Some six centuries before the term personality became the coin of the modern humanistic realm, aptitudinal assessment programs found a toehold in China under the direction of civil service recruitment efforts. The individual became an object of attention, at least in the sense of his functional potential. By the time of the Han dynasty (206 BC–220 AD), skill-focused testing and selection measures were on a firm footing, later approaching national use during the Ming dynasty (1368–1644). Then things set sail.
In 1832, the English East India Company employed assessments in the selection of personnel for overseas duty, a practice that led to the British Civil Service’s initiation of such testing in 1885. In 1883, the US Civil Service Commission was vested with responsibility for administering numerous aptitudinal examinations relevant to government work. During World War I, Columbia University psychologist Robert S. Woodworth began developing the Woodworth Personal Data Sheet for use by the US Army to sift out panic-prone soldiers. After Germany’s defeat in that war, the German High Command “established a program for the assessment and selection of officers and specialists that was of unprecedented proportions,” ambitiously seeking to interpret the “total person.” The US government would go on to stitch comprehensive assessment examinations into the fiber of the War Officer Selection Boards starting in 1943. Increasingly psychologically informed and questionnaire based, the aptitudinal trajectory was principally concerned with what we call personality as a matter of fine-tuning job placement for the sake of building state power and winning wars. At the same time, such pragmatism was nested within a much larger transition in the Western conception of the self, the full significance of which was not yet apparent. What the adoption of Woodworth’s instrument reflected was a slight tilt in civic managerialism away from what historian Warren Susman calls the “culture of character” and toward a new “culture of personality” (my emphases). First published 1984. I say “slight” because the aptitudinal developments just noted had one foot on the character side and the other on the personality side. In the American milieu especially, the duty to serve was partly derived from the nineteenth century’s understanding of “character” as those aspects of a citizen that promoted the health of the societal order. The worth and meaning of the self were measured (not entirely, but significantly and intuitively) in terms of how well one embodied “a standard of conduct that assured the interrelationship between the ‘social’ and the ‘moral’” in their own localized and/or institutionalized ways. In short, personhood was understood in terms of duty, and duty lay in the application of virtues.