Paul I. Jacobs Yeshiva UniversityThis study's aim was to assess the validity of naive subjects' implicit personality theories, the correspondence among the theories, and the influence of social desirability on them. High school girls classified the items from the MMPI Psychopathic Deviate scale into clusters representing different traits. These clusters agreed closely with the factors obtained in previous factor analyses of self-reports to these items and were highly similar for individual subjects. Desirability was substantially related to the clusters but generally did not mediate their correspondence with the factors or each other. These results indicate that the lay theories possessed validity as well as communality, and that desirability had a distinct but limited involvement with the theories.

FOR many years psychologists have been intrigued by the question of the relative importance of heredity and environment in determining differences in intelligence. Their major research method has been the correlation of intelligence test scores of people with varying degrees of genetic similarity. Thus, for example, they have shown that heredity is important because monozygotic twins, who are genetically identical, are more alike in their intelligence test scores than are dizygotic twins, whose degree of genetic similarity is only that of ordinary siblings. The users of this research method have generally been content to define intelligence as &dquo;the ability measured by intelligence tests.&dquo;Recently some psychologists have taken a different approach to the heredity-environment question. They argue that if environment is important, then it should be possible to create environments that foster intellectual growth. With this approach more care must be taken with the definition of intelligence. In a trivial sense, for example, one could increase a person's intelligence by giving him practice answering those very questions that comprise the test one uses to measure intelligence. Clearly, then, more meaningful research must take into account the relation between the training operations and the operations used to

The Coloured Progressive Matrices Test (CPM), a measure of inductive reasoning ability, has been reported to correlate .91 with WISC Full Scale IQ. Each item of the CPM Test displays a pattern with a section missing; below it are six response alternatives, one of which would correctly complete the pattern. New and presumably better self-instructional sequences were used with both first- and third-grade Ss. Trained Ss did no better than controls on a CPM posttest. The test, however, appeared to confound “pure” inductive ability with ability to imagine how a response alternative would look if inserted into the pattern. A new test format was developed to eliminate the role of the latter by having S judge the correctness of already completed patterns. Dramatic increases in test scores were found. Apparently the advantage of two years' mental growth that third-graders have over first-graders on the conventionally administered CPM derives in large part from improved power of imagining how a distractor would look in a new location, rather than of inductive reasoning ability. With the new test format Ss were significantly better able to accept correctly completed than to reject incorrectly completed matrices. Among first-graders, this tendency was significantly stronger for trained than for control Ss.

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