Saylor URL: http://www.saylor.org/books Saylor.org
Taken together, these findings make a very important point about personality, which is that it not
only comes from inside us but is also shaped by the situations that we are exposed to. Personality
is derived from our interactions with and observations of others, from our interpretations of those
interactions and observations, and from our choices of which social situations we prefer to enter
or avoid (Bandura, 1986). [26] In fact, behaviorists such as B. F. Skinner explain personality
entirely in terms of the environmental influences that the person has experienced. Because we
are profoundly influenced by the situations that we are exposed to, our behavior does change
from situation to situation, making personality less stable than we might expect. And yet
personality does matter—we can, in many cases, use personality measures to predict behavior
across situations.
The MMPI and Projective Tests
One of the most important measures of personality (which is used primarily to assess deviations
from a “normal” or “average” personality) is
theMinnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), a test used around the world to
identify personality and psychological disorders (Tellegen et al., 2003). [27] The MMPI was
developed by creating a list of more than 1,000 true-false questions and choosing those that best
differentiated patients with different psychological disorders from other people. The current
version (the MMPI-2) has more than 500 questions, and the items can be combined into a large
number of different subscales. Some of the most important of these are shown in Table 11.3
"Some of the Major Subscales of the MMPI", but there are also scales that represent family
problems, work attitudes, and many other dimensions. The MMPI also has questions that are
designed to detect the tendency of the respondents to lie, fake, or simply not answer the
questions.