Personality Assessment

• Interaction of personality characteristics and

the situation
• Strong vs. weak situations
• Impact of reward systems
• Which personality characteristics are
important for a given
• situation?
 The Situation

• Powerful Situations
 Cause individuals to interpret events in the same way
 Create uniform expectancies of appropriate behavior
 Provide incentives for the performance of a behavior
 Require commonplace skills
• Weak Situations
 Cause individuals to not uniformly interpret events in the same
way
 Do not create consistent expectations of desired behavior
 Do not offer incentives for one type of behavior
 Require a variety of skills
• Major Types of Inventories

 Self-Report Questionnaires
 Consist of a series of brief items asking the respondents to use a
multiple-choice answer format to indicate personal information about
thoughts, emotions, and past experiences

 Projective Techniques
 Require verbal responses to intentionally ambiguous inkblots,
pictures, or sentence stems that provide insights into an individual’s
personality.
 Personality Inventories
Self-reports –
• Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory,
• California Psychological Inventory
• Myers-Briggs Type Indicator
• Hogan Personality Inventory

• NEO PI-R (assesses the 5-Factor model consisting of: Neuroticism, Extraversion,

Openness, Agreeableness Conscientiousness)

Projective Techniques --
(e.g., Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), Rorschach Inkblot Test (RIT), Miner
Sentence Completion Scale)
 Thematic Apperception Test
TAT --- 31 pictures that depict a variety of social and interpersonal situations.
Participants are requested to write or tell a story about each picture to the
examiner (e.g., what happened, what Ten pictures are gender-specific; the others
can be used with either sex.
Use: To uncover internal conflicts, dominant drives, interests, and motives.
Specific motives include the need for achievement, need for power, the need for
intimacy, and problem-solving abilities.
 Rorschach Inkblot Test

Ten cards which bilateral and symmetrical inkblots

Scoring ---
Location: the part of the blot used (e.g., use of the
whole blot, common or unusual detail)
Determinants: form, color, shading, and movement)
Content (human figures, animal figures, anatomical
diagrams, inanimate objects