Reassessing the History of Ambivalence toward the Study of Individual Lives 191extended and elaborated (e.g., Murray, 1959, 1968, 1977;
Murray & Kluckhohn, 1953), offered an extensive array
of methods and concepts that could enrich the study-of-
individuals approach to personality psychology. Yet in any
account of Murray’s enduring impact on the field, these
methods and concepts usually (and fairly) take second place
to his more nomothetic concepts and procedures, such as the
TAT. How can we account for this discrepancy? One impor-
tant factor was undoubtedly Murray’s lifelong tendency—
present in his biographical work on Melville as well as his
psychology—to revise, rework, and “fuss” with his most im-
portant works—ultimately leaving them fragmentary and in-
complete (see F. G. Robinson, 1992, passim). Many other
personality psychologists, nomothetically inclined, were
eager to develop his list of variables; no one took up the task
of working out “need-integrate,” “gratuity,” or “serial pro-
ceeding” in sufficient detail so as to make their usefulness—
and thereby the usefulness of the individual lives approach—
apparent. What Murray left undone, especially in the
conceptual domain of the study of individuals, often re-
mained (to a great extent) undone.
Individualized Assessment Ventures
Murray’s approach has survived in certain intellectual “niche”
positions: for example, in the work of Robert White (a Murray
protégé and a former member of Allport’s life history seminar;
see G. W. Allport, 1967) on the “study of lives” (White, 1952,
1963, 1972). Murray’s approach has continued to be important
in certain kinds of assessment situations. During World War II,
he and several colleagues developed an assessment program,
loosely modeled on theExplorationsproject, for selecting
personnel (i.e., spies serving behind enemy lines, mostly) for
the U.S. Office of Strategic Services, forerunner of the Central
Intelligence Agency (Office of Strategic Services [OSS] As-
sessment Staff, 1948). After the war, Donald MacKinnon, a
Murray protégé, used the OSS assessment system as a model
for establishing the Institute for Personality Assessment and
Research (IPAR) at the University of California, Berkeley
(MacKinnon, 1967). (In the early 1990s, perhaps as a sign
of ambivalence about the “person” versus dimensional ap-
proaches, and in response to funding opportunities, the insti-
tute was renamed Institute for Personality and Social Research
[IPSR].) At the same time, “assessment centers,” loosely
based on many of Murray’s principles, came to play an impor-
tant role in selection and development of senior executives in
U.S. corporations (Bray, 1982, 1985; Campbell & Bray,
1993). In contrast, nomothetic questionnaire-based assess-
ment predominates in the selection and guidance of lower-
level workers, and at all levels of education.
Why the difference? Person-centered assessment is
clearly expensive and time-consuming. Probably these costs
can only be justified in a few situations, where choosing the
right or wrong person has important financial or social conse-
quences—for example, the right spy, the most effective
corporate senior officer. In a very real sense, therefore,
personality assessment (and personality psychology gener-
ally) remains stratified, more or less along lines of social
power and social class: person-centered for elites (and for
criminals and others who threaten or challenge elite power;
see our discussion of vivid persons, below), nomothetic for
the masses.REASSESSING THE HISTORY OF AMBIVALENCE
TOWARD THE STUDY OF INDIVIDUAL LIVESIt is difficult to understand the history of ambivalence toward
the study of individual lives in personality psychology if we
accept historical accounts that attribute the origins of the
field to clinically-derived theories, on the one hand (e.g., C. S.
Hall & Lindzey, 1957), or to the publication of Allport’s and
Murray’s texts, on the other hand (e.g., Sanford, 1985). Each
of these historical reconstructions emphasizes the “dissident”
role of personality theorists, overlooking broader contextual
influences on the direction of personality research, as well as
the development of the psychometric tradition before 1930.
Adopting a longer time perspective, we have seen that the psy-
chometric approach was predominant in personality research
by the time the field was institutionalized in the mid-1930s
and that the decline of interest in studies of individual lives
between the 1930s and the 1950s continued a general trend
in psychology (dubbed “the triumph of the aggregate”;
Danziger, 1990, p. 68) that began as early as the 1910s.
Adopting a multidisciplinary perspective, we have sug-
gested that the marginal status of case studies and life
histories in personality psychology was related to their iden-
tification as preferred methods in psychiatry and in abnormal
psychology (at a time when this field was primarily a med-
ical specialty), and in sociology, where they were associated
with the emergence of empirical research. In contrast,
psychologists interested in personality adopted psychomet-
ric measures as efficient means of meeting practical goals.
Psychologists working in “applied” areas were particularly
attracted to quantitative methods that could establish their
scientific expertise and differentiate them from their “pseudo-
scientific” competitors. These preferences persisted during
the emergence of personality psychology as a separate sub-
discipline in the 1930s, despite calls for more attention to
case study methods.