Revision of the first two body paragraphs
Alexander Nininger, twenty-three years old then, was newly commissioned as a lieutenant in the United States Army and sent to the South Pacific to serve with the 57th Infantry of the Philippine Scouts. Quiet and thoughtful by nature, he loved theater, would spend many hours with a friend and often sit by the fireplace in the living room, having tea and listening to Tchaikovsky. When he went to serve in the South Pacific, he wrote a letter to a friend, saying that he had no feelings of hate and didn’t think that he could ever kill anyone out of hatred. In January of 1942, when the Japanese attacked, slipping hundreds of snipers through the American lines, Nininger went to his commanding officer and told him that he wanted to be assigned to another company so he could go hunting for Japanese snipers. He carried several weapons such as grenades, ammunition belts, a Garand rifle and a submachine gun. He crawled through the jungle and shot and killed snipers. He was wounded in the leg but kept going, shooting Japanese snipers for the comrades behind him. He was wounded again but waved off a medic who tried to bring him back; he saw a Japanese bunker and two enlisted men up ahead. He kept charging at the bunker although he was shot in the shoulder. He killed one soldier with a double thrust of his bayonet, clubbed down the other, and bayoneted the officer. Then, with outstretched arms, he collapsed face down. He was awarded the Medal of Honor.
How could we know Nininger’s personality beforehand? A man who loved theater and afternoon with tea and Tchaikovsky and who was so fearless and tenacious. Knowing one’s personality helps us predict one’s behavior. But asking Nininger himself or his friends to describe his personality would not be of any help. He did not even know that he was fearless. His friends would only recall him as a quiet and thoughtful person. Then, how can we get to the heart of one’s personality? There are twenty-five hundred kinds of personality tests based on each theory and testing is a four-hundreds-million-dollar-a year industry. However, a personality test cannot predict behavior for its theoretical issues, controversial aspects and problems regarding reliability, validity and limitations.
Content validity vs. Internal Consistency Reliability
Validity is concerned about which characteristic is being assessed, for instance sociability or selfishness. One significant aspect regarding validity is content validity. It refers to component of questions in relation to a characteristic. An assessment with a high content validity has components of question items that are relevant to the characteristic that is being measured. Though it may seem easy to achieve a high content validity, choosing question items can be tricky and sometimes it is difficult to determine what kinds of content should be included in question items and what kinds of content should be excluded from them. Suppose that we are to measure sociability of individuals. We may include questions such as preference to spend free time with people rather than alone. But what about being good at speaking in public? Or tendency to initiate a conversation? Are those considered as one of the aspects of sociability or not? We can achieve high content validity by including question components that are relevant to a characteristic and by excluding those that are not relevant to it. Meanwhile, reliability refers to whether or not the data from an assessment is trustworthy. The most significant part in reliability is internal consistency reliability. It refers to whether question items of an assessment are accurately measuring the intended characteristic. Using the same example, we would choose three question items to which individuals rate their liking with the scale of 0 to 10; disco, nightclub and party at a friend’s house. However, those three items are only partially measuring one’s sociability. More importantly, they are assessing some other variables that are unique to those items. The first item may probably measure one’s liking of music and dance, in addition to sociability. The second item may probably measure one’s liking of drinking, in addition to sociability. Finally, the third item may probably measure liking of homey atmosphere, again, in addition to sociability. In order to maximize the internal consistency reliability, we have to increase either the number of question items or the correlation of the questions. For instance, we can add some more question items such as liking of local events or meeting new people. Now, the core elements of sociability are strengthened and unique elements of each question item are weakened. In this way, we achieve high internal consistency reliability. On the other hand, we can increase the correlation among question items. For instance, we can choose questions like preference to spend time with friends, preference to spend time with classmates and preference to spend time with coworkers. Then the correlation among these three items becomes quite high and it indicates that the characteristic is most likely presenting sociability, not the liking of music or alcohol. However, the solutions come with a new problem. Trying to achieve high internal consistency reliability, by increasing either the number of question items or the correlation among them, we are forced to sacrifice content validity instead. In increasing the number of question items, the content of a characteristic is automatically being expanded since we would have to go further than a basic, core part of a characteristic to make more question items. This means that components of the question items become less and less relevant to the content of the characteristic as we increase question items, resulting in a poor content validity. Meanwhile, in increasing the correlation, we have to choose very similar question items. This means that the question items would represent only a small part of the characteristic. Content of the characteristic is now very limited to only one specific aspect of the characteristic, also leading to a poor content validity. Content validity and internal consistency reliability cannot be high at the same time. Therefore, assessments always have to lack or compromise either content validity or internal consistency validity.
Trait Theory vs. Situationalism
Most personality tests are primarily based on trait theory, which believes that everyone has traits, the core of oneself that is relatively stable over time. According to Gordon Allport, the founder of personality psychology, traits are generalized response-units to stimuli that reflect one’s personality. In other words, personality consists of a collection of traits. We know one’s traits through behavior such as habits or tendency. If one’s habits are joking, smiling and talking a lot, then extraversion would be the trait that generalizes and includes those relative habits. Because we possess different traits and they vary in their degree, every person is unique for the combination of traits and their degree and we respond to a stimulus differently, producing different behaviors. Between a stimulus and a behavior is a trait, which directs the behavior. For example, if a stimulus is a new friend, one’s behavior can be being shy and nervous or it can be introducing oneself and initiating a conversation immediately. The reason why behavior to the same stimulus varies is because each one of us have different trait, introverted or extraverted in this case. However, trait psychologists cannot predict how an individual will behave in a particular situation because we don’t always behave according to our traits. For instance, you may probably not joke at a funeral even if you are extraverted or you may try to talk a lot to impress a potential customer even if you are introverted. Now, if our behaviors differ from situation to situation, then it must be the situation that determines behaviors, not broad personality traits. This position is called situationalism, first proposed by Walter Michel with the publication of his groundbreaking book Personality and Assessment. Traits theorists, in response, formulated new theoretical perspectives, trying to save the idea of traits. Two of the most significant changes that they have made are aggregation and the notion of “person-situation interaction”. First, aggregation is the process of averaging several single observations to obtain better results of personality traits than a single observation of behavior. There would be days when your cheerful girlfriend may not be cheerful for some reasons. But what matters to you is her behavior over a long term and not her mood on any given day. The practice of aggregation gives traits theorists better results in assessing personality and predicting behavior. Person-situation interaction, on the other hand, can be expressed as follows; B=F (P×S), meaning behavior is a production of the interaction between personality traits and situational forces. This can easily be explained from “If..., if..., then...” statement. For example, if the situation is overwhelming, and if the person is shy, then upset will be the result. Traits theory further proposed some ways personality traits interact with situations. The most important one is “situational selection”, the tendency to select situations in which one finds oneself. Snyder states, “quite possibly, one’s choice of the settings in which to live one’s life may reflect features of one’s personality; an individual may choose to live his or her life in serous, reserved, and intellectual situations precisely because he or she is a serious, reserved, and thoughtful individual.” Situational forces can certainly influence and direct particular behaviors. However, quite frequently, these situations, which produce certain behaviors, are the ones that an individual has chosen with the internal causal properties, reflecting or possibly implying the existence of personality traits. Situational critiques lead to the creation of person-situation interaction and situational selection. But it also made the traits theorist, essentially the personality tests, to admit their defect and invalidity in assessing one’s personality traits though a series of questions. Despite traits theorists’ embracement of situational forces as one of the factors of producing behaviors, inconsistency of behavior across situations still remains in their perspective and personality tests that lack situational forces can hardly get to the core of personality and predict one’s behavior.
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