Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory: Foundational personality assessment

About the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory

Before the MMPI, personality assessment relied largely on projective tests (Rorschach, Thematic Apperception Test) and on theory-driven inventories where scales were defined by clinical intuition rather than empirical validation. Starke Hathaway and Charnley McKinley at the University of Minnesota Hospital took a radically different approach: empirically-keyed scales validated against actual clinical diagnoses.

Their method was to collect 1,000 candidate true-false items, administer them to large groups of healthy controls AND to patients with specific clinical diagnoses (depression, hysteria, schizophrenia, etc.), and then identify which items distinguished each diagnostic group from controls. The empirically-discriminating items became the scale for that diagnosis - regardless of whether the item content seemed theoretically related to the diagnosis. This empirical keying methodology was a major innovation.

The 1943 MMPI had 10 clinical scales (Hypochondriasis, Depression, Hysteria, Psychopathic Deviate, Masculinity-Femininity, Paranoia, Psychasthenia, Schizophrenia, Hypomania, Social Introversion) plus 4 validity scales designed to detect test-taking distortions. The 1989 revision (MMPI-2) updated the items and norms; the 2008 MMPI-2-RF restructured the scales; the 2020 MMPI-3 is the current edition. All have remained under University of Minnesota Press copyright. The MMPI family has been used in approximately 80 million administrations worldwide since 1943.

The 2 subtests

Source

All test materials and historical content on this page are transcribed from:

MMPI items and current revisions (MMPI-2, MMPI-2-RF, MMPI-3) remain under University of Minnesota Press copyright. We document the test's history and significance.