learning journal 3
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Personality101-Chapter71.pdf
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Controversies and Future Directions
Frequently, fi ndings concerning individual differ- ences spark heated debates and public outcries. The fi rst chapter of this section (Chapter 7) addresses some of the controversies surrounding the use of
personality assessment to profi le people in relation to the law (section on Profi ling for “Bad” or Problematic Personality Traits), education (section on Using Personality Tests in Educational Selection [School and University]), consumer habits (section on Online Profi ling [Psychographic Segmentation]), person- nel selection and staffi ng (section on Personnel Selection), and romantic relationships (section on Personality and “Digital Love”). As you may have gathered from previous chapters, these represent some of the controversial applications and implica- tions of assessing personality. Yet, we fi nd these areas of appli- cation exciting because they enable personality researchers to work on useful practical solutions to everyday problems.
III
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Chamorro-Premuzic, T., & Ahmetoglu, G. (2012). Personality 101. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from claflin on 2018-05-29 12:03:40.
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SECTION III
In the fi nal chapter (Chapter 8) of this section and this book, we summarize the main themes of the book and discuss the future directions of the fi eld of personality psychology. We will ask and discuss questions such as: What knowledge do we have and what gaps remain in our knowledge? What efforts are being made in research, and what new and exciting methods are foreseen for the near future? We conclude the book with a few words of encouragement and points for refl ection regarding the nature of personality and its assessment.
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Chamorro-Premuzic, T., & Ahmetoglu, G. (2012). Personality 101. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from claflin on 2018-05-29 12:03:40.
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7
Controversies
A lthough controversies are plentiful, they can broadly be summarized under the following questions: (1) Is our behavior determined? (issues surrounding personality change and stability—
are we free to choose or not?), (2) Is it safe to give other people (especially businesses) information about our personality pro- fi le? (issues relating to data confi dentiality and anonymity), and fi nally, (3) Is personality profi ling ethical? (Some people believe psychological testing, including personality assessment, legiti- mizes prejudice and discrimination.) These questions are quite political and philosophical, but we will try to briefl y discuss their psychological implications in this chapter. We like to tell our students that the fi rst important lesson they need to learn in their studies is that, in psychology, the answer to any question is “it depends.” You may want to remember this too (and that is also the answer to the above questions).
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Chamorro-Premuzic, T., & Ahmetoglu, G. (2012). Personality 101. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from claflin on 2018-05-29 12:03:40.
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PROFILING FOR “BAD” OR PROBLEMATIC PERSONALITY TRAITS
In this section, we discuss the implications of using personality inventories in the context of identifying “bad” or problematic traits, such as narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. Although these traits have been traditionally studied in the con- text of clinical psychology, the past 10 years have seen an upsurge in research into their nonclinical manifestations. Indeed, many people believe that successful businessmen, CEOs, and entre- preneurs tend to display dysfunctional traits that could present a problem with regard to their interaction with others (such as leadership derailment). So, is personality useful to assess these elements of everyday life psychopathology, and, if it is, should it be used to prevent problematic behaviors?
When people think of psychopaths they tend to think of Hannibal Lecter or Jack the Ripper, but there are many exam- ples in the everyday newspaper, and some that receive global media coverage for weeks: for example, the Columbine school shooting, the Virginia Tech massacre, and the more recent shooting in Norway. These examples are vivid reminders of the threat posed by other humans, even during peaceful times. In America, debate surrounding these issues tends to focus on gun legislation and the role of the media (e.g., violent movies or video games), but as the 2011 shooting in Norway, one of the most peaceful and civilized countries on earth, has shown, nobody is exempt. As personality researchers, our focus is not on the cultural factors that could trigger these events (although we don’t deny they exist, we leave that to sociologists and anthropologists), but on the individual or personal charac- teristics that may drive some people to commit such terrible acts. This is where the moral question kicks in: Assuming that we could predict, with a reasonable degree of accuracy, some- one’s likelihood of committing the above or comparable atroci- ties (and kill innocent civilians), would it be justifi ed to take
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preventive action? Imagine, for instance, that a psychological test had revealed that the perpetrators of the Virginia Tech and Norwegian massacres had psychopathic tendencies: Would you deem it acceptable, in those circumstances, to provide treat- ment to, and maybe even institutionalize, those individuals? How many lives would you put at risk in exchange for providing preventive treatment to people who are considered potential threats to others (even when they may not have done anything to anyone in the end)?
To even attempt to answer these questions, we must fi rst explain the nature of psychopathy. Psychopathy was fi rst brought to mainstream attention in 1942 by Harvey Cleckley’s seminal book The Mask of Sanity. While working in a prison, he con- ducted many clinical interviews with incarcerated psychopaths. He was most taken back by the psychopath’s ability to appear “normal.” As Cleckley explains, their callousness and twisted thoughts were hidden by a mask of normality. This ability to mask abnormality is what enables psychopaths to become such effec- tive predators. A psychologist named Robert Hare, interested by Cleckley’s fi ndings, sought to understand what made psycho- paths tick and how they differ from others, initially focusing on personality differences. After reviewing previous research and conducting his own, he developed the “Psychopathy Checklist” (PCL). The PCL is now the standard clinical interview technique that aims to identify psychopaths. It does this by assessing four overarching facets of personality: abnormal interpersonal rela- tions, shallow affect, antisocial tendencies, and impulsive and parasitic lifestyles. Hare noted that while clinical psychopathy only affects around 1% of the entire population, the disorder lies on a continuum (Hare & Neumann, 2008). Ordinary individuals like yourself are likely to possess some psychopathic traits, albeit a lot less prevalently. It is also found that psychopathy has two types: primary and secondary. Primary psychopathy primarily relates to the interpersonal and affective facets, whereas second- ary psychopathy (commonly referred to as antisocial personality disorder) comprises the lifestyle and antisocial facets.
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According to Hare’s work, psychopaths will seek to form relationships with others only if it enables them to achieve their own goals. They will do this by being superfi cial and highly Machiavellian—manipulating others. They will invest lots of time and energy in identifying and winning over individuals that are of “use” to them. Once they have got what they want, they will simply abandon their victim. They have absolutely no problem in being abusive to their victims because they do not understand, or feel empathy toward, others. Unlike most humans, who will feel guilty or saddened when they have com- mitted a wrongdoing, the psychopath will blame the victim for being defenseless. They see the world as a competition; a “survival of the fi ttest” attitude is constantly running through their mind. A serial killer named Jack Abbott once responded to a question asking him about the reasons for committing such heinous crimes: “There are emotions, a whole spectrum of them, that I only know through words . . . I can imagine I feel these emotions, but I do not” (Babiak & Hare, 2007, p. 54). The sheer lack of regard for others and an amazing ability to charm and manipulate are why they are often regarded as “predators” in the literature.
If the personality traits of a psychopath have been identi- fi ed, the fundamental question is: What causes psychopathy? That is, are psychopaths born or made? Although this ques- tion has been debated for centuries, in recent years, some important steps have been taken to address it. Brain-imaging studies have found that there are structural differences in a psychopath’s brain. Specifi cally, abnormalities are found in the orbital–frontal cortex (a region of brain sitting above the eyes that plays a large role in personality formation and expression). As a result, the typical mechanisms that control and regulate behaviors become defi cient. Another region of the brain that has been found to be atypical is the paralimbic system. This system houses various brain structures that are essential for producing emotions such as fear, anger, and empathy. The most signifi cantly affected structures are the amygdala and the hip- pocampus. In psychopaths, these two structures are found to be
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smaller than in the average individual. This underdevelopment may explain why psychopaths have such shallow affect toward others; their brains simply cannot process the information ade- quately. Chillingly, the fact that the amygdala is not function- ing appropriately inhibits the psychopath from feeling any fear or guilt from the consequences of his or her actions. A seminal study highlighting this “emotional bluntness” was carried out by Hare in the 1980s. Hare found that the psychopath’s brain would process an emotional word the same way as any other word. This clearly showed how the psychopathic individual can be completely disconnected from any emotion that is presented before them. In light of this research, neuropsychologist Kent Kiehl suggests that psychopathy could well be a neurodevelop- mental disorder (a disorder marked by abnormal brain growth), whereby the underdeveloped regions are miscommunicating via neural pathways and feedback loops, thus producing the abnormal behavior (Kiehl, 2006).
