Alternatives to Self‐Reports

Abstract

Many studies have indicated that self-reports, as the dominant method of personality assessment, have certain limitations. For example, respondents may be unaware of their true standing on the assessed psychological trait, or could even fake their responses in order to be seen in a more desirable light. Additionally, self-reports do not capture unconscious, implicit processes that are also important for understanding individuals’ psychological functioning. These limitations of self-reports call for new methods of personality assessment. In this chapter, we describe two methods that circumvent problems related to self-reports: conditional reasoning problems, and the Implicit Association Test (IAT) for self-concept measurement. These two methods differ from the conventional methods of personality assessment because they do not require respondents to describe themselves using a set of statements. On the one hand, within the conditional reasoning approach, respondents are asked to solve a number of inductive reasoning problems. These problems are designed for assessing the respondents’ motive-based implicit biases, thus serving as a measure of personality. On the other hand, within the IAT participants need to sort the stimuli from two contrasted targets (self vs. others) and two contrasted categories related to psychological attributes in accordance with several categorization criteria using only two response keys. The response latencies on this sorting task reflect the strength of the associations between the concept of self and measured psychological attributes, revealing the structure of the self-concept's associative network. For each approach we first review the general logic behind its use in personality assessment, and then describe the method's application for measuring one specific trait – aggressiveness.

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