PROJECTIVE ASSESSMENTS OF PERSONALITY
For reasons partly historical and partly theoretical, psychologists of the
dynamic school have usually preferred evaluations of personality basedon something other than self-reports. The first and most common argu -
ment offered against self-report assessments is that individuals may not
be aware of important aspects of their personality and may in fact sys -
tematically distort their perceptions and reports of themselves. This is a
perfectly reasonable point of view for Freudians, who locate the vari -
ables of real interest in the unconscious. We cannot expect individuals
to report accurately the ways in which they deceive themselves and tryto deceive others; yet, according to psychoanalysts, these defenses areamong the most important aspects of personality .
As a result, clinicians and researchers have devised a number of
methods of assessing personality indirectly . Most of these tests arecalled projective , from the belief that the individual unwittingly projects
his or her personality into the task. Asked to describe a picture, individ-uals probably imagine that their responses tell about what they see. Thepsychologist, however, believes that the responses tell about the subject.A variety of techniques have been used to outsmart the subject in thisway . The individuals being assessed may be asked to give associations towords, report what they see in inkblots, make up stories to accompanythe cards of the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), draw pictures, orwrite completions for unfinished sentences.
The scoring of these materials is, of course, very different from
summing up the items on a scale. A judge (usually human, but occa -
sionally a computer) must consider the subject’s production in the light
of some set of rules developed to judge the characteristic of interest.Sometimes the rules are quite specific; sometimes they require extensiveintuition. The scoring system may be based on the empirical strategy ofcontrasting the responses of one group with those of another, or it maybe derived from purely theoretical considerations. Psychoanalyticallyoriented researchers often propose scoring systems based on the pre -
sumed symbolic significance of responses. There is a strong tradition of
assessing needs through the TAT on the assumption that the concerns ofthe story’s hero are those of the story’s creator (McClelland, 1980;Murray , 1938). A story about long struggles leading to a successful ca -
reer, for instance, might be interpreted as evidence of a high need for
achievement.Ego Psychologies and Projective Methods 151