But what about evolution? Evolutionary theory states that behaviors, traits, and genetic materials survive only if they are adaptive to the environment the organism fi nds itself in. Larsson, Viding, and Plomin (2008) found compelling evidence for the fact that psychopathy is highly genetic, suggesting envi- ronmental factors (such as a stable family environment) have little impact in offsetting the antisocial personality. Crucially, genetic research now suggests that one gene, in particular, may have a disproportionate infl uence on the development of psy- chopathy. Studies conducted by Jim Fallon have shown consis- tent links between the MAO-A gene, also known as the warrior gene (Fallon, 2006), and psychopathy.
Given these results, Glenn, Kurzban, and Raine (2008) pro- posed two evolutionary theories to explain why psychopathy is still found in the current human population: First, psychop- athy may be an adaptive response to specifi c, environmental conditions. For example, the fact that psychopaths can freely victimize others means that they can aid their own survival by gaining free access to valuable resources. Second, psychopathy
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is an accumulation of a variety of mildly maladaptive traits, evi- denced by the fact that psychopaths are able to appear normal (unlike individuals with schizophrenia) and function in every- day life. Thus, there are many psychopaths out there who are not serial killers. Instead, these individuals may be businessmen.
A “successful psychopath” is a psychopath who is able to go about his or her manipulation, conning, and victimizing with- out ever being caught by the authorities. It is extremely diffi cult to try and identify successful psychopaths, as they have embed- ded themselves into society so well. Indeed, research suggests that the prevalence of successful psychopaths could possi- bly be much higher than we think. Psychologist Paul Babiak recently conducted the fi rst large-scale analysis of psychopathy in the corporate sector. While it has long been a hypothesis, largely driven by Gordon Gekko-esque (Wall Street) anecdotes, Babiak found that the individuals in the senior positions of an organization are far more likely to score highly on the PCL. Furthermore, the corporate sector as a whole is four times more psychopathic than the average community. Crucially, studies fi nd negative correlations between highly psychopathic busi- ness persons’ productivity and (positive) peer ratings (Babiak, Neumann, & Hare, 2010). This means that despite doing poor work, a psychopath’s “mask” is worn so well that coworkers still talk favorably of him or her. They have been truly fooled by the psychopath’s masquerade.
It may be argued that successful psychopaths may be more of a concern to you than the traditional, stereotyped psychopath. But is there anything we can do about psychopaths running our organizations and countries? Well, it is extremely hard. While there are clinical institutions such as Broadmoor Hospital for the criminally insane in the United Kingdom, the best attempt to offset psychopathic tendencies is to foster good family envi- ronments and try to identify “at-risk” individuals at an early age (e.g., through community and family programs). As evidence has revealed, conduct disorder in children is a good marker for predicting psychopathy and antisocial outcomes in later years
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(Larsson et al., 2008; Viding, Blair, Moffi t, & Plomin, 2005). With this in mind, it follows that if people that are at a high risk of car- rying out callous and violent acts are left unchecked, they are able to manipulate, deceive, and abuse individuals throughout their lives. As current developments in behavioral genetics and brain imaging constantly yield new fi ndings about the human brain, perhaps it is only a matter of time before the personality disorder can be fully understood. Until then, however, protect- ing and identifying risky individuals will remain diffi cult.
So, next time you are on your way to work or going to see your friends, take a look on either side of you and ask yourself this: “Is that person a psychopath?”
USING PERSONALITY TESTS IN EDUCATIONAL SELECTION (SCHOOL AND UNIVERSITY)
Although personality tests are rarely used for the purpose of educational selection, scores on these tests correlate with sev- eral educational performance outcomes (see again Chapter 4). That is, people who score low on Conscientiousness, emotional stability, and, to some extent, Openness, tend to do worse at school and university (Chamorro-Premuzic & Furnham, 2005b). Moreover, there is now compelling evidence from many inde- pendent empirical studies highlighting the reasons why people with these personality profi les tend to display weaker levels of performance in educational contexts. The evidence is far from surprising: People with lower Conscientiousness levels tend to be quite disorganized, lazy, and impulsive, and fi nd it hard to adhere to orders (including from their teachers or professors). People who are low on emotional stability tend to stress out quite easily and have lower levels of confi dence, which inter- feres with their ability to do well on examinations (at school
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and university). Finally, people with low Openness scores are generally less interested in studying and have lower levels of intellectual curiosity and creativity—so, one would expect them to do well only if they are extrinsically motivated. In light of this evidence, should universities and other educational insti- tutions (maybe even schools) employ personality tests for their selection decisions? We are pretty sure your answer would be “no,” but let us try to persuade you to the contrary.
In most universities around the world, students are already being selected on some basis. If you are studying in a U.S. uni- versity, you will know about Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) and Graduate Record Examination (GRE) scores; if you are not, then you need to know that these are standardized tests given as part of the selection process to most higher education institu- tions in the United States. In fact, even if you are a student at a U.S. university, you may not have considered the following: These tests are designed and administered by the Educational Testing Service (ETS), who charge universities a fee for this ser- vice, while also charging you—or most applicants in the United States—a fee for taking the test. In effect, then, you are paying someone to sell your test scores to a university and “help” the university decide whether you are a worthy student or not.
Quite clearly, the ETS has a fantastic business model, and although you would probably prefer not to take an exam in order to gain acceptance to a university, the fact that these exams are actually making the university a more competitive place (at least when the cut-off scores are high enough) can only work in your advantage. So, if you are lucky enough to be an Ivy League student, or part of a good university program, that is probably partly due to these standardized tests administered by ETS (who, incidentally, have something of a monopoly in the United States). Thus, the underlying issue to the controversial question of whether students should be selected on the basis of personal- ity tests or any other basis is that there are marked individual differences in academic performance, whether at Harvard or at a third-rate university, and the same is true in schools.
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In Chapter 4, we have highlighted some of the studies demonstrating that personality tests are consistent and power- ful predictors of individual differences in educational achieve- ment. Yet, most educational institutions rely on different criteria when selecting their students. Indeed, most do not use any form of testing, focusing instead on (a) income (students whose parents can afford a high tuition fee are eligible), (b) past academic performance (in the previous level of formal educa- tion), and (c) entry examination (subject-based or knowledge tests for medicine, law, economics, etc.). Of these, (b) and (c) make perfect sense because they are predictive of future per- formance; however, they can also be predicted by personality traits. Indeed, the reasons why a student does well on (b) and (c) are the same reasons for him/her doing well at the selected university: Conscientiousness, stability, Openness, and so on. As for (a), you may think that it is unfair (and we do, too), but socioeconomic status also predicts subsequent academic per- formance and educational achievement (as well as career suc- cess thereafter). So, can psychological testing provide a better, more effi cient, and predictive approach to assess individual dif- ferences in academic potential?
