THE IMPORTANCE OF AN AGREED SUBJECTIVE CRITERION IN THE INTERPRETATION OF CERTAIN QUESTIONNAIRES AND PROJECTION TESTS.

Verbal tests are still made up and used by many psychologists in the doubtful belief that subjects have no inhibitions about revealing what they conceive to be their true personalities. Another important, if less obvious, weakness of such tests is that their supposed indirectness is often transparent even to dull subjects. These defects have led more cautious workers either to abandon the tests altogether or to make very restricted deductions from them. The psychologist frequently considers that the various answers given are not in keeping with the subject's personality, as he believes it to be. At the same time he often feels that the answers are consistently misleading, most probably as a result of the erection of certain defense dynamisms. If the subject's personality as it appears to observers is first assessed, it becomes possible to compare this "public reputation" with the one displayed in the test and thus to throw more light on the defense dynamisms which have been set up. The comparison with the test personalities will not, of course, be of value unless the "public reputation" types are relevant to the particular tests employed.