The Story of Psychology

by Morton Hunt

  Murray’s most significant contribution to personality research was a three-year project that he and some two dozen other psychologists conducted at the clinic. They intensively studied the personalities of fifty-one men of college age by an assortment of evaluation techniques, including depth interviews, frustration tests (such as a jigsaw puzzle that could not be solved), the measurement of finger tremor when the experimenter uttered provocative words like “cheating” and “homosexual,” and projective tests, of which the TAT was the most revealing. (It is remarkable that Murray was able to carry on and complete this major project despite falling madly in love with co-worker Christiana Morgan, and flagrantly conducting a somewhat perverse affair with her for many years.31)

  In administering the TAT, which Murray and Morgan developed in 1935 for the research project, the tester shows the subject nineteen black-and-white pictures in which it is not clear what is going on or why, and asks him to make up a story for each, giving his imagination free rein and spending about five minutes per story. The psychological interpretations of the stories are based largely on a list of thirty-five personality “needs” or motives compiled by the project research team, among them the needs for achievement, dominance, and order, and the need to be succoring.32

  Murray and Morgan, in a report describing their development of the TAT, printed several pictures as examples. In one, a middle-aged woman is seen in profile facing to the left, and near her, closer to the viewer, and turned partly away from her, is a decently dressed young man, his head slightly bowed, a faint frown on his face. (The description will have to suffice; the publisher of the test does not allow reproduction of the pictures.) This is the story that Murray and Morgan said one subject made up about the picture:

  Mother and boy were living happily. She had no husband. Her son was her only support. Then the boy got in bad company and participated in a gang robbery, playing a minor part. He was found out and sentenced to five years in prison. Picture represents him parting with his mother. Mother is sad, feeling ashamed of him. Boy is very much ashamed. He cares more about the harm he did his mother than going to prison.33

  The boy (the story goes on) gets out for good behavior; his mother dies; he falls in love but drifts back into crime; he goes to prison again; and he emerges as an old man and spends his remaining years repentant and wretched.

  Murray and Morgan interpreted the story as indicating the narrator’s perception of the dominance of bad external influences over one’s behavior; it also revealed several deep needs, among them to be nurturing (to his mother), to acquire money, and to suffer abasement. The example, said Murray and Morgan, illustrates the special value of the TAT:

  The test is based upon the well-recognized fact that when a person interprets an ambiguous social situation he is apt to expose his own personality as much as the phenomenon to which he is attending. Absorbed in his attempt to explain the objective occurrence, he becomes naively unconscious of himself and of the scrutiny of others and, therefore, defensively less vigilant… The subject reveals some of his innermost fantasies without being aware that he is doing so.34

  Despite its value, the TAT is cumbersome to use, and with some people yields lengthy stories and too much information but with others barren stories and too little. Still, it has proven to be a reliable and valid tool for measuring personality traits, and has been shown to have predictive power. Fifty-seven Harvard graduates who took the TAT in 1952, when they were about thirty years old, were studied fifteen years later; those whom the 1952 tests showed as having high motivation for intimacy were significantly better adjusted in their marriages, work, and other areas of interaction.35 The TAT, despite some trenchant criticisms, has continued to be widely used, though less often than the Rorschach, and has spawned many similar tests.

  A large number of projective tests have been created in recent decades, and many are in current use. They include the Blacky Test, a set of picture stories about a little dog (the child makes up a story to fit each picture); word association tests (in some tests, the subject, on hearing or reading a word, mentions the first word that comes to mind; in others, uses the given word in a sentence); sentence completion tests (“I only wish my mother had __ _____ ____,” “The thing that bothers me most is __ ____ ____.” and so on); drawing tests (in one, the subject is asked to draw a house, a tree, and a person; the drawings are interpreted psychodynamically, a dead tree, for example, suggesting emotional emptiness, a leafy tree liveliness, a spiky tree aggressiveness).36

  Conduct sampling or performance testing: In this category of assessment, a trained psychologist observes the individual in particular situations and measures or rates his or her behavior. Through a one-way mirror, an observer may watch children in a classroom working together on a project, playing, or responding to a contrived stimulus, like cries for help from an adjoining room. Or the unseen observer may watch a group of individuals in a special situation, like attempting to solve a problem that requires cooperation.

  In another form of performance testing, the psychologist, face to face with the individual, subjects him or her to problematic or stressful situations and rates the person according to the resulting behavior. Candidates for Air Corps flight training in World War II went through a battery of tests, one of which consisted of the subject’s trying to hold a thin metal rod steady inside a tube (whenever it touched the tube, a light flashed) while the tester made unpleasant or belittling remarks or suddenly snarled at him.