Most psychometric tests for predicting academic perfor- mance (such as ETS’s) are essentially cognitive ability tests. These tests are timed and include questions that have a pre- determined, single, objectively correct answer: For example, what is the capital of Norway? What is 7% of 120? What does GDP stand for? These questions are not arbitrary, but they are selected on the basis of their predictive value or power, and what they attempt to predict is educational success. In fact, the very fi rst IQ tests were developed for this purpose over 100 years ago. The French Educational Ministry had commissioned Alfred Binet (1857–1911) with the task of devising a method for discerning between better and worse learners, independently of how well behaved they were (before Binet, students’ potential had been rated by their teachers, who were obviously biased against poorly behaved kids and in favor of well-behaved ones).
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The goal of cognitive ability tests today still remains the same: to provide a quantitative and relatively objective and generic measure of a person’s learning potential, or how fast and well a person will pick up formal knowledge.
Although the ETS does not refer to its tests as IQ tests, there is ample evidence showing that tests like the GRE and the SAT correlate substantially with scores on standardized IQ tests (Chamorro-Premuzic & Furnham, 2010a, 2010b). The reason why these tests are not referred to as “IQ” is sheer political cor- rectness: “Standardized achievement test” or “graduate record examination” sounds more neutral, boring, and better, and avoids referring to some people as smarter than others, or imply- ing that some people are smart while others are stupid. There are good statistical reasons for using these tests, as top scorers tend to outperform average scorers, who in turn do better than low scorers in academic assignments; but the tests are also problem- atic because there are often more White, educated, and affl uent students than ethnic minorities (except Asians) among the top scorers; so, universities that rely too much on these tests may end up with few Hispanics, Blacks, and people with lower lev- els of socioeconomic status. Yet, these tests are some of the best predictors of an individual’s future academic performance, and the only way we can compare applicants from very diverse back- grounds (e.g., an applicant who went to the 25th best school in Bangladesh and achieved an average grade that puts him/her in the top 5% versus an applicant who went to the 17th best school of Argentina and achieved an average grade that puts him/her in the top 20%). Moreover, standardized “achievement” tests like the GRE and the SAT assess maximal performance or what a student can do, but there are many capable students who end up underperforming at school or university because they lack moti- vation or discipline, or do not “fi t” with the academic climate of the institution.
This is where personality tests can help. Scores on vali- dated personality scales assess individual differences in learn- ing potential, but for different reasons than ETS’s achievement
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tests. Indeed, personality scales provide information on what a person usually does or his/her typical performance, so they should complement IQ and other cognitive ability tests in the prediction of students’ academic performance. To illustrate this with a simple example, assume that we have a student with a high GRE score but a low score on Conscientiousness. This per- son would probably be a “fast learner,” but also lack the neces- sary levels of self-discipline and management skills to engage in the learning program outlined by his/her teacher. Conversely, high levels of Conscientiousness may compensate for lower levels of GRE, SAT, and IQ (von Stumm, Hell, & Chamorro- Premuzic, 2011). What this means is that personality moder- ates (infl uences) the effects of ability on learning and academic performance; we therefore need to look at the overall profi le of a student in order to gain a better understanding of what he or she will usually do, how he or she will do it, and why.
There is also a second reason for including personality tests in educational selection, namely the lack of consequential group differences in average scores on these tests. For instance, Hispanics, Blacks, and Whites show little differences in their Neuroticism, Conscientiousness, and Openness scores (and these three predictors of academic performance are largely unre- lated); moreover, whether you are rich or poor, went to a good school or a bad school, your score on these and other personal- ity traits could be high, average, or low (with roughly the same probability). Given the predictive validity of personality scales at school and university (see again Chapter 4), and the fact that individual differences in personality are largely unrelated to IQ (Chamorro-Premuzic & Furnham, 2005b), using personality tests for academic selection will enable us to better predict and understand individual differences in educational attainment and academic performance, as well as promoting ethnic and socioeconomic diversity at school and university.
Of course, you may argue that it is not fair for schools and universities to deny anyone the opportunity to study, but there are unavoidable supply-and-demand differences between
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institutions wherever there is choice (and even when there isn’t). There is, however, an undeniable paradox in any “competitive” educational system, especially those systems that are strongly market-driven (like the United States). On one hand, those sys- tems end up producing the best and most sought-after institu- tions and learning programs in the world. For instance, 17 out of the top 20 universities in the world are in the United States (ARWU, 2011). On the other hand, a top reputation enables uni- versities (and schools) to select the best students; that is, students who are quick, confi dent, well-organized, and curious, and with the fi nancial support behind them to devote most of their time to their studies. This creates a vicious circle, whereby the “rich get richer” and the “poor get poorer,” as educational choices enhance rather than reduce baseline differences in academic potential between students. Surely, the true sign of a top university or school would be to select less educated students or “slower learners” and turn them into the leaders of tomorrow. Instead, what Ivy League and comparable institutions do is to identify the top leaders of tomorrow, assess them, and give them prestigious degrees and titles in exchange for their hard work and competition against fel- low students. How well would those same students fare at third- rate institutions, and how well would average students from poor institutions do if they went to an Ivy League school? If you think of it, selecting the best students is a way of minimizing some of the common challenges to teaching: Dealing with someone who is curious, willing to work hard, and a quick learner is surely easier (and more rewarding) than dealing with someone who is unmoti- vated, uneducated, and has conduct problems.
ONLINE PROFILING (PSYCHOGRAPHIC SEGMENTATION)
In this section, we examine current trends in online personal- ity profi ling in the context of consumer behavior (also known
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as psychographic segmentation). Big Internet players like Amazon, Google, and Facebook are competing fi ercely in the game of “knowing their customers” and combine behavioral, demographic, and (occasionally) psychometric data to predict what individuals will do, what they may like to buy, and even what sort of lifestyles they live. So, how valid and ethical are these initiatives?
Although we cannot estimate the exact probability, we are quite confi dent that you will have, at least once, done some of these things: used Facebook, Gmail, Google, YouTube, Amazon, or eBay. If not, you probably still live in the 20th century. If you have, and you are observant (as a psychology student or some- one interested in psychology, we would expect you to be), you may have noticed that these sites subsist on advertising; that is, “pop-ads” or visual advertisements displayed next to the main functions in these sites. If you are very observant, you will have noticed that those ads are often relevant to your own interests and consumer preferences. This is what advertisers and market- ers refer to as “behavioral targeting”: the selection of ads, prod- ucts, and brands that are likely to be relevant to the consumer. Here are a couple of examples. One of us uses a Gmail e-mail account (rather frequently). When he fl icks from one e-mail to the next, the narrow text line above the inbox also fl icks from one line of ad to another one. Moreover, the ads tend to display material that is clearly connected with the content of the e-mail message. In fact, one of us recently wrote to the other author about “going out for a drink in Greenwich” (a lively and quite trendy suburb of London); the same message also contained information about our university. What did the text ad display? Surprisingly, it was advertising “new courses at the University of Greenwich.” If you have an e-mail account with Gmail, you can test this now—in fact, you can write about exotic holidays in Cuba and you will probably be “offered” Cuban cigars (not in the United States of course, because of the embargo) or a time- share in the Caribbean. Although this is exemplifi ed behavioral targeting, the “behavior” is actually just text, and the ads are
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selected via semantic text scanning or matching of keywords (this is also how Google became the most popular search engine in the world, and why it is now the most profi table advertising company in the world).
