Rich Facts About Personality Assessment System

The Personality Assessment System (PAS) is a descriptive model of personality formulated by John W. Gittinger. The system has been used by scientists in studying personality and by clinicians in clinical practice. A major feature of the PAS is that a personality profile can be systematically interpreted from a set of Wechsler Scales subtest scores.

The PAS has two aspects which distinguish it from other personality models. They are the use of the Wechsler subtests, an objective test, to determine a personality and the use of a developmental model in which the description of personality includes development through adolescence.

Krauskopf has proposed that differential aptitudes are the "cause" of personality differences. The reason is that people prefer to use aptitudes they feel they are better at than ones where they feel weaker.

Krauskopf calls this hypothesis "radical" because so little attention has been paid to the idea. With this "radical hypothesis", the use of an intelligence test, the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale to obtain personality information makes sense.

The PAS has been used for many applications over the years. A sample of applications include education, career analysis, self-help, and intelligence gathering.

DuVivier discusses the importance of working with individual differences when analyzing college student success and drop-out rates with particular attention to avoiding drop-out. She uses an "Impressionistic Model Analysis" based on the PAS.

Downs  studied college students majoring in mathematics and mathematics education. In the study, most students in both groups were primitive regulated, in fact, compensated regulated. Pure mathematics majors tended to be primitive and basic role uniform whereas mathematics education majors tended to be primitive role adaptive.

Meyers studied several police forces and discovered that police tended to be either primitive role adaptive or compensated role uniform people.

Wilton describes an entire toolbox of building life skills, everything from child training to dealing with obnoxious people to building security. She bases her work on her understanding of individual differences which she credits foremost to John Gittinger and the PAS.

DeForest  describes the use of the PAS in two aspects of intelligence gathering in Vietnam. One use was to develop interrogation methods appropriate to the personality type of the subject. According to the DeForest's report of the work, Vietnamese were very similar to each other, especially at the primitive level, and this led to develop of a consistent method of interrogation.

The PAS was also used to identify personalities that were likely to remain loyal, as opposed to ones who would flip-flop according to who they were dealing with at the moment. This was used to select subjects from among captives or deserters to return to enemy locations to gather intelligence.

Relation Between PAS & MBTI

Krauskopf and Saunders discuss how the PAS relates to other differential concepts. Due to personal interactions at conferences, perhaps the relationship of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator to the PAS has received more discussion and thought than other comparisons.

The two systems have relationships but an individual's profile in one system is not readily derived from the profile of the other. Research and conference discussions suggest that conscious choices as defined by preferences made on the MBTI questionnaire define an individual's MBTI profile. Similarity, choices in one's life-style define a person's PAS third or surface dimension.

In the PAS terms, the face one shows to the world is the result of an individual's conscious and unconscious screening process. Like the MBTI profile, the PAS surface dimension reflects who a person is or how he/she wants to be seen.

The MBTI and PAS diverge on the source of what goes into one's public persona. The first two dimensions of the PAS represent measurable, developmental interactions of Nature and Nurture at play in forming one's "basic" or core personality.

Based on motivations emanating from the basic personality, the surface persona is the result of an individual's largely, but not entirely, conscious choices to maximize strengths and to minimize weaknesses. Once the individual's basic or core personality is formed, it is immutable. In contrast, the surface dimension is subject to subtle transformations through life experiences such as education, therapy, illness, trauma, and/or aging.

So, while both the MBTI and the third dimension of PAS result from conscious choices about the identity a person wishes to project, these respective models vary as to the sources governing the decisions going into the choice of one's public persona.