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PERSONALITY ASSESSMENT
I: PERSONALITY TESTING 5
AND ITS CONSEQUENCES
If something exists, it exists in some quantity, and if it exists in some
quantity, it can be measured.
—Edward Lee Thorndike (Thorndike, 1905; cited in Cunningham,
1992, p. 35)
If you accept the conclusion of Chapter 4—that personality traits are real
and everybody has them—then Thorndike’s quote, above, implies that the
next task is to measure them. Are you more or less friendly, for example,
than the person sitting next to you? To answer this kind of question, or, more
broadly, for personality traits to be useful for the scientific understanding of
the mind, for the prediction of behavior, or for any other purpose, mea-
surement is essential. The next two chapters explore “personality assess-
ment,” the enterprise of trying to accurately measure characteristic aspects
of personality.
The Nature of Personality Assessment
Personality assessment is a professional activity of numerous research, clin-
ical, and industrial psychologists, and it is a prosperous business. Clinicians
may measure how depressed you are in order to plan treatment, whereas
potential employers would probably be more interested in measuring your
conscientiousness to decide whether to offer you a job. But there is more to
personality assessment than just measuring traits.
An individual’s personality consists of any characteristic pattern of
behavior, thought, or emotional experience that exhibits relative consistency
across time and situations (Allport, 1937). These patterns include the terms
commonly thought of as personality traits that were discussed in Chapter 4,
and personality psychology has a long, still active, and still fruitful tradition
of conceptualizing and assessing such traits. 113
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114 CH. 5 PERSONALITY TESTING AND ITS CONSEQUENCES
But these patterns also include oth