Implicit measures of personality

CNCSIS grant IDEI nr. 1067

Implicit measures of personality

The classical methods of assessing personality have proven a series of shortcomings, the social desirability of the answers and the exclusive focus on the consciousness aspects of the psychic are the most important ones. Attempts to eliminate these problems have been made by using projective tests, but due to their unsatisfactory psychometric characteristics, they were not as successful as expected.

Trough this grant we are assessing the degree to which the new generation of implicit measures could eliminate the above-mentioned shortcomings.  Our exploratory research includes three different techniques. Out of these techniques, two are based on the paradigm of reaction time to different stimuli (IMP and IAT), and the third one is based on solving some inductive conditional reasoning (CR). The IMP (identification misattribution procedure) constitutes an international premiere, while the efficiency of the other two techniques in measuring personality has been insufficiently validated through some frail attempts.

We are going to use a series of experimental studies in order to verify the viability of the implicit measures in a laboratory controlled environment. The measures that will prove accurate are to be then assessed in a natural-ecological context, including a multinational organization so that we may analyze their impact from the point of view of costs and benefits and from the point of view of their predictive power for describing and explaining human behavior.

The support for our hypothesis will not only lead to the elimination of the already mentioned shortcomings regarding the assessment of human personality, but will also facilitate a revolution in the measurement field, by introducing a new generation of tests, which would add up to the personality inventories and projective tests that made up the actual classical portfolio.

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