Personality Scales

How can we measure personality?

Before we jump into the discussion of personality measures, we must define personality. Personality is what makes us different to other people. It can affect our likes and dislikes and how we think, feel and behave. However, not everything we do can be attributed to our personality.

Personality refers to our lasting traits and tendencies that influence different areas of our life, such as work ethic. It is also important to distinguish personality traits from intellectual, physical or interpersonal abilities. Abilities, biological traits or cultural roles don't qualify as personality traits.

Personality in psychology

As you can see, the concept of personality in psychology is quite narrow and perhaps tricky to measure. Personality is not always visible, it's subjective, and not everyone has an insight into their own enduring and broad characteristics.

Nonetheless, personality is of great importance to who we are and a significant predictor of our future behaviour.

So, how can we measure our personality? There are many ways to assess personality, including behavioural measures, implicit association tests or projective tests. However, the most common and easy to administer are personality scales.

Personality scales psychology

If you have ever taken a personality test on the internet, you probably have a sense of what personality scales look like. Personality scales include questions or statements designed to assess where you fall on a specific personality dimension. The response options are typically either placed on a dichotomous scale (Yes/No) or on a Likert scale, which allows a range of options from “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree”.

There are two opposite adjectives on the extreme ends of each personality dimension, e.g., introvert and extrovert. After answering a set of questions related to a dimension, you will be given a score indicating where you fall on the spectrum.

Personality scales are inherently subjective and introspective. The way the respondent answers will depend on their subjective view of themselves and others. Personality scales also require the respondent to look back on their life there. The purpose of this is to see the patterns that emerge from experiences, which means they rely on the accuracy of our memory.

Taking a personality test, freepik.com

Personality types

Some personality scales and inventories will assign you a personality type based on your score. Personality types are used to categorise people who tend to deviate on one or several personality dimensions.

Eysenck was one of the earliest psychologists studying personality. Based on the tests he conducted on 700 soldiers (1947), he identified two main personality dimensions; neuroticism and extraversion. Depending on where people fell on the two dimensions, they were classified into one of the four personality types:

• Choleric type, characterised by high neuroticism and high extraversion

• Melancholic type, high on neuroticism and low on extraversion.

• Sanguine type, low on neuroticism and high on extraversion.

• Phlegmatic type, low on neuroticism and low on extraversion.

Examples of personality scales

Let's take a look at what personality scales look like in practice.

Big five personality scale

The Big Five personality traits were initially theorised by Fiske and later developed by other researchers such as Costa and McCrae. These personality researchers reduced many potential personality features into five overarching dimensions that are thought to be sufficient to describe the general patterns of our personality.

This conceptualisation of personality has been very influential in psychology and is frequently used in research. The five main dimensions can be measured with the NEO-PI-R personality inventory, which consists of 240 statements related to personality, each having five response options, ranging from “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree”.

The Big 5 personality dimensions include openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.

• Extroverts are lively, prefer higher activity levels and are likely to engage in excitement-seeking activities. They are relatively warm, gregarious, and friendly. On the other hand, introverts might enjoy spending time alone and prefer lower levels of external stimulation.

• People that score high on neuroticism tend to be anxious, vulnerable to stress, insecure and emotionally unstable. In contrast, people low on this dimension are resilient to stress, emotionally stable and confident in themselves.

• Openness to experience refers to one's readiness to entertain new or foreign ideas, be intellectually open, curious and have a vivid imagination.

• Agreeableness refers to how likely a person is to comply with others, compromise, be friendly, altruistic and put one's self-interest aside while interacting with others.

• Conscientiousness is characterised by dutifulness and self-discipline. Conscientious people tend to like order, be organised and put genuine effort into achieving their goals.

Measuring conscientiousness, Alicja Blaszkiewicz, StudySmarter Originals

Proactive personality scale

Bateman and Crant (1993) designed the proactive personality scale to predict proactivity levels, a trait associated with individual success, entrepreneurship, and job performance.

Proactivity has also been linked to well-developed leadership and interpersonal skills, as well as high levels of responsibility and commitment. Proactive individuals don't hesitate to take the initiative and influence their environment to pursue their goals.

The proactive personality scale consists of 17 items, with seven response options, ranging from 1 “strongly disagree” and 7 “strongly agree". Let's look at example items included on that scale.

The frontal lobe personality scale

The frontal lobe is the front part of the brain responsible for emotional regulation, impulse control and higher-level executory functions like planning, problem-solving, adapting to change or even controlling one's attention.

The frontal lobe personality scale (Grace and Mallo, 1992) consists of 46 items that assess changes in personality and functioning of traumatic brain injury survivors with damage to the frontal lobe.

Hypomanic personality scale

Eckblad & Chapman (1986) developed the hypomanic personality scale to measure hypomanic tendencies. Hypomania can be viewed as an experience on the spectrum of bipolar pathology and is often seen as an indicator of a higher risk for developing bipolar disorder.

The hypomanic personality scale consists of 48 items that can be answered with one of the two response options; true or false.

Here are some of the items included in the hypomanic personality scale.

Evaluation of personality scales

The personality scales most frequently used in research, like the NEO-PI-R, have shown good reliability.

They have also shown to be valid, meaning that the scale which assesses extroversion actually assesses extroversion and not something else like energy.

Another advantage of personality scales is that they provide a standardised measure of personality. Everyone that completes a personality scale gets the same questions and has the same response options. This allows us to compare people's results and distinguish certain personality types. Questionnaires are also much easier and faster to administer than other personality assessment methods.

However, personality scales are also prone to some biases. Since they rely on self-report, they can be easily faked. One limitation of personality scales is social desirability bias; if a person is asked whether they help others. They likely respond in a way that shows them in a positive rather than negative light, following society's standards.

Other relevant issues are memory and judgement biases, personality scales are introspective, and if only selective memories come to our mind when we take the test, our answers will reflect that. We are also likely to judge our behaviour favourably, affecting how we answer the questions.