 17. Cognitive Approaches to Personality  379
theless, it is fairly well-  established that im -
plicit motives, as assessed by the Thematic 
Apperception Test (TAT), do not correlate 
with self-  reports of motivation or personal -
ity (McClelland, Koestner, & Weinberger, 
1989). Implicit motives are therefore per -
sonality variables in one respect, in that 
they predict social–  emotional outcomes, 
but not another, in that they do not corre -
late with self-  reports of personality. Cogni -
tive, or performance-  based, measures may 
often possess these features (Robinson & 
Wilkowski, 2015), and this should not be 
surprising, in that assessing how people pro -
cess information (cognition or performance) 
is quite different than asking them what 
type of person they are (self-  report). In the 
sections that follow, I touch on a few classes 
of measures from this implicit personality 
perspective.
Conditional  Reasoning
When people are motivated to engage in a 
certain type of behavior (e.g., achievement 
behavior or aggression), they begin to per -
ceive the world in ways congruent with that 
disposition. An aggressive person, for exam -
ple, can justify his or her aggressive impulses 
by pointing to ways that others are taking 
advantage of the self. These inferences are 
sometimes unconscious in the sense that one 
does not realize that the relevant perceptions 
are quite subjective, and self-  serving, rather 
than objective (James & LeBreton, 2010).
James and colleagues (2004) created a 
conditional reasoning test for aggression 
based on this line of thinking. People were 
asked to make inferences about ambiguous 
social scenarios by choosing multiple-  choice 
answers, and some of these alternatives 
supported hostile, suspicious, but likely er -
roneous interpretations of character mo -
tives (e.g., that one character was planning 
on double-  crossing the other in the future). 
James et al. (2005) showed that aggressive 
reasoning of this type was predictive of ag -
gressive behavior in a number of contexts, 
and these relationships remained significant 
when they controlled for explicit measures 
of personality. Although the conditional rea -
soning approach has primarily been used to 
study aggression, it can be adapted for other 
purposes as well (James & LeBreton, 2010).Implicit  Associations
The IAT is an RT test that examines as -
sociations at the category level (Nosek, 
 Greenwald, & Banaji, 2005). The test is 
often used to assess implicit forms of stereo -
typing and prejudice, but it can be adapted 
to study the implicit self-  concept or person -
ality (Greenwald & Farnham, 2000). In ap -
plications of this type, one categorization 
task asks people to distinguish stimuli asso -
ciated with the self (e.g., the word me ) ver-
sus not (e.g., the word them ). This self–other 
distinction is paired with another distinc -
tion targeting some domain of personality, 
such as introversion versus extraversion. The 
question is whether the self seems to be im -
plicitly associated with one pole of the per -
sonality continuum (e.g., introversion) or the 
other (e.g., extraversion).
IAT-based measures of personality corre -
late modestly with explicit measures of per -
sonality and seem to predict some relevant 
outcomes (Greenwald, Poehlman, Uhlmann, 
& Banaji, 2009). In parallel to the implicit 
motivation literature (McClelland et al., 
1989), such measures seem to be particular -
ly useful in predicting spontaneous, less con -
trolled forms of decision making or behavior 
(Schnabel, Asendorpf, & Greenwald, 2008). 
Along these lines, for example, an IAT-based 
measure of shyness better predicted spon -
taneous relative to controlled forms of shy 
behavior, whereas the reverse was true for 
an explicit personality measure of shyness 
(Asendorpf, Banse, & Mücke, 2002). In the 
future, it might be important to extend this 
literature by focusing on a greater number of 
nonlaboratory or real-world outcomes, par -
ticularly given questions about predictive va -
lidity (Oswald, Mitchell, Blanton, Jaccard, 
& Tetlock, 2013).
Executive  Functions
Executive functions  are cognitive control 
operations instantiated by the frontal cor -
tex that allow us to control our behaviors 
when they would produce problems or er -
rors, while tracking longer-  term objectives 
(Lieberman, 2007). The developmental lit -
erature has long theorized, and shown, that 
executive functions both develop with age 
and support various forms of self-  regulation 