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MANAGEMENT

How To Size Up People Correctly

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A Summary

By

Ray Monsalvatge

Reprint from October 1961, Sooner Shamrock

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Those who "can read character at a glance," or who claim positively to be able to determine personality traits by oral and written tests, Rorschach ink blots, handwriting analysis are as capable of mistakes as the palmists, crystalgazers, and tea leaf readers. Belief in the validity of the latter has long since passed into obscurity, and doubts of. the infallibility of the former have been well enhanced in William H. Whyte, Jr.'s appendix to his THE ORGANIZATION MAN who demonstrated

Ray Monsalvatge is a happy man who divides his time as a teacher between the North American Continent and Latin America. For half of the year he is a special lecturer at the University of Puerto Rico; and the remainder of the time finds him in the United States, Canada, Cuba, or Mexico, as an industrial consultant, in great demand as a club speaker, or having a wonderful time teaching youngsters to enjoy a tame fox or a Hi Fi set!

"How to Cheat on Personality Tests." To avoid a bad score on these tests, you must be "normal,” according to the definition of the test maker. Being "normal" involves feeling, "I love my father and my mother, but my father a little bit more. I don't care for books or music much. I love my wife and children. I don't let them get in the way of company's work."

Who is really normal? A wag once said, "There are two kinds of people in the world, the normal and the abnormal. And the normal ones decide which is which."

People's personalities consist of variations in four basic inherited traits: (1) intelligence, (2) conscience, (3) emotional reaction, and (4) psychosexual development, with Scciability as a corollary of the four, and various Special Ways of Adjustment to the variations in the four basic traits.

The four basic inherited traits are unchangeable fundamentally and can no more be a cause for blaming an individual than the presence of curly hair, blue eyes, or dark skin. In humanity, each varies considerably: in intelligence from idiocy through imbecility through moronic conditions, through the normal through the geniuses; in conscience from slightly developed through overdeveloped; in emotional reaction from dullness to extreme sensitivity; and in psychosexual development from masculine to feminine. Every individual will recognize in himself certain examples of all variations in each of the four basic inherited traits. Physical and psychological sexual variations within ourselves provide an example:

At conception, neither masculinity nor femininity was evident. In embryonic life, there was a stage in which both external and internal sex organs were in existence until either the masculine or the feminine set became useless and the other useful. Yet, every adult male body contains useless Fallopian tubes, and every female body contains useless testes. These can be seen, dissected, studied. The case of the hermaphrodite proves that sometimes both external sex organs exist at birth. After birth, psychologically the male child, for example, is interested only in himself at first, later he plays ball games with his own sex, and still later he becomes interested in the opposite sex. But the normal individual is essentially bisexual, mar-

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