DEFINITION:
A “personality test” is a psychological metric, usually in the form of a verbal or written questionnaire, designed to characterize an individual’s personality in terms of a variety of magnitudes or dimensions representing an individual’s distinctive mental features and capacities (“traits”).
For the concept of “personality,” see the Glossary entry, personality.
ETYMOLOGY:
For the etymology of the word “personality,” see the Glossary entry, personality.
The word “test” is attested from the fourteenth century. It derives from the Middle English word of the same form meaning “vessel for the assay of metals in alchemy.”
The Middle English test, in turn, derives from the Middle French testum, with the same meaning, and ultimately from the Latin word testa, meaning an earthen pot. Testa is related to the verb texo, texere, meaning “to weave.”
DISCUSSION:
Personality test typically consist of a long series of questions, usually posed in the form of a questionnaire that the patient is asked to fill out. These questions are calculated to elicit from the patient the feelings and behaviors that he or she would feel and perform under a wide range of varied circumstances.
From the answers to these questions, the personality psychologist can evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the patient’s most important personality traits, including likes, dislikes, fears, desires, capabilities, self-understanding, habitual patterns of feeling and acting, and other similar cognitive and affective structural features and behavioral propensities.
Personality psychologists have endeavored to construct theoretical models of personality, which would aid in the diagnosis and treatment of personality disorders. Among the best known of these are Hans Eysenck’s two-factor model of “extraversion/introversion” and “neuroticism/stability”; Raymond Cattell’s complex 16-factor model; and Robert R. McCrae’s “five-factor theory.”
These empirically well-validated theories were then used as the basis for the design of the earliest reliable and widely used personality tests beginning in the post–World War II period.
Over the 60 or 70 years since, a great number of alternative personality tests, based on diverse theories of personality, have been designed by both professional psychologists and non-professionals, for the use of the general public in informal therapeutic and self-assessment environments.
Among the most famous of these are the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and the Enneagram.