interviewer than another or because their ideas flowed better on one occasion than another. The standardization of questionnaires is helpful in maintaining a high level of consistency, but the detailed development process, during which the degree of reliability is carefully measured and monitored, ensures that precision of measurement is high.

  Because of their standardization and objectivity, questionnaires are also likely to be fairer than many other selection processes. Everyone receives the same task in the same way. There are no helpful hints for one candidate that others do not also get. In addition, during the development process a great deal of attention is generally paid to ensuring that the content of a questionnaire is appropriate for all types of respondents. This was not always the case, however, and in the past some questionnaires included material that was inappropriate or unsuitable for certain groups. Questionnaires designed for selecting managers might have assumed, for example, that the candidates would be male, and culture differences between groups were not taken into account. Modern questionnaire developers are much more sophisticated and aware of these issues and will take them into account in developing and researching questionnaires.