Behavior: Face-Lift for a Famous Test

Chicago Psychiatrist Sidney Weissman derisively calls it "the old Sears catalog" of psychological tests. The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory is indeed one of the oldest, longest and most cumbersome tests in use today. Millions of people in at least 46 countries, from psychotics to normal job seekers to Soviet cosmonauts, have puzzled their way through its seemingly endless array of odd and eerie statements (samples: "Much of the time my head seems to hurt all over"; "My soul sometimes leaves my body"; "In walking, I am very careful to step over sidewalk cracks"). Now, at age 44, the archetypal test is getting a face-lift. "This revision is long overdue," says Kent State Psychologist John Graham, one of four professors who have been working on the test for four years. "We psychologists have been less than responsible in letting it go so long."

The MMPI, which grew out of work in the late 1930s at the University of Minnesota by Psychologist Starke Hathaway and Psychiatrist J.C. McKinley, assesses character, attitudes and behavior by the patterns of responses (true, false, cannot say) to 566 statements. Originally designed to help identify those with psychological problems, the test was widely used in clinical settings during World War II by military officials who wanted quick findings about attitudes toward authority, impulse control, drive to dominate and other potentially troubling aspects of the normal personality.

Some revisions are minor or obvious. Dated references to streetcars, sleeping powders and the children's game drop the handkerchief will come out. The statement "I like to take a bath," which had been attracting "false" answers from shower lovers, will become "I like to take a bath or a shower."

Other changes will be more complex. As the MMPI has come to be seen as a beloved landmark of American psychology, it has also come under frequent attack as dated and culture bound. Since empirical work on the test was done among pre-war, white, rural Minnesotans in their mid-30s, it does not account for newer values and is often a particularly unreliable test for blacks, women and adolescents. On the masculinity-femininity scale, a woman who says "true" to "I would like to be a soldier" or "I like mechanics magazines" risks being pigeonholed as abnormally masculine. The test uses "he" instead of "he or she," and over the years, some researchers have noted that women have complained about the test far more frequently than men.

Many psychologists contend that the test does not work well with blacks. One study found that blacks and whites give significantly different responses on 213 of the 566 items. By 1960, with the test nearly two decades old, only four of the approximately 1,000 articles on the MMPI discussed its impact on blacks, and those four were confined to criminal and psychiatric populations. The test also needs better adaptation to the psychology of adolescence. For almost 40 years, some psychologists have noted that the MMPI profile of the normal youngster temporarily caught in adolescent turmoil is similar to that of the adult psychopath.