Hidebound Personality Test Updated for Normalcy
Would you consider a woman too masculine if she said she would like to be a soldier? What would you make of a guy who took care not to step on cracks in the sidewalk?
Does the statement, “I was often sent to the principal’s office for cutting up,” suggest the speaker was a class clown or a knife-wielding gang leader?
By turns sexist, confusing and completely out of date, versions of those questions all appeared for decades on the world’s most widely used psychological test, the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, or MMPI. Millions of people in dozens of countries, being evaluated for character, attitudes and personal behavior, have waded their way through 556 statements, which they must answer true or false.
The test was designed to figure out who is normal and who is not. To do that, the researchers who created it relied on a group of 2,600 middle-class, mostly rural, married people from Minnesota. None of them was younger than 16 or older than 65. And they were all white. They were the standard of “normal” psychological fitness against which millions across the world came to be judged by businesses, industries and schools. Now, almost a half century after it was first used, the MMPI has undergone its first major overhaul.
“Society changes, assumptions change and we realized the test needed to reflect a broader range of people,” said W. Grant Dahlstrom, professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina and a member of a committee that recently introduced a new version of the personality test. “We took out the sexist references, the religious references and others that have become obscure.”
No more can the statement, “I like mechanics magazines,” be used as a way to gauge a person’s “appropriate” sexuality. Also, the blanket use of the word “he” has been supplanted with “person.”
The researchers won’t reveal specific new questions because they say it might bias the test. But they will say they added questions and some new categories of personality type.
In the 1930s, for example, when the test was first introduced, people were considered either hard chargers or easygoing, big eaters or picky. Now the test interpretation must account for Type A personalities and anorexics.
“We have included a number of items that reflect the driven, compulsive, schedule-bound, aggressive and competitive style of the Type A,” said James N. Butcher, a professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota and another member of the group that rewrote the test. “We now have certain questions dealing with eating disorders too.”
More than 20,000 people randomly selected from phone books and carefully balanced by region, race and sex took the new version of the test. Different groups of items assess paranoid behavior, hypochondria, anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, anger, cynicism and many other behavioral patterns.
There are a variety of trick questions in the test so psychologists can evaluate whether people are trying to lie about themselves.
The personality test started out in a medical and psychiatric setting, but it quickly spread. Applicants for few high-tension jobs in the United States these days can get by without taking the test.
Flight controllers, nuclear power plant operators, airline pilots and officials at such top-secret federal agencies as the National Security Agency all must take it.
“It’s been translated into more than 100 languages,” Butcher said. “You could argue that no test has been applied more widely. It needed some improvements. But it has really stood the test of time.”
