A Memory-Systems Approach to the Classification of Personality Tests: Comment on Meyer and Kurtz (2006)

Abstract

In response to Meyer and Kurtz's (2006) recommended discontinuation of the terms “objective” and “projective” as descriptors of personality tests, a new classification system for personality measures is sketched out that is based on memory research. Adopting a widely used model of the organization of human memory systems (e.g., Squire, Knowlton, & Musen, 1993), a distinction between declarative and nondeclarative personality tests is proposed based on whether tests assess facets of personality represented in consciously accessible memory systems or in nonconscious memory systems whose operation is reflected in performance. The declarative/nondeclarative classification can be further refined by specifying separable memory systems within each domain of memory (e.g., episodic, semantic, priming, skill learning). It is proposed that such a new classification would be conceptually meaningful, because it links personality tests to highly refined accounts of human cognition, and heuristically fruitful, because it provides new insights into the properties and limits of existing tests and helps identify hitherto largely untapped sources for the assessment of personality.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I thank Joyce S. Pang for her helpful comments and suggestions in the preparation of this article and Gregory Meyer and John Kurtz for a stimulating and encouraging discussion leading up to the writing of this article.

Notes

¹Like self-reports, informant reports typically represent declarative personality measures, because they tap into the informant's semantic and episodic memories about a target person. They are therefore limited by similar constraints as self-reports: they depend on careful observation of the target, may sometimes simply represent memories of what the target told the informer about her or his own personality (cf. McClelland, 1972) or, in the worst case, may represent an attempt of the informant's left-hemispheric interpreter to maintain a consistent, plausible view of the target person. Once an informant starts looking at nondeclarative markers of personality (e.g., how frequently the target blushes, seems to automatically associate some concepts with others, or spontaneously behaves in distinct, recurrent ways), however, he or she is essentially taking on the role of the researcher or clinician who is going beyond the behavioral surface that we can easily categorize in ourselves and others using shared and salient conceptual categories (e.g., “extraverted”) and digs deeper into the operating characteristics of the target's nondeclarative memory systems. In essence, then, the informant reports the results of nondeclarative measures, which is not different, for instance, from a researcher reporting findings from a study on implicit motives and implicit learning in a paper. The process through which the knowledge is shared is clearly declarative, but the way the knowledge was acquired is not.