The objective assessment of personality: Cattells’s T-data revisited and more

The traditional assessment of personality based on individual’s self-report suffers from a series of limitations which encumbers the capacity to predict people’s future behavior. On the one hand, it makes equal the information that people offer about themselves and how they really behave. On the other hand, it does not take into account the fact that the behavior of any one person in a structured situation is determined, fundamentally, by the contingencies of that very situation. The aim of this study is to offer an alternative to personality assessment by means of questionnaires, picking up on the Cattell’s tradition to assess personality by means of objective tests. Three examples of objective tests are presented here for the assessment of risk tendency. The three tests developed for this purpose have shown satisfactory levels of reliability and validity that support the use of this kind of instruments, particularly in contexts such as personnel selection.