Better People-watching Through Science: A Psychometrician’s Perspective
Dr. Galen Buckwalter and Kate Nolan, Ph.D. Candidate
Have you ever sat in a park, mall or cafe and watched the world go by? Ever found yourself so intrigued by watching people on the subway you forgot to get off? Have you ever watched reality TV because “it was on, and you couldn’t help but hear the yelling?”
There’s a reason people-watching connects so deeply with us and is a part of life around the world: seeing the differences in how we behave, move, communicate and interact with our environment tells a story about ourselves and how we all fit together.
There’s people-watching and then there’s watching people, from a psychological perspective.
Watching People like a Professional
With a little practice, there are an enormous number of traits we can see by watching someone — his tidiness by how well coiffed and put together he is, her self-esteem by her slouching shoulders, and of course, everyone knows that someone who fidgets and won’t make eye contact is hiding something. Okay, maybe it’s not so easy.
We’ve been observing and studying one another since we left the trees. People are pack animals after all, and we certainly do understand ourselves and our world better by learning what distinguishes and connects each of us. But in the modern world, we’re able to take a look at human traits, behaviors and capabilities on a vast and increasingly accurate scale. And to understand and build that scale, we use psychometrics.
Introducing Psychometrics
Psychometrics is the measure of the psychological traits and characteristics of people. Psychometricians study and assess abilities, attitudes, personality traits, knowledge and skills of all kinds and use this information to learn how we can create better systems and environments to serve and support human endeavor.
When you consider the entire scope of human behavior and thinking, you can see just how broad the application of this field of study can be. Given our similarities and our profound differences of thought, the sky’s the limit.
Using the measurements we capture from behaviors, surveys, habits and experiences, psychometricians focus on two tasks:
- The development of statistical processes and standards to improve psychological measurement.
- The construction of instruments that enable this measuring.
The reason testing and assessing people on a scale is important is because the more information we have about people, the more we can help and serve them.
It All Started in a Puddle
Like countless other ideas, psychometrics originated with Charles Darwin, the grandfather of the study of traits and characteristics. Through his analysis of the differences within species and the features that enable animals to be more adaptive and successful, The Origin of Species showed how minute differences among animals can lead to significantly different outcomes.
Psychometrics was born when Sir Francis Galton applied Darwin’s study of animals to humans. Considering that we’re animals too, there’s huge variance among people, but these relatively huge brains of ours lead to a level of differentiation that demands to be examined.
Psychometrics is people-watching at both a granular and expansive scale.
What We Look for
Though differences in our heights, the strength of our eyes and general coordination are indicators of what we can do physically, the measurement of how we feel, react and judge our environment is a measure of our mental and psychological differences. And these differences are what’s at the heart of how psychometrics is used today.
Capturing our personalities, attitudes and beliefs renders the invisible quantifiable and enables us to build systems that support and engage the vast range of our thinking on an increasingly individualized level.
At its core, psychometrics is used to measure the attitudes and behaviors that can’t be easily seen, so we can identify strengths and weaknesses in a way that actually helps people. And you’re probably more familiar with psychometrics in your life than you even realize.
Psychometrics Is everywhere.
Education
One of the key applications of psychometrics is in the realm of education.
Think back to the anxiety produced by the SAT. Unless you’re an uncommonly gifted test taker, you’ll recall being as anxious about how the test was administered — at school, on a Saturday, surrounded by hundreds of stressed teenagers armed with pencils — as you were about being prepared in math, reading and writing.
Here’s the thing about the SAT: though it’s measuring your math, reading and writing skills as functional areas required for nearly any job, it’s also assessing something much deeper. It’s designed to be predictive of college success, as measured by first-year college GPA, which is an indicator of how likely you are to stay in school. Colleges and universities are looking for students who they can retain, not just those who’ll do well, so the SAT is geared toward determining who is likely to remain engaged through at least the first year. Achievement in math, reading and writing are only part of the equation, for determining who gets an acceptance letter.
Athletics
Each year, while preparing for the NFL Draft, most college football players are focused on getting faster, bigger and better at the game. They usually pay less attention to another significant aspect of the draft, the Wonderlic Test. Administered to potential NFL draft picks , you can test yourself against current and past players here.
Used by the NFL since the 1970’s, the Wonderlic Test measures not only basic math and language abilities but also the pressure of trying to complete 50 questions in just 12 minutes. In all the years the test has been administered, only one player has ever scored a perfect 50 — Pat McInally, in 1975.
Because coaches look for a specific range of scores for each position, the player’s score is factored in when considering his or her (but probably his) problem solving and split-second decision-making skills. It’s yet another metric by which each player is assessed.
Employment
In the working world we inhabit, since most of us went undrafted by the NFL again this year, psychometrics are sometimes used to determine what kinds of career options are available and how well you’ll fit in at a company.
The Holland Occupational Themes, for example, has resulted in the Holland Codes for millions of jobs around the world. In addition, it’s led to the ideal Big 5 Personality Profile, the IQ test, physical and neuropsychological assessments and has led to a mountain of data collected on all these variables. This has become the best big data set available on the psychology of job, career and vocational choices and is used by many companies to measure aspects of your personality that have been validated to predict occupational and career success. A distinct benefit of this test is it’s been used by the Department of Labor — which administers federal labor laws and their enforcement — who post their voluminous, free database on The Occupational Information Network (O*NET).
How it All Comes Together: Body, Mind and Data
The point of all of these tests is they assess you in relation to other people, enabling those who developed them to focus on the minutia of how people think and perform, at scale. We think psychometrics can be used to improve nearly every aspect of people’s lives. And there’s a big place where it’s missing: finance.
Finance
Psychometrics works to inform people who build the systems we’re dependent on, but it also functions to teach us about ourselves. Have you ever given any thought to the various reasons why you interact with money the way you do? We have, and we want to share this information with you — the result of years of examining how people think about money in their lives.
That’s why we developed our Financial Personality Quiz (FPQ). Like the SAT, Wonderlic and Myers-Briggs before it, our financial personality quiz captures key personality dimensions, but now with a focus on how they relate to your relationship with money. Measuring on openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism (the Big Five Personality Traits), the FPQ uses both personality science and psychometrics to identify people’s spending and saving behaviors that aren’t usually focused on closely if at all.
So the next time you’re watching reality TV will you find yourself shaking your head while watching someone do something, say something or misread a situation you would handle completely differently? Will you see any of yourself in those you’re watching? Maybe, instead of shouting at the screen as someone reveals a way of thinking that’s completely alien to yours, ask yourself, “What’s really going on in his/her head?”
We’re getting to the bottom of it, and now you can start to too.
