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The authors describe their research project on the best ways of selecting physicians for psychiatric training. They were interested in finding what qualities of personality make a person most suitable, what instruments to use to detect these qualities, and the best method of using the chosen instruments.
In this paper they report a synopsis of their work to date with preliminary results. They discovered, for example, that one of the most important sources of error in initial predictions was an overestimation of an appearance that suggested maturity, poise, and integrity. They found that a display of overt hostility generally led to an underestimation of the candidate. They pooled the list of attributes thought to be most relevant for psychiatrists and boiled them down to twenty-five, including such qualities as 'integrity, emotional stability, emotional warmth, objectivity toward others, and psychological mindedness'. In order to survey these areas, a new battery of tests, a different interview procedure, and an autobiography were devised. At this point they have prepared a manual to guide the scoring of the most promising procedures in making predictive ratings. Thus far there are some promising results from preliminary cross-validations.