PERSONALITY ASSESSMENT
Sometimes our culture seems obsessed with measuring personality. Popular
magazines often promote short tests, or “quizzes, ”to measure how good a
roommate you are, what type of romantic partner you need, or the vacation
spot that matches your personality. Although the magazines rarely claim their
tests are based on scientific investigations, the popularity of these tests sug-
gests that readers find them at least interesting, if not believable. There issomething about calculating a score that gives credibility to an untested
10-item quiz.IN THE NEWS
First They Tell You One Thing; Then They Tell You Another
A few years ago, four important
health studies were reported in thenews media within one 2-week pe-riod (Vo & Ostrow, 2006). A Wo-men’s Health Initiative study found
no evidence that a low-fat diet for
women over 50 reduced the risk ofcancer or heart disease. We learnedfrom another study that calciumand vitamin D supplements did not
prevent broken bones for older
women. We also read that estrogensupplements might not increaseheart disease after all, followed by a
report that exercise did not reducethe incidence of colon cancer. Whatmakes these findings particularlyinteresting is that each contradictedcurrent health care advice based onearlier studies. For those of us tryingto keep up with the latest develop-ments in nutrition, this is a familiarexperience. Just like the advice onoat bran, salt, red wine, and caf-feine, what researchers once told ussuddenly seemed not to be the case(at least for now).
Personality resea rchers have little
reason to feel smug. As discussed inChapter 8, psychologists in the 1970swarned of the health consequencesfrom a Type A lifestyle. But researchin the 1980s suggested that thewarnings may have been premature.
Similarly, the latest advice on how tolose weight, raise your children, andrelate to your romantic partner oftenshifts with each new discovery.
What ’s going on here? Perhaps, as a
friend suggested recently, news mediashould stop reporting research find-ings until the investigators agree onwhat they know.
The problem is not that re-
searchers can ’t make up their
minds. Rather, consumers of scien-tific information may need a better
understanding of how scienceworks. A single study —even one
reported with great fanfare in thenews media —is but one step in a
long-term, ongoing process. As re-vealed throughout this book, animportant research finding does notmerely provide data on an interest-ing question. It also raises newquestions and stimulates new re-search. To understand what re-searchers know about a topic, wehave to look at programs of re-
search, not just isolated studies.Moreover, psychologists know thatbehavior is the result of manycauses, and untangling the complexrelationships between variables is achallenging task.Sometimes findings can ’tb e
replicated. Sometimes additional
information changes the interpreta-tion of earlier results. If we look atresearch findings over a long period
of time, we often see an impressiveamount of progress. But a closerinspection reveals that sciencemoves in fits and starts. As a result,highly publicized “discoveries ”of-
ten turn out to be incorrect. Onejournalist looked at 12 discoveriesin the field of high-energy physicsthat were important enough to be
reported in the New York Times
(Taubes, 1998). He determined that9 of the 12 discoveries were laterfound to be inaccurate.
What ’s the lesson here? First,
scientific understanding of any in-teresting question comes from aseries of investigations, not just onestudy. Second, the subject matterof this book —personality and
behavior— is complex, and good
psychological research is difficult.Third, recent findings represent ourknowledge at the moment. It wouldbe foolish to dismiss this informa-tion, but it would be equally ill ad-vised to assume that the most recentstudy is the last word.Personality Assessment 33