  Also during World War II the Office of Strategic Services took candidates for secret service assignments to an isolated estate and there put them through a three-day series of trials. In addition to undergoing the usual interviews and questionnaires, the men faced a sequence of difficult tasks: assembling a hut without proper instructions, scaling a high wall, fording a stream, and keeping their wits under the influence of alcohol. Psychologists rated them on leadership ability, the capacity to withstand stress and frustration, and so on. The method sounded promising, but the team members, in their final report, admitted that they had received almost no feedback from overseas and therefore had little idea how accurate or useful their evaluations had been.37 In any event, as a way to assess individual personality it is too costly, difficult, and demanding for general use.*

  Other more practical performance tests have been devised, but because most of them require a tester for each tested individual and many must be performed in a laboratory, they too are unsuited to such large-scale applications as personality testing in schools, industry, clinics and institutions, and the military. A few examples:

  —The subject has to trace four printed mazes, each in less than fifteen seconds, without letting the pencil’s track touch the sides. Success is thought to indicate an assertive ego.

  —The subject reads a story aloud normally and then backward; the greater the difference in the elapsed times, the stronger the presumption that the subject is rigid and inflexible.

  —A group of subjects takes a test of attitudes on some controversial issue; each is then privately informed that his or her view is different from that of the majority. (For test purposes this need not be true.) Somewhat later the subjects are retested; the degree of change in an individual’s stated attitudes is taken as a measure of his or her vulnerability to pressure to conform, or, in some versions, of adaptability.

  —The subject sits in a chair and waits for a scheduled event to occur, but it is delayed. Unknown to him or her, the chair is a “fidgetometer” that records all movements; those who do a lot of fidgeting are considered nervous or easily frustrated.38

  This is only a small sampling; graduate students in pursuit of a degree and psychologists in search of a marketable product have concocted hundreds of others. They may also have a nonmaterial motive for developing such products: in order for the results to be trustworthy, the real purpose of the tests must be hidden from the subject, and constructing one therefore has some of the quality of playing a game or devising a practical joke. I
t may be that some of the psychologists who design such assessments find this particularly appealing.

  Making Order out of Chaos

  Early in the history of personality research, it became evident that the vast amount of data gathered about traits was only raw material. A set of miscellaneous trait scores of an individual did not add up to a picture of his or her personality, and compilations of scores from large samples of people yielded no insights about personality in general.

  Allport put his finger on the problem: “It seems clear that the units we seek in personality and in motivation are relatively complex structures, not molecular.”39 But trait measurements are molecular, and it was not apparent how to see a structure in a mass of findings like the twenty-six trait scores produced by the MMPI, much less in the hundreds of scores that could be gathered from a battery of different tests.

  A number of psychologists suggested making order out of chaos by grouping allied traits into larger tendencies or syndromes such as “general activity,” “sense of well-being,” and “emotional stability,” or into such psychodynamic syndromes as aggressiveness and oral or anal tendencies. Others recommended sorting personalities into bimodal categories or types, like Jung’s division of people into the extraverted and the introverted.

  But such terms were vague catchalls; researchers wanted rigorous evidence that traits cohered in clear-cut, identifiable clusters. And a way to gather such evidence did exist. Galton had discovered correlation analysis, the statistical procedure for measuring co-variance (the degree to which one variable, like a trait, increases or decreases when another does). Then the English psychologist and statistician Charles Spearman had developed the more sophisticated technique known as factor analysis to measure, simultaneously, the correlations among a whole group of variables—exactly what was needed to make sense of trait data. The method is complicated but its basic concept is simple. If a number of traits all co-vary—that is, if a higher or lower score in any trait is accompanied by somewhat higher or lower scores in the others—it is reasonable to suppose that they are all influenced by an underlying general tendency or factor.

  An intriguing application of factor analysis to personality was made during the 1940s by Hans J. Eysenck (1916–1997), a German-born psychologist who, though not Jewish, left Germany after it came under Nazi domination and became a British citizen. Adopting Jung’s two-part typology, Eysenck hypothesized that a number of traits such as rigidity and shyness would be strongly correlated in introverted people and that opposite traits would be as strongly correlated in extraverted people. To this he added another two-part typology of his own, the dimension of neuroticism, with highly stable personalities at one extreme and highly unstable ones at the other; again, he expected certain traits to be associated with each.

  When he put his suppositions to the statistical test, using trait data yielded by the MMPI and a personality test of his own devising, he found them confirmed: there were indeed correlations among the traits he thought should be clustered in introverts and in extraverts, and comparable correlations among those he expected to find clustered in neurotics and in mentally healthy people. When he plotted out these four factors, they bore an astonishing resemblance to the four temperaments of Galen’s ancient humoral theory. Eysenck, normally an outspoken maverick, was untypically cautious about this coincidence:

  It is easy to read into historical writings what one wishes to see, and particularly to interpret ancient terms in line with modern connotations. Nevertheless, there do appear to be certain similarities between these early speculators and the more modern work [of others and of Eysenck himself].40