Here’s another example. If you bought things on Amazon (CDs, DVDs, or clothes), or even if you “watched” items on their catalogue, Amazon will automatically “redecorate” its window display or screen every time you log on. This is a rather simple mechanism: Amazon enables you to browse items for free, but in order to buy something you need to open an account (which is still free, but requires you to provide certain personal details). This enables Amazon to identify every member who browses items, and record their e-shopping “behaviors.” Moreover, this also enables the giant online retailer to customize or personal- ize its recommendations. For instance, if you bought a movie with Robert De Niro, it will recommend you more movies with that actor (even if one movie was Meet the Parents and the recom- mendations included The Deer Hunter—two movies that have nothing in common except, well, Robert De Niro). The system is also inaccurate at detecting how satisfi ed you were with a pre- vious purchase. So, you may have bought some Levi’s jeans but disliked them, and Amazon will still recommend to you other jeans or, what is worse, other products by Levi’s (worse in the event that you didn’t like your jeans).
There are now more refi ned and probably controversial examples. For instance, Facebook is apparently using the infor- mation of tagged photographs (who the people are, where they are, and what they “like”) to “cherry-pick” the ads it displays to each account user. So, if you use Facebook and tag your holiday pictures in Disneyland, you will probably be offered trips to Orlando or the latest Disney movie, and so on. What is con- troversial and unpopular about these growing advertising strat- egies and trends is that consumers feel intruded upon, spied upon, and violated in their privacy. However, most people prob- ably fi nd that this is a price worth paying, and that the alterna- tive (not using Amazon, eBay, Facebook, Gmail, etc., or paying
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more for similar services or products) is worse. The perception of a “big brother” society, especially when we are referring to the web, is no doubt alarming to many consumers, who fear that the information they are volunteering online may one day be used to their own detriment.
Where does personality profi ling kick in here? Although few online businesses are assessing personality traits, there is clearly a “digital war” for predicting behavior and profi ling consumers. We believe that personality will play a key role in both refi n- ing online retailers’ (including social networking sites) ability to understand consumers and predict their behavior; and also adding transparency and accountability to the process of con- sumer-centered recommendations. However, two things need to happen fi rst. First, personality researchers need to highlight the degree to which personality traits predict individual differ- ences in consumer preferences (generic and specifi c). Some of these associations are rather intuitive: Individuals with higher levels of Openness to experience tend to have unconventional, more creative, preferences. Thus, if we know how “creative” a product is—for example, an Apple Mac laptop is probably per- ceived as more “creative” than a Dell PC (even in today’s world where most people prefer the Mac, which does not really imply that most people are creative)—therefore, higher Openness should correlate positively with preferences for Mac products. There is also some work to be done in terms of classifying the entire range of products, brands, and psychological needs that are fulfi lled when individuals purchase them and consume them. As you will see in the forthcoming sections, this cata- loguing of phenomena and behaviors has been accomplished much more successfully in the world of human resources (staff- ing) and dating (romantic relationships). One may argue that those areas are ubiquitous to human life as they concern love and work, two of the fundamental areas of mental health, as well as being universal domains of human motivation: career success and relationship satisfaction (both also feed into key evolutionary goals, namely competition and reproduction).
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That said, consumerism has become almost as important, or even more. Even when people are single and unemployed, they remain consumers—and many people (you can call them greedy, superfi cial, and materialistic, but we all surely have a bit of that too) are in relationships or jobs simply to boost their purchasing power, which translates into consuming more and better products.
Yet there are clear individual differences underlying con- sumer behaviors. For starters, we don’t all like the same prod- ucts. Then there are also big interindividual differences in how much money and time we spend to acquire things (even when income differences are held constant). Last, but not least, there are marked differences in how people react to advertising, and what they feel, think, and do after they purchased the same product. Surely, the personality has something to say about consumer behaviors. Specifi cally, information about an indi- vidual’s character or personality profi le should enable us to predict what they will try to consume, what they will enjoy consuming, and how they will respond to marketing and advertising campaigns. What is perhaps more extraordinary is that laypeople already use information about a person’s consumer habits to profi le his or her personality. For exam- ple, what would you think of a 50-year-old man wearing a heavy metal t-shirt (other than guessing that he is probably an IT manager)? That t-shirt, although an inanimate object, has a personality: It displays the behavior and preference of its owner, and knowing that someone of that age likes heavy metal music can signal many things other than suggesting that the person is going through a midlife crisis (or has bad taste in music). What could those things be? Counter-conformity, antisocial behavioral tendencies, problems with authority, rebelliousness, introversion, low Agreeableness, Openness to new experience, sensation–seeking, the list goes on. Yes, this may just be us brainstorming, but there are simple ways of testing these hypotheses and some research has already man- aged just that.
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For example, our own work has shown that individual dif- ferences in personality explain why certain people like some forms of art, but not others (Chamorro-Premuzic, Reimers, Hsu, & Ahmetoglu, 2008). People high on Openness like most forms of art, but they especially prefer unconventional, novel, or less popular forms of art—like cubism, abstract, and Japanese art. Likewise, open people tend to prefer music that is complex and unusual (Chamorro-Premuzic, Fagan, & Furnham, 2010), and also consume more music than the average person. In a simi- lar vein, personality predicts individual differences in movie preferences: neurotics like nostalgic, dramatic, and emotion- ally laden fi lms; extraverts like cheerful, superfi cial, and uplift- ing movies; open people like arty, factual, and science fi ction fi lms, and there are many more associations between people’s fi lm preferences and their personalities (Chamorro-Premuzic, Kallias, & Hsu, in press). While it is easy to categorize these and other forms of media—mainly because the job has been done by art historians, fi lm critics, and musicologists—psychologists must be more proactive when it comes to classifying other con- sumer products and brands. One psychologist who has done a great deal of work in this area is Jacqueline Aaaker.
PERSONNEL SELECTION
This section will aim to critically evaluate the use of various personality instruments and methodologies for identifying key employee features across different organizational settings. Personality traits have been assessed in the context of selection for decades and the best-known personality inventory is the Myers-Briggs “type” indicator (MBTI), which is completed by 2 million people each year. Yet, few academic research psychol- ogists talk about the MBTI, which refl ects an all too common discrepancy between what goes on in the world of science, on one hand, and the real world, on the other. One of the reasons
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for this discrepancy is that academics and businesses have dif- ferent agendas. For academics, personality research is often about measuring “traits” or validating psychometric tests; for businesses (or, if you prefer, organizations), personality is a use- ful currency only if it helps them attain their goals: to increase profi ts (or, if you prefer, organizational effectiveness—note that nonprofi t organizations can still be more or less effective). Ironically, this is also where the science and practice of person- ality assessment should meet. Indeed, applied psychologists, notably industrial/organizational psychologists, are interested in predicting individual and organizational performance. To the degree that personality scores enable them to anticipate what a person is likely to do, they will regard personality scales as powerful instruments and use them to inform their policies and decision-making processes. The typical scenario where this would occur is during the process of personnel selection, which concerns the search for the best available employee to fi ll a job opening: Can personality tests help us to identify the right per- son for the job? The short answer is “yes,” and the longer answer is as follows.
Scores on well-established personality scales (self-report scales) correlate in the region of .2 to .3 with job performance “scores.” We say “scores” because measures of job performance are rarely reliable. Consider the following: Three candidates turn up for a job interview and the best-looking person is offered the job (this is not a joke, there is a well-established literature on lookism or how good-looking people are rated more favorably on a number of psychological traits, including competence— Langlois et al., 2000). Most educated people—even when they are not liberals—would complain about the prejudiced nature of this selection; surely, it is unfair to select against people just because they are less attractive. However, what if the selected candidate is also evaluated positively on his or her job perfor- mance (because she/he is attractive or any other reason)? That would demonstrate that the selection has been successful: Pick- ing someone for a job and having that person perform well later
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on would be evidence for having made the right choice in the fi rst place (even if the “validity” of the selection method would be due to bias during both stages, the selection and the assess- ment of job performance). Again, that would not be a surreal or unimaginable example. Humans are subject to biases and ultimately both the selection and the evaluation of someone’s performance are made by humans.
