The Story of Psychology (60 page)

Clearly, what people say is not a reliable source of information; human beings, alone among living species, are able to lie, and often do. Nor can one depend on their gestures and expressions; people can dissemble, some expertly. Not even their deeds always reveal the truth; people can practice deception until at some critical juncture they reveal the real self. Yet whoever the other person is—the one we are thinking of marrying, the potential buyer of our house, the leader of an enemy nation (or our own)—nothing could be more valuable than to be able to make a sound judgment as to what that person is really like and how he or she is apt to behave.

For such reasons, the study of personality has been a leading interest of both the philosopher and Everyman throughout recorded history and one of the most important fields of modern psychology for the past seven decades.

The earliest known efforts to appraise personality relied on the pseudo-science of astrology. From the tenth century
B.C.
on, Babylonian astrologers had predicted wars and natural disasters on the basis of the positions of the planets, and by the fifth century
B.C.
Greek astrologers were using these data to interpret the personality and forecast the future of individual clients. The notion that the positions of the planets at the time of one’s birth influence one’s personality and fate had great appeal in that scientifically näive time; oddly, it still does, even though modern astronomy and the behavioral sciences show it to be a baseless superstition.

Physiognomy, mentioned earlier, was another fictive system for spying out the hidden terrain of personality. Unlike astrology, the idea that facial traits are clues to the inner person has some psychological validity; how we look surely plays a part in how we feel about ourselves. But Hippocrates, Pythagoras, and other physiognomists did not perceive this relationship; instead, they compiled lists of fanciful connections between particular facial characteristics and traits of character. Even the great Aristotle asserted that “persons who have a large forehead are sluggish, those who have a small one, fickle; those who have a broad one are excitable, those who have a bulging one, quick-tempered.”
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Like astrology, physiognomy has endured. The sophisticated Romans believed in it: Cicero asserted, “The face is the image of the soul” and Julius Caesar said, “I am not much in fear of these fat, sleek fellows, but rather of those pale, thin ones.” (Caesar’s view is best known in Shake-speare’s version: “Let me have men about me that are fat; / Sleek-headed men and such as sleep o’ nights; / Yond Cassius hath a lean and hungry look; / He thinks too much: such men are dangerous.”) Jesus’ actual looks are unknown (the earliest “portraits” in Roman catacombs were painted two or three centuries after his death), but from the second century
A.D.
to the present he has been shown as having refined and delicate features. The physiognomic tradition lives on; most of us, on seeing or meeting people we do not know, make guesses about their personality on the basis of their looks.

Another approach to divining character from visible traits was phrenology, the pseudo-science of skull reading that was the rage in the nineteenth century. Although it died out in the twentieth, many people still assume that a person with a high bulging forehead is “brainy” and sensitive, one with a low flat forehead stupid and unfeeling.

The best-known ancient effort to link personality to physical characteristics
was Galen’s humoral theory of temperament—his belief that an excess of phlegm makes one phlegmatic; of yellow bile, choleric; of black bile, melancholic; and of blood, sanguine. The doctrine survived until the eighteenth century; its successors take the form of nutrition fads, chelation, steam-room sweating, and other quasi-scientific efforts to modify body chemistry with the aim of enhancing mental and physical well-being.

In contrast, an approach that sounds remarkably modern was proposed three centuries ago by Christian Thomasius (1655–1728), a German philosopher and jurist, and the founder of the University of Halle. Thomasius worked out a scheme for measuring personality by assigning numerical scores to various traits of character; his method, though crude, remarkably foreshadowed the current personality-assessment technique known as the “rating scale.” Equally noteworthy is the title he gave his book:
New Discovery of a Solid Science, Most Necessary for the Community, for Discerning the Secrets of the Heart
[
s
]
of Other Men from Daily Conversation, Even Against Their Will.
²
A bit long for modern taste, no doubt, but as up-to-date in spirit as any contemporary how-to-succeed best seller.

Throughout the ages the discussion of personality has often centered on one of the basic, much-debated issues in psychology: Is human nature determined from within or from without? Are our minds and behavior the products of inner forces, or are we shaped and prodded into thought and action by the stimuli of the environment?

The debate began when Plato and his followers maintained that the contents of the mind exist in it from before birth and need only to be remembered; Protagoras and Democritus countered that all knowledge arises from perception. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the dispute was more alive than ever, Descartes and other rationalists arguing that the mind’s ideas are innate, Locke and other empiricists claiming that the newborn’s mind is a blank slate on which experience writes its messages.

When psychology became a science, the hereditarians—Galton, Goddard, Terman, and others—presented survey data to support their view, while the behaviorists—Pavlov, Watson, Skinner, and others— produced experimental evidence to back theirs. The argument has continued ever since, with the “dispositionists” or “innatists” (to use contemporary terminology) interpreting personality and behavior in
terms of internal (dispositional) forces, the “situationists” or “environmentalists” interpreting personality and behavior in terms of the situations the individual experiences.

The two views lead to opposite conclusions about child rearing, educational methods, psychotherapy, public policy toward minority groups, the treatment of criminals, the status and rights of women and of homosexuals, immigration policy, and many other personal and social issues. Accordingly, the question has dominated personality psychology in recent decades.
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One longs for a definitive scientific answer; let us see what researchers and theoreticians on both sides have been learning and whether such an answer is emerging.

