inferred covert dynamic processes or structures . . . may provide intrigu -
ing reading. No matter how fascinating personality descriptions may
seem, however, they have little value when competent judges cannot agreeabout them. (p. 121)
Interpretation is difficult in part because so many things other than
personality influence the responses. When we ask subjects to draw apicture or tell a story , their artistic abilities are likely to be much more inevidence than their intrapsychic dynamics. Under the naïve assumptionthat the hero of the story represents the personality of the storyteller, wewould have to infer that novelists, who are capable of describing a hugerange of human characters, have multiple personalities. Perceptualproblems (which are common in the elderly), verbal skill, and motiva -
tion all have a much greater impact on projective responses than they
do on objective test results. Indeed, projective tests may be most valu-able as samples of cognitive behavior—not personality .
Reliability has always been a thorny issue for projective tests.
Personality is supposed to be consistent across time and situations; itis, almost by definition, that which endures as the momentary pres-sures of the environment and the body vary (Maddi, 1980). The spe-cific behaviors may well change, but the psychologist should be ableto infer the underlying unity throughout the changes. It seems reason-able to expect that the projective test results, which allegedly mirrorpersonality , would show the same degree of consistency across differ-ent forms of the test or at different times. This is the criterion of reli -
ability , and it has always proven to be a sore spot in projective testing.TAT stories change from one time to another, and so do the scores de -
rived from them (Winter & Stewart, 1977), perhaps because needs
change as a result of their expression on the test (Atkinson, Bongort,& Price, 1977).
But if the expression of needs is subject to such marked fluctua -
tions, we have no way of knowing whether the responses we obtain on
the first test are characteristic of the individual or simply a reflection ofthe immediate situation. The TAT measures may be accurate reflectionsof the motivational state of the individual, but if they are not reliable
over time, they are poor indicators of the characteristics of the individ -
ual. The same argument, of course, also applies to projective tests of
processes other than needs: defenses, complexes, attitudes, and cogni -
tive styles. Demonstrable retest reliability is essential to the measure -154 PERSONALITY IN ADULTHOOD