Sequential response shift rate: a correlate of human adaptivity measureable with existing personality inventories

The rate at which Ss changed responses to successive personality inventory items was investigated. It was hypothesized that frequent shifts usually reflect the capacity and motivation to respond differentially to different situations; or that, conversely, too few shifts show a perseverative tendency paralleling inadaptivity in real-life behavior. Eight separate groups (students in nursing, education, social work, and human services paraprofessionals) totaling 286 normal Ss were tested, and their shift rates were compared with supervisory ratings of practical performance. Lanyon's Psychological Screening Inventory, Gough's California Psychological Inventory, or the Minnesota T-S-E were used to elicit shift rate or its approximate antithesis, linear perseveration. Results tended to confirm a moderate, sometimes curvilinear, relationship between shift rate and important practical performance criteria. Sequential shift rate and perseveration are crude but meaningful behavioral measures relatively independent of conventional self-descriptive scores, demonstrating that some inventories detect a previously unrecognized response variable related to general adaptivity.