The reliability of the Thematic Apperception Test

Controversy over the TAT's reliability may stem largely from the mis-application of traditional psychometric measures, which are inappropriate to this test. The TAT is implicitly based on a multiple regression model, for which coefficient alpha is not appropriate. Also, test-retest correlations may be adversely affected by the standard instructions to write a "creative" story. In a test-retest study, 47 high school students retook the TAT after a year with instructions designed to break the implicit set to produce a new and different story from that previously written. The test-retest correlations were r = .48 (need for affiliation) and .56 (need for intimacy), or approximately the same as those for, e.g., the MMPI, 16PF, and CPI, It was demonstrated that this high stability over time was not due to subjects' recalling and repeating previous responses. Finally, it was shown that alpha considerably underestimated the test-retest reliability, contrary to assumptions of classical psychometrics.     

Another look at sex stereotypes and social judgments: an analysis of the social perceiver's use of subjective probabilities

Locksley, Borgida, Brekke, and Hepburn (1980) assert that subjects fall prey to the base-rate fallacy when they make stereotype-related trait judgments. They found that subjects ignored their stereotypes when trait judgments were made in the presence of trait-related behavioral information. The present article reexamines those findings with respect to two issues: (a) the use of a normative criterion in comparison with subjects' judgments and (b) the level of analysis (group vs. individual) of subjects' judgments. We conducted a replication of the Locksley et al. (1980) Study 2, and the results were examined with respect to these two issues. We found no support for the base-rate fallacy. When a Bayesian normative criterion was constructed for each subject based on the subject's own stereotype judgments and was compared with assertiveness judgments made in the presence of individuating information, there was no evidence that subjects ignored or underused their stereotypes as the base-rate fallacy predicts.     

Learned helplessness and judgments of control

One of the central hypotheses of learned helplessness theory is that exposure to noncontingency produces a reduced ability to perceive response-outcome relations (the postulated "cognitive deficit"). To test this hypothesis, subjects were exposed to a typical helplessness induction task and then asked to make judgments of the amount of control their responses exerted over a designated outcome (the onset of a light). Support for the postulated cognitive deficit would be found if subjects who experienced the induction underestimated the relation between their responses and outcomes. The results, however, demonstrated that induction subjects (n = 30) made higher and more accurate judgments of control than subjects in a no-treatment control group (n = 30). This finding clearly fails to support the postulated cognitive deficit and highlights the need for other direct tests of the basic hypotheses of helplessness theory.