Human Assets

 

The obvious problem with conventional personality inventories is that people can distort their answers. There is a great pressure to delude ourselves and others into appearing to have desirable characteristics. This problem is not obviated by 'lie' scales and it is not really overcome by ipsative scales that force us to choose between equally desirable characteristics. If applying for a job, we will still tend to 'talk up' the characteristic that seems more important for the job.

 

At the same time, information about personality is clearly extremely important to recruiters and maybe one way of obtaining more accurate insights is through implicit measures of which people are unaware. A particularly promising and well-established procedure is the Implicit Association Test. 

 

The basic approach is to measure the strength of the association between various characteristics  (for example, pleasantness) and the person's self-view. The approach can be used for any number of attributes. It can also be used to measure attitudes to targets other than the self. For example, the task might be to associate pleasant and unpleasant words with the ethnic majority and ethnic minorities to get an indication of a person's level of prejudice. 

 

There is a growing research literature on the Implicit Association Test and increasingly sophisticated methods of adjusting the scores to increase its accuracy. It appears to be a new and exciting way of gaining insights into a person's candid views about themselves as well as about others. In the workplace, it might be a particularly useful approach to getting indications of, for example, commitment, integrity and sociability.