This leads us to consider the next question. How would you decide whether someone is the right candidate for a job? Well, whatever methods you use to select that person, the answer remains the same: One needs to identify the characteristics of a high-performing individual, and then assess someone’s poten- tial to display those attributes later on, on the job. Ultimately, this concerns defi ning individual differences in job perfor- mance, and identifying the predictors or determinants of those individual differences. Let us assume that the job in question is a sales job. What do good salespeople look like? They tend to be confi dent (to persuade others and cope with rejection if they don’t); they tend to be good at reading people’s emotions (to understand what others want); they are also sociable and outgoing (as they have to deal with people, even if via e-mail or social networks). Once we have profi led the personality of successful sales people—or any successful job performers—we can consult the literature or scientifi c evidence on what traits predispose those behaviors. Rather than reviewing the litera- ture on the personality predictors of sales performance, we will discuss the generic fi ndings on how well personality predicts “job performance” across all job families—even though this is a bit like mixing apples and oranges (because some personality characteristics are useful in some jobs rather than in others).
As stated, correlations between personality and job perfor- mance can average up to .3 (see Ones & Vishveswaran, 2011, for a recent review). What this means is that a candidate or job applicant with the “right” personality profi le will be 65% more likely to do well at the job, compared to just 35% for a candidate with the “wrong” personality profi le (and 50% for a candidate
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with average profi le). The question, of course, is what personal- ity traits most candidates need to display to do well in most jobs. The answer is far from counterintuitive: People who are emotionally stable (low Neuroticism), responsible, disciplined, organized (high Conscientiousness), confi dent, sociable, and likeable (high Extraversion) tend to show higher levels of job performance in general, whether performance is assessed objectively or subjectively. Objective indicators of performance are quantitative estimates of an employee’s output: In low-level jobs, they may include the number of calls taken per hour in a call center; in highly qualifi ed jobs, they may include millions of dollars made in stock share investment or sales. Subjective indicators of performance tend to refer to supervisory ratings of their employee’s contribution to the organization’s goals. Inevitably, these will be more biased, and may just boil down to whether your boss likes you or not. So, putting all this together, well-adjusted or emotionally stable, sociable, and diligent employees tend to be appreciated more by their bosses and also show higher outputs of objective performance.
Given that the above personality traits are relatively inde- pendent of each other, a person who displays all of them (high Extraversion, low Neuroticism, and high Conscientiousness) will be more than 15% more likely than the average person to do well. Indeed, if we assume that individual differences in those three traits are totally independent, then we would add 15% + 15% + 15%, which would mean 45% more likely than the average per- son to do well. Unfortunately, the three traits are not really inde- pendent, as modest to moderate associations have been found between them (Rushton & Irwing, 2011; but see also Ferguson, Chamorro-Premuzic, Pickering, & Weiss, 2011, for a rebuttal to their postulate). But these are all generalizations that do show that personality traits are useful predictors of performance— they are generalizations based on data, namely meta-analysis of thousands of studies in many different organizations, countries, and cultures, and where many different instruments have been employed. It is likely that these studies underestimate the real
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impact of personality at work. How so? Well, because defi ning the specifi c attributes that contribute to high performance in a given job, and taking into account how performance is assessed, will enable us to identify (a) better predictors and (b) the most effective methods for predicting performance. It is the second point that requires further consideration.
Personality tests are still not used very widely for selec- tion purposes. Indeed, other than in the United States and the United Kingdom, few big economies base their staffi ng deci- sions on the results of personality tests. If you have ever applied for a job somewhere, the chances are that you did not complete a personality test as part of your selection process. More likely, you would have completed an application form, sent your cur- riculum vitae (CV), requested letters of recommendation from people with whom you have worked or studied, and, almost certainly, attended an interview. Although most of these meth- ods tend to be preferred by candidates, and despite being more frequently employed than personality tests, they are all less reli- able and far less valid predictors of performance than good per- sonality tests (Chamorro-Premuzic & Furnham, 2010a, 2010b). You do not need to consult the scientifi c evidence on this, it is almost a matter of common sense. Application forms tend to assess the very demographic factors that we ought to ignore to avoid discrimination, except when they ask people to report on previous accomplishments. To be sure, past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior (this is one of the main premises of personality theory—Chamorro-Premuzic, 2011). However, what if candidates are young and have no previous experience for the job? Surely, it would be unfair to discriminate against them on that basis, and prefer more experienced candidates, unless you decide that you wanted to hire the oldest applicant in the pool. With regard to CVs, people lie on their vitas and are even trained to “customize” their CVs for every job application. In fact, we always advise our students to exaggerate their achieve- ments and skills in their CVs, because if they don’t, employers will still expect them to do so and “discount” 20% or 30% of
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their accomplishments. For instance, saying that you are “fl u- ent” in French is usually interpreted by recruiters as “speaking some French” or having studied it for a couple of years in high school; so if you say that you have “basic” knowledge of French, they will assume that you can barely say “oui.” References are an even weaker candidate to predict performance, as even the laziest and most problematic employee can fi nd one or two peo- ple to comment positively on some aspects of his or her person- ality (in fact, in many countries, it is almost illegal to provide a negative reference for someone—certainly in the United States you may be sued if you do). We already highlighted the prob- lems with the interviews: People ask irrelevant questions, focus on irrelevant behaviors, and are biased against unattractive and uncharismatic candidates. Psychopaths and narcissists tend to interview very well because they can charm anybody and dis- play exuberant signs of social potency, at least during a couple of hours (when they are hired, employers are often shocked by their “dark side” and end up paying the price for their destruc- tive conduct; Hogan, 2007). Thus, personality scales may not be the perfect selection devices, but they are better than most alternatives. The only single alternative that seems to predict performance more accurately, across an even wider range of jobs, is cognitive ability (IQ tests). However, these are even less popular than personality tests, and they “discriminate” against ethnic minorities and (sometimes) women. By “discriminate,” we don’t mean that they are biased, but that certain groups of people tend to score lower on average than others—and those people also tend to perform lower on average than others. The reason why IQ tests predict performance is that they are great predictors of learning speed and ability, and many jobs require individuals to learn things while on the job (in fact, most jobs do to some extent).
Finally, studies have also shown that all the methods we considered (interviews, CVs, references, and application forms) tend to predict performance, albeit poorly, when they are cor- related with personality test scores. Thus, they do not provide
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additional information on a candidate but are used as different ways of obtaining information about their personality. Needless to say, those methods are more time-consuming, hard to inter- pret, and unreliable than valid personality scales. Even if they don’t replace personality tests, it seems quite foolish to ignore the contribution—and value added—of personality scales when it comes to identifying and predicting performance differences or potential between different job candidates.
PERSONALITY AND “DIGITAL LOVE”
The market for online dating is huge and growing and an increasing number of single individuals subscribe to these ser- vices in order to fi nd their “ideal” partners. In 2005, Americans spent $500 million on online dating (forecast for 2011 is $1 bil- lion). Online dating is now the largest segment of paid content on the web, other than pornography. Increasingly, too, online dating sites, such as Match.com and eHarmony, are employ- ing psychological tests to profi le individuals in terms of their romantic compatibility and help them identify their “perfect matches.” Our own research has looked at some of the asso- ciations between personality trait and romantic preferences (Ahmetoglu, Swami, & Chamorro-Premuzic, 2009). In this sec- tion, we review this somewhat polemic application of personal- ity assessment; we refer to this as “digital love,” but we may as well have used “personalized” love to label the concept.
