[bumby]

Is there data on how stable personality assessments are? I've heard they tend to change depending on one's mood or circumstances. I can also imagine some people are really good at displaying the traits they think someone wants only to have that façade fall off once on the job. It seems like intelligence tests would be much harder to fudge, assuming we agree on what constitutes intelligence.

[austin-cheney]

Personality changes over time due to life experience, practice, trauma, and so forth. It’s not permanently crystallized the way intelligence is.

It’s doesn’t change from day to day though. It is durable over time, semi-crystallized.

That said, the same things cause variance in intelligence assessments would cause variations in personality assessments. That does not indicate a defect in the testing, but rather poor preparation on the part of the tester. Just as the goal is to score as high as possible on an intelligence assessment the goal is to score as honest as possible on a personality assessment, which requires participating under the best conditions.

At any rate the best way to determine test honesty for both intelligence and personality assessments is to retest a candidate 3 weeks later.

I can remember the 4.5 hours of intelligence and personality assessments I took for consideration in full time employment with JSOC. It was the greatest single intensity of mental exhaustion I can remember in a long time.