John Gittinger, the CIA’s personality profiling guru. Thanks, yikibook.com.
One of the weirder chapters in John Marks’ The Search for the “Manchurian Candidate”: the CIA and Mind Control is chapter ten, which deals with John Gittinger’s Personality Assessment System, or ‘PAS’ for short. Gittinger was a maverick psychologist who the CIA paid to identify the typical vulnerabilities of different personality types, for example, personalities that are prone to excessive guilt or anxiety.
The purpose behind Gittinger’s profiling was to provide a guide for how best to manipulate different sorts of people. Philip Zimbardo explores the way personal vulnerabilities are used for manipulation in his paper about ‘systems of control’ titled On Resisting Social Influences.
Readers will remember that a cornerstone to Adam Weishaupt’s ‘system of control’ was cataloguing the compromising secrets and psychological vulnerabilities of his followers. The PAS is the CIA’s ‘sciency’ attempt at categorizing psychological vulnerabilities for more efficient exploitation– formulating Weishaupt’s system for mass-production.
The PAS is promoted by a dedicated organization, the Personality Assessment System Foundation; if you’re interested in reading more about how the PAS score is put together, the foundation provides some documentation here. Surprisingly little of this documentation was written by John Gittinger himself– according to Marks, Gittinger was the only person who completely understood the PAS and the CIA was never able to fully codify Gittinger’s system. This is how Marshall Heyman and PAS Foundation summarize the PAS’s usefulness:
Its primary value lies in the fact that it readily lends itself to use as a tool for the prediction of behavior.
The general idea is that once the CIA has used the PAS to ‘get inside your head’, they’re able to anticipate how you’ll react to things. To ‘get inside your head’, the agency needs “observable behavior and/or psychological test data”. Much of Gittinger’s assessment relies on how the subject interacts with other people, which harkens back to Sullivan’s work developing Freud’s assertions about human psychology.
Readers will remember that one difficulty Crowley had setting up his ‘systems of control’ was identifying appropriate targets for recruitment: he would waste time, money and energy trying to convert people who were not psychologically receptive, Crowley’s attempt on the Earl of Tankerville is one good example. I interpret the PAS as the CIA’s attempt at patching this weak point in Crowley’s ‘system’.
I stress the word ‘attempt’, because while Gittinger’s system boasts a wide array of different personality classifications (64 basic ones!), there doesn’t appear to be much data to validate these classifications. I don’t want to give the impression that the CIA has found a magical key to categorizing people through the PAS. Just because much of the PAS was/is classified, doesn’t mean it works well. The PAS’s ‘secret’ nature only signifies that 1) the CIA spent a lot of money developing it and that 2) at some time important people within the CIA thought the PAS might work.
I find reading Gittinger’s description of his 64 basic personality classifications a bit like reading a horoscope, or a manual on how to cold-read for fortune-tellers: I could find aspects of myself in almost all of the 64 classifications. What I mean is that any classification given to describe you, or to describe people who you know well, will always appear to be insightful.
Here’s my simple description of Gittinger’s PAS rating: everybody’s personality lies naturally somewhere along three continua, [1] Internalized (i) / Externalized (e), [2] Regulated (r) / Flexible (f), [3] Role Uniform (u) / Role Adaptive (a). However, parenting and the environment can make people deviate from their ‘natural’ setting, for example, introverted people can become tension-filled extroverts, which Gittinger describes by making the switch from ‘i’ to ‘e*’. Any person’s PAS score will be a series of three letters modified by stars, e.g. ‘i*fa*’. Each combination is supposed to mean something different, an ‘iru’ is not the same as an ‘e*f*a*’ because of differences between how the two people were brought up.
There is very little difference between how Gittinger describes many of the classifications, and no empirical evidence (that I could find) showing that these groups result from the conditions and motivations which Gittinger assigns to them. Coming at this system from a statistical/science background myself, it all looks very theoretical…
… And very political. Gittinger goes out on a limb to assign political orientations to different personality types. Adolf Hitler and John Calvin were ‘i*fa*’, highly “artistic” personalities. Gittinger also states that this same ‘i*fa*’ pattern allows “the most effective emotional relationships”. Gittinger believed that the ‘ifa’ or “artistic” personality types were optimal for American culture circa 1973. This is how Heyman describes the ‘ifa’ personality family:
- IFA, or self-centered, sensitive and socially active; an ‘artistic’ style
On the other hand, Gittinger says young communists and socialists tend to be ‘e*fa’, which Heyman describes as a ‘theatrical’ personality style. Gittinger opines:
Many young socialists and young communists come from this cluster; as they grow older, however, they lose much of their enthusiasm and dedication and devote more time to their individual interests.
I dare say Winston Churchill would agree. :)
Gittinger had no problem inserting his personal beliefs into the personality definitions either, he asserts this about the ‘i*fu’ personality:
The i*fu cluster includes people who live almost entirely on recalling and reliving their past lives as well as well-organized and well-ordered historians, who can reconstruct the past lives from minimal cues. Many biologists, bacteriologists, naturalists, and archaeologists are also found in this cluster.
Emphasis is my own. For readers who are less familiar with American culture, ‘past life regression’ therapy is supposed to deal with traumatic events in previous lives to make a patient happier in their current life. This idea was popularized by Madame Blavatsky, co-founder of the Theosophical Society in the 1870s; the idea gained even more traction in the 1950s amongst certain (unscrupulous?) mental health professionals.
In fact, Gittinger was something of a frustrated hippie. ‘if*u*’ personality types get a bad rap from the PAS ‘genius':
Drug addiction is common among members of this cluster because the if*u* needs artificial help to expand his fantasy productivity.
