No, it's an excellent property. Great progress in personality theory would come from replacing surveys (which, to put it in an extreme say, ask ``Are you intelligent?'') with tasks (``Solve this puzzle''). Something can be done for conscientiousness, for example. The problem of replacing surveys with tasks is that now you have to be sure what the task measures.
I have long had this sense. Self report *does* work, but for a desirable personality trait, forcing people to demonstrate that they possess that trait is always more convincing than merely believing when they say they do. There are ways of getting around this (e.g. by phrasing items rather negatively), but on top of this one still has to cope with lack of self knowledge.
In contrast, tests like the Rorschach, handwriting analysis, or Sheldon's somatotypes have always seemed much more promising to me than the mainstream psychological community seems to believe. The problem is likely that they were overhyped early on and then fell into disrepute. Now everyone uses the Big Five, and so, well, everyone just uses the Big Five.
As a user of personality theory I have experienced that the measurement error for personality traits is much larger than for intelligence measured with some test (such as Raven Matrices).
There are also other ``traits'' that economists call with specific names: discount factor (delay-discounting) and risk aversion. These two can be measured with survey questions, but (much better) with choices.
Interesting idea; but are we sure we are not picking up something like Openness?
Correlations with verbal IQ show that we almost definitely are. Is it a bad thing to have a funky pictorial test of Openness to Experience?
No, it's an excellent property. Great progress in personality theory would come from replacing surveys (which, to put it in an extreme say, ask ``Are you intelligent?'') with tasks (``Solve this puzzle''). Something can be done for conscientiousness, for example. The problem of replacing surveys with tasks is that now you have to be sure what the task measures.
I have long had this sense. Self report *does* work, but for a desirable personality trait, forcing people to demonstrate that they possess that trait is always more convincing than merely believing when they say they do. There are ways of getting around this (e.g. by phrasing items rather negatively), but on top of this one still has to cope with lack of self knowledge.
In contrast, tests like the Rorschach, handwriting analysis, or Sheldon's somatotypes have always seemed much more promising to me than the mainstream psychological community seems to believe. The problem is likely that they were overhyped early on and then fell into disrepute. Now everyone uses the Big Five, and so, well, everyone just uses the Big Five.
As a user of personality theory I have experienced that the measurement error for personality traits is much larger than for intelligence measured with some test (such as Raven Matrices).
There are also other ``traits'' that economists call with specific names: discount factor (delay-discounting) and risk aversion. These two can be measured with survey questions, but (much better) with choices.
R.D. Lang Says 'huh that's not my carrot...'