  With this caveat, he offered the following diagram:41

  FIGURE 16

  Eysenck’s fourfold personality table

  As fascinating as the coincidence was, most users of the MMPI found Eysenck’s fourfold typology too general; they hoped to extract more specific and detailed diagnoses from the many scores the test yielded. Such diagnoses were made possible by a different use of factor analysis developed over several decades of unremitting work by the English-born psychologist, Raymond B. Cattell (1905–1998), mentioned earlier. Cat-tell was far more cautious and methodical than Eysenck; instead of beginning with hypothesized conclusions, as Eysenck had, he let factor analysis lead the way. He computed the correlations among a large number of variables, assembled lists of those which showed significant correlations, and gave them the names of factors. It was an onerous task, even with the help of computers; to calculate all the possible correlations of a hundred variables, for instance, one would need to calculate 4,950 relationships.

  An example of Cattell’s work: In an early stage, he found that a strong tendency to admit common faults was somewhat correlated with a high tendency to agree, and that both of these tendencies were correlated with emotionality, susceptibility to annoyance, critical severity, and certain other traits, plus such physical criteria as high heart rate. To Cattell the web of correlations among these “surface traits” suggested an underlying “source trait” that he designated “anxiety.”

  Such research sounds austere and remote from real life, but Cattell, though urbane and aristocratic of mien, was no dry-as-dust pedant.42 The son of an English engineer, he thought—probably because of his father’s profession—that the physical sciences should be his field, and studied chemistry and physics at the University of London. But he was an omnivorous reader and an eager participant in the intellectual and political ferment of the times (the 1920s), and these activities eventually brought about an epiphany:

  My laboratory bench began to seem small and the world’s problems vast. Yet, like someone in a railroad station, watching trains depart and knowing they are not his, I declined all the standard remedies by political parties or religious affiliations. Gradually I concluded that to get beyond human irrationality one had to study the workings of the mind itself…From that moment, a few months before my science degree, I realized that psychology was to be my life interest.43

  Cattell plunged into graduate work in psychology, studying under Spearman at the university and acquiring expertise in factor analysis. Unfortunately, at the time he received his Ph.D. psychology had gained only a bare toehold in English universities, and for fifteen years he had to earn his living as a school psychologist and clinician. Doing so had its costs—the heavy workload and meager income wrecked his first marriage—and its rewards: it greatly added to his understanding of the complexity and richness of personality. But his real goal was to do the kind of research he believed in, factor analysis:

  It was plain to me, as John Stuart Mill had stated it, that the only proof of structure and causal relation lies in covariation, and that correlation and the new tool of factor analysis which Spearman had created could now be advantageously applied on a wide front—to personality structure and to the difficult problem of finding the dynamic roots of behavior.

  Cattell came to the United States in 1937, briefly held positions at several leading universities, remarried happily, and began to carry out factor analysis of personality traits. In 1945 his work went into high gear when he became director of the Laboratory of Personality Assessment at the University of Illinois. There, for twenty-seven years, and later at the University of Hawaii, he pushed ahead, doing ever more advanced factor analysis and deriving ever higher-level personality factors.

  In the early years he was able to group 171 surface traits into sixty-two clusters. He found, however, that these clusters overlapped—correlated with one another—and later was able to consolidate them into thirty-five.44 Still later he and others—in his autobiography he generously credits some eighty associates—pressed the analysis still further, eventually concluding that sixteen source traits or factors were, in his words, “necessary and adequate to cover all kinds of individual differences of personality [i.e., surface traits] found in common speech and psychological literature. They leave out no important aspect of total personality.”45

  Each of t
he sixteen personality factors is bipolar. Emotional stability, for instance, ranges from “affected by feelings” at one extreme to “emotionally stable” at the other, and suspiciousness from “trusting” at one end to “suspicious” at the other. Through procedures outlined in a manual, testers can draw a personality profile of a tested individual or of a category of individuals. The differences in such profiles are striking and illuminating. Here, for instance, are the profiles of three kinds of professional persons; such profiles became an important tool of career counseling.

  FIGURE 17

  Three personality profiles, according to Cattell’s sixteen-factor system

  Cattell’s 16 Personality Factor Questionnaire was in wide use for some time; in recent years it has largely been supplanted by less complex analyses, many of which are its intellectual offspring.

  Learned Personality

  No, not “learnéd” but “learned.” Behaviorist theory, quite unlike either psychodynamic theory or trait theory, sees personality as nothing but a set of learned (conditioned) responses to stimuli. Psychodynamic and trait theories, in their different ways, see personality as inherent qualities of the individual that determine behavior; behaviorists have dismissed such talk as “mysticism,” which deserves no place in scientific psychology. Skinner, in his characteristically immoderate way, called personality or the self merely “an explanatory fiction…a device for representing a functionally unified system of responses.” A trait, he said, is only a group of similar responses that lead to similar reinforcements in various situations; it does not cause behavior but is a label for a set of similarly conditioned responses.46