Another look at personal validation

Students' ability to validate the results from their own psychological tests was examined in two experiments. In Experiment I, sophomore, senior, and graduate students were presented with their actual and inverted profiles from the California Psychological Inventory (CPI) and the Students were asked to select their actual profiles. The senior and graduate students could reliably select their own profiles while the sophomore students could not. In Experiment 2, sophomore students were presented with their actual and inverted profiles from the CPI and the Differential Aptitudes Test (DAT) and the students were asked to select their actual profiles. The students were able to reliably select their actual profiles for both tests. The students were much more likely to select their own DAT profile than CPI profile, and they were more confident in their selection of the actual DAT profile.