Early in this century the chief contributions to personality theory were made by the psychoanalysts. Freud developed an account of adult personality as the outcome of the ego’s efforts to control instinctual drives and channel them into acceptable forms of behavior. Adler was more interested in the effects of social forces on personality, such as the birth position of the middle child as a cause of inferiority feelings. Jung portrayed personality as shaped largely by the interplay of the opposing inherent tendencies toward assertiveness and passivity, introversion and extraversion, and the conflict between experience and “the collective unconscious” (concepts, myths, and symbols that he believed were inherited, unlearned, by each person from earlier generations).

While psychodynamic concepts thus suggested how personality develops, they did not provide psychologists with a way to measure personality quickly and precisely, as had become possible with intelligence. The lineaments of personality revealed by psychoanalysis appeared only after scores or even hundreds of clinical sessions; even then, the process yielded impressionistic evaluations, not quantitative measurements. As Raymond Cattell, one of the great names in personality measurement, said, the clinical method was “nothing more than a reconnaissance” and what psychology needed was a “quantitative taxonomy.”
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The first such taxonomy was a product of World War I. When the United States entered the conflict in 1917, Robert S. Woodworth (1869–1962), an eminent experimental psychologist and professor at Columbia University, was commissioned to devise a quick, simple way to identify emotionally disturbed recruits. With no time to spare, he
threw together one of the first tests of personality, the Personal Data Sheet, a questionnaire that asked the respondent a number of unsubtle questions about symptoms, such as, “Did you ever walk in your sleep?” and “Do you feel like jumping off when you are on high places?” The score was arrived at by adding up the number of symptoms admitted to.
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As personality assessment, the Personal Data Sheet was primitive and limited; it gathered only such information or misinformation as the subject offered and only about neurotic symptoms. Yet it had “face validity”—one intuitively felt that its questions did distinguish between normal and neurotic people. And, in fact, a later effort to validate the test found that diagnosed neurotics averaged thirty-six unfavorable (“Yes”) answers, normal people only ten.
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Woodworth’s pioneer effort set a pattern; after the war, many psychologists developed other questionnaires that similarly asked subjects to evaluate themselves. But these soon went beyond symptoms to include questions about a few general personality traits. The best known of the early tests, developed in 1931 by the psychologist Robert Bernreuter, asked 125 questions and scored the answer to each for four traits: dominance, self-sufficiency, introversion, and neuroticism. If, for instance, a respondent answered “?” (“Don’t know” or “Can’t say”) to the question “Do you often feel just miserable?” he or she got three points on intro-version, one on dominance, zero on neuroticism, and zero on self-sufficiency. These scores were only educated guesses—Bernreuter had no empirical evidence for each answer’s relation to the four characteristics—but such was the national fascination with psychological testing that over a million copies of the Bernreuter Personality Inventory, and large quantities of similar tests, were marketed and used during the 1930s.
⁷

By then personality was a distinct field of psychology and was dominated by trait theory, a scientific version of the commonsense view that each person has a recognizable set of characteristics and usual ways of behaving in particular situations. Traits describe the elements of a given personality, though they say nothing about underlying psychodynamic structure or how that personality developed.
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The Bernreuter and other early personality tests were efforts to measure some of those elements.

An important study that appeared in 1928 and 1929 seemed to cut the ground out from under trait theory. The Reverend Hugh Hartshorne, a religious educator at Union Theological Seminary, and Mark May, a psychologist who had formerly been at Union, studied the effectiveness of adult efforts such as the Boy Scout movement to inculcate moral
behavior in children. Hartshorne and May had a number of children take paper-and-pencil tests of attitudes toward cheating, stealing, and lying. Then they had the children take part in activities like party games and the self-grading of tests, in which they had the opportunity to cheat, steal, and lie without, seemingly, being found out, although in fact the researchers could tell exactly what they had done.

The results were disconcerting. Not only was there little relation between what the children said on the paper-and-pencil tests and how they actually behaved, but remarkably little consistency between how honest or dishonest any child was in one situation and how honest or dishonest in a different one. Hartshorne and May concluded that if traits existed, they did not cause individuals to behave similarly in different situations.

This contradicted everyday experience. We all feel that some of the people we know are honest and others dishonest, some reserved and others outgoing, some painstaking and others slapdash. Gordon Allport (1897–1967), a leading light of the psychology department at Harvard, came to the rescue with a series of studies and a book,
Personality: A Psychological Interpretation
(1937). Allport, a mild-mannered, hardworking man with plain doughy features, had many research interests, among them prejudice, communication, and values, but personality, and in particular trait theory, was the central concern of his life. It was in part thanks to his own personality that he was the ideal person to counter Hartshorne-May situationism with scientific proof of commonsense dispositionism.
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Allport was the youngest of four sons of a country doctor in Indiana. His father’s family had come from England several generations earlier, his mother was of German and Scottish descent, and Allport home life, he recalled many years later, “was marked by plain Protestant piety and hard work.” There being no hospital facilities in the area, for years the Allport household included patients and nurses, and young Allport did his fair share of tending the office, washing bottles, and caring for patients. He absorbed his father’s humanitarian outlook and values, and
in later years liked to quote his father’s favorite dictum: “If every person worked as hard as he could and took only the minimum financial return required by his family’s needs, then there would be just enough wealth to go around.”

At Harvard Allport found time, even with his studies, to do a good deal of volunteer work in social services. This satisfied a deep-seated need to help people with problems and, he said in an autobiographical sketch, “gave me a feeling of competence (to offset a generalized inferiority feeling).” His two interests, psychology and social service, merged when he became convinced that “to do effective social service, one needed a sound conception of human personality.”