Unless you discovered the internet in your mid-20s or later, odds are you have encountered the personality test. Of course personality tests have been littering the pages of magazines for decades, but the internet is really a ripe medium for testing. Who are you most like. What type do you fit
best, How likely are you to… we humans seem to like being assessed and seeing where we fit in, but perhaps that’s for another article. What I’m really getting at is: where did this really start? The first official personality inventory: Woodworth’s Personal Data Sheet.
World War One soldiers taking aptitude test, 1918.
I’m sure that people were trying to put other people into categories long before that, but there wasn’t any official, standardized personality inventory until 1917, when Robert Woodworth, a psychologist, was called to create a test to screen out potential military recruits who might be susceptible to “shell shock” (a then misunderstood issue now known as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder). Woodworth collected data from known shell shocked soldiers, and created 116 yes-no questions that, in theory, would indicate a personality susceptible to shell shock and “neurosis” (essentially, answers that matched those of shell shock soldiers).
In today’s light, the test really doesn’t hold a lot of water. It’s very subjective, and assumes a high amount of face validity (truthfulness) in responses – many tests nowadays have “liar detectors” built in to indicate whether or not the person taking the test is just BSing the whole thing, or even trying for a particular outcome. The test, while containing a wide variety of questions, also had many culturally specific questions, or simply questions that testees might not know how to answer: “Do you often consume a fifth of liquor in a day?” Many might not consider how much a fifth of liquor is to be common knowledge (it is 128oz, or 1/5th of a gallon). Questions involved inquiries into general health, feelings, childhood, bed-wetting, lovemaking, fears… most of them sound silly and irrelevant by today’s standards.
Since World War I ended in 1918, the test was only given a limited run. For the short time it was used on recruits, results did seem favorable to weeding out recruits who matched their shell shocked counterparts – though it is not incredibly likely this would have eliminated or even taken a large chunk out of the shell shocked potential population (PTSD is not necessarily linked to any definite personality type, but is a combination of reactions to stress and stress management capabilities). The test was reworked from time to time over the years, and led to the development of tests for other unwanted personality qualities.
Since that initial conception, personality inventory development has flourished, and there are quite a number of pretty accurate tests out there. If you’re interested, check out the MMPI (Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory), the Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator, or the Keirsey Temperament Sorter.
SOURCES
- http://www.poeticgenius.com/apotheosis_sept_oct_2001/psychometry09.htm
- http://psychclassics.asu.edu/Woodworth/murchison.htm
- http://www.believermag.com/issues/200408/?read=article_paul
- MMPI: http://psychcorp.pearsonassessments.com/HAIWEB/Cultures/en-us/Productdetail.htm?Pid=MMPI-2&Mode=summary
- Meyers-Briggs: http://www.humanmetrics.com/cgi-win/JTypes2.asp
- Keirsey: http://www.keirsey.com/
