Personality Assessment System

The Personality Assessment System (PAS) was a unique method for assessing personality and predicting future behavior, created by CIA psychologist John Gittinger while on the CIA payroll. Top Agency officials gave the PAS a place in most agent-connected activities. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, it was Gittinger who was summoned to the White House to advise on how Khrushchev would react to American pressure. A former Gittinger aide called it "the key to the whole clandestine business." After most mind control researchers had given up, Gittinger sold his system to cynical, anti-gimmick case officers in the Agency's Clandestine Services.¹

Origins

Gittinger started working on his system before joining the CIA in 1950, while he was director of psychological services at the state hospital in Norman, Oklahoma. His high-sounding title did not reflect that he was the only psychologist on the staff. Every day he saw several hundred patients with virtually every clinical problem. He measured itinerant workers on the Wechsler intelligence scale and made a chance observation that became the "bedrock" of his system. Short-order cooks tended to do well on the digit-span subtest, which rated ability to remember numbers, while dishwashers had poor memory for digits. The cooks maintained efficiency in distracting environments by falling back on internal resources and shutting out commotion. Gittinger dubbed this inner-directed personality type an "Internalizer" (I). The dishwashers could not separate themselves from the external world and had to be placed in corners to work. He called them "Externalizers" (E). He found that a high digit span in any person allowed a basic personality judgment.¹

Dimensions

Gittinger concluded that babies were born with distinct personalities modified by environmental factors. He measured the compensations children made to adult pressure using the Wechsler arithmetic subtest. Under stress, these compensations tended to disappear and the person reverted to the original type. Besides the E-I dimension, Gittinger identified Regulated (R) versus Flexible (F) through the block design subtest. The Regulated person learned by rote without understanding; the Flexible had to understand before learning. His most original contribution was a third dimension, Role Adaptive (A) versus Role Uniform (U), measured by the picture arrangement subtest. It corresponded to "charisma," since people were naturally attracted to the A person and tended to ignore the U.¹

Operational Use

While the PAS worked best with actual Wechsler scores, Agency officials could not ask a Russian diplomat to take the test. Gittinger's staff developed "indirect assessment," observing behavior and working backward to predict how the person would have scored. They compiled a checklist of 30 to 40 observable patterns, each reflecting a Wechsler subtest and corresponding to insights from the data base. Was the target sloppy or neat? Did he relate to women stiffly or easily? How did he hold a cigarette? When he went through a receiving line, did he immediately repeat each person's name? The TSS assessment staff used these observations to make reasoned estimates about personality, with emphasis on vulnerabilities. "If you could get a sample of several kinds of situations, you could begin to get some pretty good information," Gittinger said, though he added, "I never thought we were good at this."¹

Robert Hyde at Butler Health Center built an experimental party room with a pinball machine, dartboard, and bamboo bar stools to watch subjects react to alcohol through a two-way mirror. He found that pure Internalizers became more withdrawn and uncompensated Externalizers became garrulous, sloppy drunks. Harold Abramson made similar observations for LSD, finding that an E was more likely to have a bad trip. Harris Isbell sent Wechsler scores of heroin addicts. Martin Orne sent scores of hypnosis subjects. Gittinger collected scores of actors, businessmen, students, fashion models, doctors, homosexuals, prostitutes, and sexual psychopaths. By the early 1970s, 29,000 sets of Wechsler results had flowed in, each accompanied by biographic data.¹