What is love? Psychologists have rarely tried to answer this question. One exception is the famous U.S. psychologist Robert Sternberg, who conceptualized a three-way theory (all his theories come in “threes”) of love (Sternberg, 1986). In his view, there are three major types of romantic relationships, namely romantic, companionate, and fatuous. Romantic love is how most people—at least in western cultures or when they are teenagers—think of love. It’s being almost infatuated with
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another person and getting butterfl ies in your stomach; it also involves high levels of intimacy with the other person. This is the main reason why most people today are reluctant to accept the idea that you can customize your romantic partner online. Then again, meeting him on a drunken night out is hardly more romantic. The second type of love, companionate, is like a great friendship: It involves sharing or wanting to share every moment with the other person, and being committed to that relationship for a long time because it is so much fun to hang out with them. Finally, fatuous love is based on sexual attrac- tiveness and passion but lacks commitment (this could include affairs or one-night stands). Although these three major love types describe most relationships, there are also relationships that may have it all: That is, they have commitment, passion, and intimacy; these relationships are what Sternberg refers to as consummate love, and perhaps best refl ect what most people mean in terms of “a perfect match.”
The relationship between personality and romantic rela- tionships is not just of theoretical interest. In fact, there are hundreds of websites and phone applications dedicated to dating, and, increasingly, they incorporate some psychology of personality in them. Although people are still shocked by the idea that you can simply “shop around” for your partner by browsing on the web, it should come as no surprise to any- body. The Internet has become ubiquitous in most parts of the world, with people spending hours online. Unlike the physi- cal world, the virtual world enables you to connect with many people at the same time, wherever they are. The Internet also enables us to meet new people on a much bigger scale than the physical world does. Why do you think Facebook has over 700 million users (at the time this book was written; by the time you read it, it will probably have well over 1 billion)? Well, it all started as a university website to rate and meet fellow students; then it expanded to students from other universities, cities, countries . . . the rest is history. What few people think of is that Facebook functions as a hidden dating site. The most common
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way to meet your romantic partner (even today) is via “word of mouth” or a friend’s recommendation. So, we are more likely to be open to meeting other people if we have friends in common. This is really quite ancestral and if you think back to medieval times or go far enough from big industrialized cities, you will fi nd that parents will try to hook up their son or daughter with their neighbors’ son or daughter. Scale that and add a bit of technology and you have the online dating revolution.
There is an urban legend about how Facebook grew expo- nentially after they included “relationship status” as one of their main profi le fi elds. Indeed, just as people are less interested in befriending or “liking” someone if they don’t have a profi le pic- ture, they are less interested in someone if their relationship status is “engaged” or “married.” Given that most of the people in the world are probably unhappy with their love life (some because they are single, others because they are with the wrong person), and as people spend so much time online, it is only normal that the Internet has become a popular pick-up place. Indeed, in many places, it is now the second most popular way of meeting your partner (after friends in common). So, how can personality profi ling be used to improve people’s online dating experience?
Most online dating sites require members to browse through hundreds or thousands of profi les. These profi les tend to include a picture (and we will not discuss the psychology of physical attractiveness here, but as you probably imagine these pictures tend to portray users in a very favorable way). Online profi les also tend to include a biographic blurb, written by the date-seeker or an acquaintance (the latter is like a reference or recommendation letter). For example: “Love a good night out and pepperoni pizza, good dancer, politics is not my thing, pre- fer beach to mountains, and would like a gym partner as I fi nd exercise boring.” Even if you are not a psychologist, when you read this profi le you will build a sketch of that person’s charac- ter. Now that you have read something about personality, you should be able to translate this profi le into Big Five language
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(as well as other taxonomies). This is how we would do it (but there are many interpretations, not least because behaviors and preferences have different meanings in different cultures):
“Love a good night out”: extraverted, outgoing, sensation- ●
seeker, party animal (probably not studious and quite street- wise; may also be quite unhealthy if a “good night out” implies drinking and smoking, as it does in the United Kingdom) “Good dancer”: ditto . . . and maybe overconfi dent, as few ●
males (assuming, as we did, that this is a male) feel compe- tent dancing and even fewer would brag about it; then again males tend to brag about things more than females do “Politics is not my thing”: unintellectual, low Openness, no ●
hungry mind, possibly anarchic or resentful about public affairs, low Conscientiousness (feels no civic responsibili- ties, etc.) “Prefer beach to mountains”: possibly vain and somewhat ●
superfi cial, back to sociability and Extraversion, more con- ventional, unintellectual “Would like a partner for the gym as I fi nd exercise boring”: ●
lazy, no self-control, low Conscientiousness, high sociability Oh, and we almost forgot the “pepperoni pizza” comment:
clearly unsophisticated, but also warm and down-to-earth and grounded; comfortable person, hedonistic, honest (many peo- ple on online dating sites will pretend to like Bach when they really just like Lady Gaga—pepperoni pizza is to fi ne dining what Lady Gaga is to Bach).
Admittedly, there is not much science to our method but there still is some science, namely translating self-descriptive adjectives into personality traits. Many studies (and these are serious empirical studies and experiments) have shown that independent raters tend to agree in their perceptions of strang- ers’ personalities. In fact, even 30-second video clips of random people yield reliable and rather accurate personality ratings by viewers who are told to profi le the targets using Big Five or com- parable personality language (Graham, Sandy, & Gosling, 2011). This is because we cannot communicate our personality; that is,
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in everything we do and everything we say, there is personal- ity information that others will decipher and decode, whether they are trained psychologists or distracted laypeople. If you pay attention to, and have some knowledge of, the clues people pro- ject, you will be able to build rather accurate profi les of people, and online dating blurbs contain important information about a person’s character. Therefore, if you are “shopping around” for a partner, you will need to have a trained eye and sophisticated radar to predict what that person will be like. The good thing about online dating is that you can “meet” many people in a few minutes time, from the comfort of your home and in your paja- mas. This also presents a challenge in terms of requiring date- seekers to discriminate between available candidates. Although the search is both time-effi cient and cost-effective (compared to, say, spending a lot of money in a bar or club), there are hundreds of profi les to fi lter and once you have a short list, you still need to invest time in exchanging a few e-mails and then, after all, you still need to meet up and see if there is “chemistry.”
Personality can make the process much more effi cient if: (a) daters are aware of what their suitable matches are and (b) daters are able to read other daters’ personality from their avail- able profi les. In that sense, online daters are no different from “analogue” daters: Every person should be aware of what other people are like and then, consequently, decide whether they are a good match for them or not. Although our notion of love is still very romantic—most people intuitively believe that they have just one “perfect match” or love of their life—that is just unfeasible. There are over 6 billion people in the world and even an extremely popular person may just meet around 10,000 peo- ple in their adult life (try to work out how many you have met so far, even briefl y). So, the probability of having just one perfect match and meeting him/her is, well, very slim. We don’t want to bore you with math, but 10,000 out of 6,000,000,000 is less than 0.0002% (even if you are Mr. Popularity or have 5,000 “friends” on Facebook). This raises the question of just how many people we are compatible with: Is it 10, 100, 1,000, or 1
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million? Although 1 million seems excessive, that would repre- sent just under 0.02% of the world’s population, which would mean two suitable matches in every 1,000 people. Most people would surely settle for that.
