The Description and Measurement of Personality
- Author:
Raymond B. Cattell. New York: World Book
Company. 1946. London: Geo. Harrap & Co. Pp. xx+602. Price 15s.
Dr Cattell explains that his book is the first of two volumes. Fifteen years ago, so he tells us in his preface, he left an academic laboratory to take charge of a psychological clinic where there was ” an embarrassing abundance of research material mainly handled by overworked medical men untrained in research methodsHe then planned a book on ” the empirical study of personality “, which was to embody ” quite militantly a truly scientific approach, and make a definite break with the majority of writings having intuitive foundations such as then commanded the field in the clinical study of personality “. He began with what he calls the crosssectional approach ; and, as time went on, this has expanded into the present volume. But this is to be regarded partly as a preliminary to an equally systematic account of the ” development of personality “, which will form the topic of a later volume.
Dr Cattell’s approach to the problems of personality is by means of psychometric measurement, with the data interpreted throughout by factor analysis. This, as Professor Terman points out in his introduction, ” does not betoken a lack of interest in the other applications of psychology to life situations Dr Cattell certainly ” inveighs against the blind application of clinical methods that have not been scientifically validated “. But that is not because he wishes us to substitute a statistical for a clinical procedure, but because he wishes (in common with most academic psychologists) to bring the two together.
By ” psychometric measurements ” Dr Cattell means’ very much more than mere test-measurements. He has one short but systematic chapter, summarizing the evidence for ” traits discovered through objective test measurements But in the main the assessments on which he chiefly relies have been based either on selfinventories or on ratings of actual behaviour. Some psychologists may feel, as Prof. Terman suggests, that Dr Cattell is ” putting his case a bit strongly when he says that the self-inventory represents the nadir of scientific inventiveness and subtletyand dismisses the Rorschach test as ” something analogous to a patent medicine “. Nevertheless, in view of the recent revival of magnified claims for tests of temperament and personality, it is welcome to find a writer, like Dr Cattell, tempering enthusiasm with scientific caution, and reminding us that tests of personality are still in a theoretical rather than a practical stage.
Perhaps the most interesting feature of his book lies in the large number of group factors, both on the intellectual and on the temperamental side, which the author is led to accept. Earlier writers in this country, with first-hand experience of work with school children, have insisted from the outset on the need for groupfactors to explain the special abilities and the special disabilities they encountered, as well as the wide divergences of temperamental types. Spearman, on the other hand, whose influence for a while ousted the methods of Karl Pearson and his followers in the sphere of statistical psychology, was so convinced of the supreme importance of the single general cognitive factor (which he preferred to call g rather than intelligence) that he spread over the whole notion of group factors the same shadow of doubt as had hung for so long over the notion of ” faculties ” and ” temperaments To British workers Dr Gattell’s book will be invaluable because it compresses into a single volume an admirable summary of the numerous researches carried out on personality during recent years in America. Apart from slight differences of detail and nomenclature, their results seem in the main to corroborate the scheme of personality developed by earlier investigators - on this side of the Atlantic. Thus Dr Cattell’s psychographic scheme (or, as he prefers to call it, ” list of modality divisions and sub-divisions “) agrees very closely with the scheme which was put forward in the pages of this Journal many years ago as a basis for child guidance work and has been freely adopted since. His own scheme, though slightly more elaborate, agrees in distinguishing between (1) abilities or cognitive traits, which he divides into those that are (a) inborn or native and those that are (b) acquired or achieved, and (2) temperamental and dynamic factors, which again he subdivides into (a) those that are innate and constitutional and (6) those which, like sentiments and complexes, are acquired.
His long and comprehensive survey leads him to enumerate something like 30 or 40 different factors. But these he eventually reduces to 12, which he considers to be manifested in all his data. Here again it is interesting to see that factors that were early distinguished in this country have reappeared in American investigations, though sometimes under slightly different names or with slightly different descriptions.
It is true that, as more than one reviewer has pointed out, Dr Cattell’s style is a little slapdash, and his terminology often cumbersome and forbidding. The names with which he baptizes some of his ultimate factors, though perhaps suggestive, are scarcely elegant or succinct; and the classical purist will assuredly protest against such hybrid neologisms as ” metanergs ” ipsative ” monovariate and ” subsidiation “. Nevertheless, as a conspectus of factorial studies, his volumes will prove a mine of information for the practical research worker, and will yield a stimulating and at times a provoking study for the psychological theorist. C.B.
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