856 vIII. EMERGING  ISSuES AND  NEW  DIRECTIONS
A Task‑Based Framework for  Identifying 
and Measuring  Skills
A leading personality psychologist (and 
author in this volume) defines personal -
ity (noncognitive) traits (skills) as follows: 
“Personality traits are the relatively endur -
ing patterns of thoughts, feelings, and be -
haviors that reflect the tendency to respond 
in certain ways under certain circumstanc -
es” (B. Roberts, 2009, p. 140). Roberts’s 
definition of personality (“noncognitive”) 
skills, and the one favored by Almlund et 
al. (2011), suggests that all psychological 
measurements are calibrated on measured 
behaviors or “tasks” broadly defined. Tasks 
include taking IQ tests, answering personal -
ity questionnaires, performing a job, attend -
ing school, completing secondary school, 
participating in crime, or performing in an 
experiment run by a social scientist. Figure 
42.1 depicts how performance on a task can 
depend on incentives, effort, and cognitive 
and noncognitive skills. Performance on dif -
ferent tasks depends on these components to 
different degrees.23 People can compensate 
for their shortfalls in one dimension by hav -
ing strengths in other dimensions.
In psychology, common practice is to as -
sess skills by self-  reported questionnaires 
(for one widely used questionnaire, see John, 
2000; John & Srivastava, 1999). However, 
performance on any task or any observed 
behavior can be used to measure personality 
and other skills.24
For example, completing high school 
requires many other skills besides those measured by achievement tests, including 
showing up in school, paying attention, and 
behaving in class.25 A good score on an IQ 
test requires both ability and effort, which 
is affirmed by incentives to succeed in this 
task. While this point is generally known, it 
tends to be forgotten in naive use of person -
ality and achievement inventories.
Inferring skills from performance on tasks 
requires standardizing all of the other con -
tributing factors that produce the observed 
performance. The inability to parse and lo -
calize behaviors that depend on a single skill 
or ability gives rise to a fundamental prob -
lem of assessing the contribution of any par -
ticular skill to the successful performance 
on any task (or measure). This problem is 
commonly ignored in empirical research 
that studies how cognitive and noncognitive 
skills affect outcomes.26
There are two distinct issues that need to 
be addressed when using tasks to measure 
skills. First, performance on tasks depends 
on incentives created by situations. Different 
incentives elicit different amounts of effort 
on the tasks used to measure skills. Accu -
rately measuring noncognitive skills requires 
standardizing for the effort applied in any 
task. Second, performance on most tasks de -
pends on multiple skills. Not standardizing 
for other relevant skills that determine per -
formance on a particular task used to mea -
sure a particular skill can produce mislead -
ing estimates of that skill.
These issues are empirically relevant. For 
example, incentives can increase effort and 
FIGURE 42.1. Determinants of task performance.Noncognitive
Skills