Natural Language Processing Provides a More Accurate Assessment of Personality in Business Contexts

At Persona, we believe that personality matters in business. To get the most out of people, you need to understand them: What are their motivations? How are they likely to respond to different events? However, current personality assessments are fundamentally flawed in a business context, failing to provide businesses and investors with an accurate understanding of the individuals undergoing the assessments. That’s why instead of administering personality assessments, we simply ask individuals to write us a story.

Personality Assessments Are Either Boring or Inaccurate, or Both

The challenge with personality tests is that they are either based on poor (or non-existent) science, or they are lengthy and dull. Unfortunately, for proponents of Myers Briggs, no one fits neatly into categories like yellow, green, or red; personality isn’t that simple. Yet, most applications of the most scientifically valid model for personality, known as the Five Factor Model or Big 5, are incredibly arduous and tedious. No one, especially not busy executives and founders, wants to answer 300 multiple-choice questions about their behaviour in various social situations. No one wants to sit there and agonise over whether they moderately agree or strongly agree with statements such as ‘I enjoy being around others’. Compounding this issue is the awareness among test-takers that their responses could potentially be used against them, leading to inaccuracies in their answers. Consequently, the insights generated through these assessments are less reliable. As the old adage goes: garbage in, garbage out.

Write Us A Story - Thematic Apperception Test (TAT)

Instead of having individuals complete lengthy multiple-choice questionnaires, our assessment method is much simpler. We present them with a picture of a corporate environment and ask them to write a story about what is happening in the scene. This includes descriptions of who is in the picture, what they are doing and feeling, and what unfolds. Test-takers are required to write 700 words in 25 minutes, making it an exercise in free-flowing creativity. That’s all there is to it.

The TAT methodology was first developed by Henry Murray in 1935. Murray, a world-renowned psychologist and personality expert, became famous for accurately predicting that Hitler would commit suicide rather than surrender, based on his personality analysis of Hitler during the Second World War. His work in Thematic Apperception stemmed from the theory that people's thinking is shaped by their subconscious processes through projections of fantasy.

Using Natural Language Processing to Assess Language Used in Creative Writing

At the time Murray developed a complex scoring system to manually assess creative writing from individuals to ascertain different personality and psychological traits. However, there has since been considerable criticism of its broader application in psychology, as some practitioners fail to implement adequate controls or subjectively interpret writing without sufficient rigour. While Murray’s scoring methodology was robust, it still required expert analysis and interpretation of writing samples. Without proper controls, sufficient time, or expertise, results are neither accurate nor replicable.

Enter Natural Language Processing (NLP). Instead of manually assessing each sample, we use NLP to evaluate and extract personality data from creative writing samples. Not only does this approach provide us with much more detailed and rich data, but it also ensures replicability and comparability across the population and individuals. The data generated by an individual writing sample offers almost instantaneous insights into the test-taker's personality and predicts their behaviour.

Turning Data Into Insights for Investors and Businesses

The data we obtain from the model is highly detailed, and personality science is a complex field. Personality is contextually complex, and there are numerous interactions between traits and subtraits within individuals. Fundamentally, there are no "right" personalities; there are only personalities that will thrive in different contexts and conditions. Without substantial expertise in personality science, accurately understanding the behavioural implications of personality data and how to utilise it would be challenging.?

That’s why we have focused on developing frameworks that provide our clients with easily understandable insights into how personality affects working with individuals and how an individual’s personality impacts day-to-day business operations. Our emphasis in this area enables us to make the corpus of academic literature on personality and business accessible to our clients. While our frameworks offer accessible insights to our clients, we recognise the need for additional support when complexity arises. Our experts are always available to address questions and resolve specific challenges through the science of personality.