Personality psychology can teach us three important les- sons about online dating, and dating in general: (1) Personality (including values) partly explains why some couples are more successful than others. In broad terms, people who are compat- ible in their values and personalities (though they can often complement each other by having contrasting personality styles) are more satisfi ed with their relationships and are together for a longer time. (2) People’s personalities determine the degree to which they prefer certain values and personality traits in other people; this is because romantic partners help us validate our self-concept and identity, and loving someone who is similar to us enables us to maintain high levels of self-esteem (Freud saw this as a normal manifestation of narcissism, and he was right). Finally, (3) there is no such thing as a perfect match; rather, it is naturally easier to get along with some people than others, and that is also determined by our and their personality profi les. It follows that online dating sites that incorporate valid and reli- able measures of personality should make it easier for people to predict how compatible they will be with a person (even if the prediction won’t be perfect, it will be signifi cantly better than chance).
That said, we do understand that readers will be somewhat skeptical about the need to inject some science into the pro- cess of dating. They believe that chance is something we should embrace rather than something we should replace by probabil- ity and psychological generalizations. In an article published 10 years ago in the technology magazine Wired, we found the following quote (which we believe addresses this point): “Twenty years from now, the idea that someone will look for love without looking for it online will be silly, akin to skipping the library card catalog to instead wander the stacks because ‘the right books are found only by accident.’ Serendipity is the
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hallmark of ineffi cient markets, and the marketplace of love, like it or not, is becoming more effi cient” (Wired, 2002).
FAKING
As mentioned earlier (see Chapter 3), a big criticism of person- ality assessments is that it is extremely easy for participants to fake their responses, which does question their validity and practical uses regarding personnel selection. This is an impor- tant criticism as many organizations will ask new applicants to undergo a personality assessment. This is because the litera- ture abounds with examples of certain personality traits being good predictors for specifi c work outcomes (Li, Liang, & Grant, 2010; Seibert & Lumpkin, 2009). It would therefore make sense to screen possible employees if your aim is to easily identify worthwhile applicants. It also allows the possibility to focus attention only on applicants who demonstrate certain traits that would provide a catalyst to foster a specifi c type of work envi- ronment (for example, a creative-based organization, such as an advertising company, may want to foster a sociable and highly interactive environment between employees so that there is a healthy fl ow of ideas, leading to a preference to employ more extraverted individuals).
However, sometimes this screening can backfi re. For example, earlier in this chapter, it was discussed how certain types of individuals (e.g., those with high levels of psychopa- thy) are drawn to corporate environments. If organizations use personality inventories to screen possible employees, a psycho- path would be wise enough to respond “correctly” to socially desirable questions. If they are then hired, they would have the resources and a platform to form a network of manipula- tion, which is undoubtedly costly to an organization’s stability and levels of productivity (Babiak & Hare, 2007). It can also be costly to the applicant. Michael Campion (in Morgeson et al.,
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2007) cites an applied situation, whereby 5% of job applicants achieved a perfect score: an achievement that is so virtuous that it is extremely unlikely that the applicants were answer- ing truthfully. Campion found that these fakers were overshad- owing the genuine applicants and distorting the results of the assessments, causing the genuine and good applicants to have a decreased chance of being employed. This demonstrates that faking does affect people’s personal lives and is a real ethical dilemma within the fi eld of occupational psychology.
Research investigating faking is somewhat mixed, leaving the fi ndings to a matter of personal interpretation. Meuller- Hanson, Heggstad, and Thorton (2003) suggested that job applicants are only likely to fake good responses, not bad. Therefore the validity of personality inventories only comes into question at the high end of the score distribution. This hypothesis was supported when the researchers compared two groups (an incentive group compared to a control group) on a performance task. Meuller-Hanson and her colleagues found a signifi cant discrepancy between the high scorer’s levels of self- reported motivation between the two groups. They concluded that personality inventories are susceptible to faking and that they should be used only for fi ltering possible applicants and not as a platform on which to make absolute hiring decisions.
On the other hand, studies have shown that people fake responses even when there is no actual incentive to do so (e.g., McDaniel, Margaret, Perkins, Goggin, & Frankel, 2009), sug- gesting that people in general simply (and rather innocently) want to be seen in a favorable light. This poses the question of whether the context of selection (and thus assessment in this context) is really an issue. Thus, the real question may, in fact, only relate to whether faking distorts the relationships between personality and job outcomes.
This notion was investigated in a meta-analysis conducted by Ones, Viswesvaran, and Reiss (1996). The reviewers exam- ined whether faking—or “social desirability” as psychologists refer to it—infl uenced the validity of personality inventories by
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distorting the personality–performance relationship. Contrary to common belief, their results showed that social desirability scales did not predict any performance criteria, and correlated instead with actual individual differences, namely emotional stability and Conscientiousness. Ones et al. further found that removing the effects of social desirability from the Big Five dimensions of personality does not change the validity of per- sonality constructs for predicting job performance. The authors concluded that faking might, in fact, not be a problem, even in settings where there is a real incentive to fake.
Arguments have also been put forward to suggest that fak- ing may not be a problem, even from a theoretical standpoint. For instance, Hogan (2005) argued that faking is, in fact, a sign of social adjustment (the level of ease with which the individual is able to accommodate his or her own needs and desires to circumstances in the environment). According to Hogan, this should be regarded as a positive personality trait as it gener- ally indicates that the individual has good “social skills.” In that connection, if the applicant can identify the socially correct responses within a personality assessment, he or she is likely to be able to do the same when making decisions within the work- place. The ability to monitor one’s own behaviors and urges is necessary in social settings, and something that we all do to an extent. These types of “faking” behaviors are desired and effec- tive in many types of business situations. For example, to be able to make more sales, salesmen need to be able to read social cues effectively and engage with their customers appropriately by adjusting their own behavior.
Nevertheless, in a comprehensive review of the literature, Morgeson et al. (2007) revealed that there was evidence to sug- gest that faking was detected in 50% of the studies conducted in the fi eld. Regardless of how big or small the issue of faking is, inevitably organizations will want to minimize its occur- rence. So, can they do it and if so how? There is a good amount of research in this area and several strategies for reducing fak- ing have been suggested. The most basic has been to warn
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test-takers that faking can be detected. While this is a logical approach, the response to, and therefore the effectiveness of, such warnings will inevitably also be a function of individual differences between test-takers. For example, deviant individu- als may choose not to listen to the interviewer, whereas anxious individuals may read into the warning too much and in turn ruminate over each question. Another approach is to imple- ment forced-choice, as opposed to the usual Likert-type scales. For example, a forced item may require you to select between the options “You are sociable, chatty and friendly” or “You are reserved, quiet and introspective.” Some argue that using forced- choice scales removes any ambiguity regarding the responder’s answers; however, Goffi n, Jang, and Skinner (2011) found that outcomes from forced-choice and traditional assessment tech- niques were highly correlated, suggesting that neither approach has any benefi t over the other.
The most commonly employed strategy to overcome fak- ing is the use of social desirability scales—that is, including bogus items in the inventory. This technique adopts the same principle that can be found in the school playground; you ask applicants to answer a question that is totally fi ctional. If the responder provides a positive answer, then it is clear they are faking. For example, “I am highly profi cient in the computer language ULTNIX.” This is a completely made-up computer lan- guage; however, fakers are likely to answer “yes.” As mentioned before, however, even if this technique is effective in detect- ing socially desirable responding, it does not solve the problem because social desirability does not affect the validity of person- ality inventories.
