Personality vs. Intelligence

Personality vs. Intelligence:

A literature review and future study proposal

An Interactive Qualifying Project Report Submitted to the faculty of the

WORCESTER POLYTECHNIC INSTITUTE In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the

Degree of Bachelor of Science By

__________________ Joyceline Chow

__________________ Indraneel Sircar

Date: February 15, 2008

__________________________________ Professor John Wilkes, Project Advisor

Table of Contents

I. Abstract................................................. Pg 2 II. Literature Review.................................... Pg 4

a. Intelligence ........................................ Pg 5 b. Personality and the MBTI ..................... Pg 16

i. Personality Traits vs. Personality Types ........ Pg 17 c. Woodcock Johnson III .......................... Pg 23

i. Thorough Descriptions of the WJ III Tests...... Pg 25 d. The MBTI, SAT and WJ III ..................... Pg 30 III. Appendix A ........................................... IV. Appendix B ........................................... V V. Bibliography .......................................... V

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Abstract

The possibility of a relationship between intelligence and personality has generated great controversy in psychology. This study involves the very specific question of the relationship between the Myers Briggs Type Indicator version of Jungian Personality and the Woodcock Johnson III test of Cognitive abilities as the Intelligence test. Myers posited that there would be a relationship but the cluster of intelligence experts working for the Educational Testing Service (on the SAT) strongly disagreed. Our contribution to the empirical study of this question was to review the literature on measures of these concepts, place the indicators to be used in context, gather data on about a quarter of the 60 cases needed to test the question empirically, and propose a future study which could be based on a larger data set. This involved a search for an IQ test that was credible but took 20 minutes rather than 2-3 hours (as the WJ-II did) to administer.

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Literature Review

Interest in the study of a relationship between personality and intelligence is a very recent development in the field of psychology, a science that is still trying to establish a firm theoretical grounding. It is a multi-paradigm field. The formal study of intelligence is approximately hundred-fifty years old and the study of personality by Jungians developing the MBTI can be traced back to the 1940s. However, full-scale studies do not emerge about until 1960 when Isabel Myers was at the Educational Testing Service and thinking about the IQ-MBTI relationship. She was in conflict with Princeton based psychologists developing the SAT out of the IQ tradition when she posited that there would be a predictable order in the average scores of the sixteen different types.

The emergence of a new field of study is likely to provoke controversy in a scientific community, and Isabel was an uncredentialed outsider. Isabel Myers started a school of thought that believed that a relationship exists between personality and intelligence in the context of a field that believed in the latter and doubted that personality was stable enough to be measured accurately, much less, that it was stable over time.

Thus, the goals of this paper are to systematically study the development of the intelligence testing, personality profiling, and empirically discover the relationship between intelligence and personality using the Woodcock Johnson III cognitive assessment battery, the SAT (a common proxy measure for IQ), and the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator.

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