Date of Graduation

Spring 2015

Degree

Master of Science in Psychology

Department

Psychology

Committee Chair

Donald Fischer

Abstract

Predicting character failure is a challenging risk management problem in many organizations and, while self-report measures of attitudes, beliefs, and personality traits have proven useful, room for improvement remains. Measures using Implicit Association Test (IAT) procedures appear to have some promise in this regard because, unlike self-report measures, they are resistant to impression management artifacts and independent of introspective ability or self-knowledge. Adjectives related to maladaptive personality attributes were used to develop IATs that are balanced with respect to an evaluative dimension (good—bad) in order to not confound self-esteem with semantically distinct descriptors of behavioral tendencies. Although correlations with an established self-report measure, the Levenson Self-Report Psychopathy Scale (Levenson, Kiehl, & Fitzpatrick, 1995), indicate some evidence of convergent and discriminant validity, reliability coefficients indicate the IATs are contaminated with measurement error. Problems with these basic psychometric properties suggest directions for future work in order to realize the full potential of these measures.

Keywords

counterproductive work behavior, dark side personality traits, psychopathy, integrity measures, implicit association test, five factor model of personality

Subject Categories

Psychology

Copyright

© Benjamin J. Thomas

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