Conclusion
Faking is considered to be the most serious problem in per- sonality assessment. This is particularly the case in settings where there is a substantial incentive to fake. Yet, research investigating the issue of faking suggests that socially desirable
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responding may neither be a practical problem nor a theoretical one. It certainly does not pose a signifi cant enough threat to the validity of personality inventories to warrant the omission of their use. Disputes regarding the use of self-report inventories no doubt remain most salient in selection settings. The bottom line, however, is still that organizations must have a fi ltering process—be it using CVs, interviews, or personality question- naires. Clearly, the issue of faking is not eliminated by either procedure. Given that one procedure must be chosen, however, the question remains as to which one that should be. Employers will generally trust their gut instinct and therefore prefer to use the interview. Yet, the evidence is unequivocal in showing that self-report inventories have better reliability and validity indi- ces than interviews and other selection methods. In addition, they are far more effi cient to administer. In essence, the ques- tion is not really about whether faking is a problem or not but whether there is any better alternative to self-report invento- ries. Given that personality measures do predict performance, they must be considered an option for employees; when other options are put alongside them, they fare no better than self- reports. Accordingly, if the aim is to assess a person’s personal- ity, or his or her potential to do a job, self-report inventories are (currently) one’s best bet; and this is regardless of whether this person is or isn’t responding in a socially desirable way.
GENERAL CONCLUSION
There is still controversy surrounding the use of personality inventories for profi ling purposes. The debate can divided into two broad themes. The fi rst concerns whether self-report inven- tories work; and the second whether it is ethical, or “moral,” to use them. There is little doubt as to the former question: Self-report inventories are the most accurate tools available for assessing people’s personalities and potential. The latter is
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open to debate and is sometimes more a matter of personal val- ues than scientifi c truth. You may believe that dysfunctional and dangerous personality attributes should be identifi ed and “dealt with” early on, or that a person is innocent until proven guilty. You may believe that consumer profi ling is an effi cient means of locating relevant products, or that it is a breach of pri- vacy. You may believe that online dating sites are a perfect way to meet somebody matching, or that they go against the notions of romance and destiny. Clearly, the moral aspect of personal- ity profi ling is more diffi cult to resolve than the empirical one. Discussions about ethics require an interdisciplinary approach and are beyond the scope of this book. As scientists, our pri- mary goal is to provide empirical facts. The interpretation of these facts is often a subjective matter and people may choose to construct reality differently based on the same facts. The facts are that personality inventories are valid and reliable and are fi t for the purpose of profi ling people. Whether they should or shouldn’t be used for that purpose is where the subjective aspect of the issue arises. This issue is one still open for debate among psychologists; it is also one open for academics in other fi elds, as well as the general population.
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Directions and Future Research
We have come to the end of our discussion with regard to the nature of personality. In this fi nal chapter, we will review some of the main themes that were discussed through-
out Chapters 1 to 5 and try to give an overall conclusion of what these chapters have told us about the nature of personal- ity. We will then suggest some new directions that personality research is, or should be, taking as well as the future agenda of this research.
WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT PERSONALITY
Any time we talk about personality, be it our own or someone else’s, three bottom-line questions seem to require clarifi cation.
8
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These are the how, the why, and the so what of personality. That is, we fi rst need to address how people differ from one another. In what way does your colleague, or classmate, differ from you? Is he or she more reserved, less confi dent, more focused, more carefree, and so on? Once agreed, the question is, why does this person differ from you in the way he or she does? That is, what is the cause of the differences between you and your col- league or classmate? Is it the place you grew up, the way your parents taught you to behave, or is it some inherent genetic dif- ferences that you were born with? Finally, and quite crucially, what do these differences between you mean? Do they have any consequences? Will they impact on your life—now, and in the future?
We all have some intuitive answers to many of these ques- tions. As mentioned in Chapter 4, however, a problem with using intuitive answers is that observations often have two confl icting answers that sound equally intuitive. In contrast, personality psychology provides us with a solid evidence base that we can lean on when searching for answers about human nature. Clearly, there are gaps in our knowledge. Yet, more than a century’s theory building and research into the human psyche have today provided us with a pretty good understanding of the nature of personality. Thus, we can be reasonably confi dent in answering some fundamental questions such as “What is per- sonality?” “How do people differ from each other?” “Why do people differ the way they do?” “How much does our personal- ity infl uence the course of our future?” and, fi nally, “Can per- sonality change?”
The answers to these questions, from a psychological stand- point, are well established. Personality refers to the stable and consistent patterns we observe in how people behave, feel, and think. Even though there are hundreds or even thousands of different ways people can differ, it seems that many behavioral, cognitive, and emotional patterns go hand in hand to such a degree that they actually form broader patterns; and these broader patterns are much fewer in number. Several decades of
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research has shown over and again that there are fi ve broad pat- terns of behaving, feeling, and thinking.
In regard to the question of why people differ, the answer is twofold. The fi rst reason is that environment strongly infl u- ences behavior, thought, and emotion, impacting both short- and long-term patterns. Given that no two individuals can be exposed to the same environment, differences between indi- viduals are inevitable. The second reason is that humans and other animals differ biologically in terms of basic arousability levels and reactivity to external stimuli. Such biological mecha- nisms have a genetic basis, which means that genes are directly responsible for some differences between people. Genes also indirectly lead to individual differences by shaping the environ- ment; that is, by determining what people will evoke in, or how they will react to, environments, as well as infl uencing which environments they will choose in the fi rst place.
In terms of the signifi cance of our personality on the course of our life: While few would deny that personality is consequen- tial in some areas of life, particularly to do with social interac- tion, its pervasive infl uence seems to be broader than commonly assumed. Personality infl uences not only how we will match with others, or the way we will act in social situations, but also the political and religious convictions we will have, how happy we will tend to be, and even how long we will live.
A fi nal question regards change. Given that personality is by defi nition stable and consistent, the notion of change would seem to contradict the notion of personality. There is no doubt that the vast amount of evidence suggests a considerable sta- bility in personality across time and situations. This is not to say that personality cannot change should one wish to change or even more naturally through exposure to different environ- ments. Indeed, the same evidence that supports the notion of stability also supports the concept of change in personality. Behavior, thought, and emotions do change, both naturally as people age, and also through exposure to various environ- ments and situations (in particular, long-term exposure)—and
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this change can be lasting. However, drastic changes are not common and when change does occur, it generally occurs to the same degree across all people. Thus, one should neither deny nor expect a lot of change in personality in relation to others.
FUTURE DIRECTIONS
So what does the future hold for personality psychology? First, having a wide knowledge about the nature of personality does not entitle us to sit back and relax and applaud our achieve- ments. There is much to discover and, indeed, much that is still unknown. As with any science, personality psychology needs to continue to explore and attempt to uncover the unknowns of human nature. Several areas of future investigation are worthy of particular attention.
As a most basic step—a lot more ground can, or needs to, be covered with regard to the relevance of personality in diverse life domains. We have conducted an ample amount of research in areas examining the impact of personality on academic per- formance, job performance, and leadership. There is also a growing amount of research in areas of subjective well-being and romantic relationships. Yet, even within these fi elds there remain questions that need to be addressed. Most importantly, exploring the conditions under which personality factors exert a strong, versus weak, versus no, infl uence needs ongoing and persistent efforts, so that the accuracy as well as specifi city of our predictions become truly satisfactory.
There is also a need to broaden the scope of our predic- tion. There remain domains of psychology that have received insuffi cient attention from personality psychologists. One such example is consumer psychology—the prediction of con- sumer preferences and behaviors. While there is a vast amount of research examining universal psychological mechanisms
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