I discourage all readers from seeking a chemical creative fix! :)
I’m laughing as I write this, but it really isn’t funny, because the overarching premise of Gittinger’s analysis is to look for ways to manipulate and use people based on their weaknesses. Even if Gittinger was a poor scientist with confused ideas, what he produced was useful enough for somebody at the CIA to continue funding his long career. Irrespective of how effective the PAS really is, the system is evidence that the CIA wanted to know how to use people on an industrial scale. That’s really ugly, especially for an organization with a cult-like nature.
Gittinger’s assessments are preoccupied with identifying some of the same characteristics as those Amy Siskind noticed about people who are attracted to cults: religiosity (‘e*r*’ varieties, ‘if*’ varieties, ‘e*fa’ ,’e*f*u*’, ‘i*fa*’, ‘i*f*u’) and insecure competitiveness (‘era*’, ‘er*a*’, ‘e*ra’, ‘e*ra*’, ‘ef*a*’, ‘i*f*a*’, ‘i*f*u’). Gittinger also picks up (everywhere!) on the control tactics Zimbardo identified: Gittinger notes if personalities are prone to anxiety, self-doubt, guilt or over-reliance on authority figures. He also theorizes about how different PAS classifications may be sexually vulnerable. My take-home is that Gittinger had a sophisticated understanding of ‘systems of control’ like Aleister Crowley did.
There’s something else ugly about Gittinger’s work: when you read through his descriptions of variations on the eight basic PAS personality groups, you’ll notice that a large number of variations relate to behaviors that are considered ‘pathological’ by mental health professionals. An awful lot of the ‘era’ classification are described as “psychopathic” or “sociopathic”. (What’s the difference? I suggest this explanation from Robert Hare). ‘ira’ and ‘iru’ personalities are “schizoid” or “autistic” and often become “schizophrenic”. ‘e*r*a’, ‘e*ru’, ‘e*fu’, types tend to alcoholism or drug abuse; ‘ir*a’, ‘i*ra’, ‘ir*a*’, ‘ir*u*’, ‘ir*u’, ‘if*a’, ‘i*fa’, ‘e*r*a’ tend towards “narcissism“.
Regular readers know that I believe the behavioral patterns which used to be called ‘narcissism’ are useful for exploitative organizations. Fully 8 out of 64 personality types in the PAS are identified by Gittinger as ‘narcissistic’ or potentially narcissistic– that’s 13% of available classifications! (Narcissists are estimated to be only about 1% of the total population.) Why was the CIA so interested in identifying narcissism?
(In fact, there may be more ‘narcissistic’ personality types than just those eight, because definitions of ‘narcissism’ have changed over time. Gittinger describes other ‘pathological’ traits which sound like ‘narcissism’ in PAS classifications but which Gittinger doesn’t call ‘narcissistic’.)
All in all, Gittinger spends a lot of time ferreting out how to manipulate people who *are likely* to be suffering from mental illness or character dysfunction. Is it CIA policy to leach off the mentally ill and emotionally crippled?
In answer to that question, John Marks’ writing may be helpful. His chapter on Gittinger, a Navy man, is complimentary. To Marks, Gittinger represents the CIA blazing a new trail in the sciences. How was Gittinger useful? According to Marks:
Gittinger’s strange ideas seemed to work.With uncanny accuracy, he could look at nothing more than a subject’s Wechsler numbers [results from a standard 11-question IQ test], pinpoint his weaknesses, and show how to turn him into an Agency spy.
Marks (Bill Colby’s pet writer) stresses that the PAS system was used to evaluate how to manipulate ‘assets’, ie. people working with the CIA but not official employees of the CIA. However, Marks includes this footnote:
While Agency officials might also have used the PAS to select the right case officer to deal the the E [Externalizer] agent– one who would be able to sustain the agent’s need for a close relationship over a long period of time– they almost never used the system with this degree of precision. An Agency office outside the TSS did keep Wechslers and other test scores on file for most case officers, but the Clandestine Services management was not willing to turn over the selection of American personnel to the psychologists.
The emphasis is my own. Did the CIA use PAS tests to identify case officers (or other employees) with personality characteristics that suggest reliability like narcissism? I strongly suspect that they did.
It’s ethically bankrupt and a social tragedy that a government agency would use the mentally ill for nefarious ends, like dragnet spying on American citizens; or extrajudicial drone killings; or torture. In the case of the CIA though, the story takes another twisted turn, because one of Gittinger’s CIA colleagues was David Saunders, who also worked at a company called Educational Testing Service, or ‘ETS’, as it’s known to millions of highschool students worldwide.
‘ETS’ prepares the College Board exams, such as the SATs (“Scholastic Assessment Test”, formerly “Scholastic Aptitude Tests”) that are necessary for admission into most of the USA’s top universities. Most students who wish to better themselves at an institution of higher education will take one of these ‘assessment’ tests, designed in part by Gittinger’s partner at the CIA. Educators ought to be feeling nauseous right about now, because it’s likely that *somewhere* every student has a record that is amenable to PAS testing; a record which is probably held by a CIA data storage company with an ETS contract.
I say that with some degree of confidence, because I have more than my fair share of experience working with ETS’s products. College Board tests are not good aptitude tests; they’ve admitted this themselves. Companies like The Princeton Review butter their bread on the fact that you can study for the SATs and improve your ‘aptitude’ score significantly– that shouldn’t be possible on a true aptitude test. Whats more, ‘learning to score higher’ on the ‘verbal’ test sections in particular is about learning to conform your interpretations and opinions with those of ETS test designers. So what is ETS really measuring? Is it mass, white-collar PAS profiling? Picking out people who channel their thinking to mimic that of authority figures?
Two years ago, suggesting that SAT scores might be used for PAS-type profiling would sound quite alarming. In light of what we now know about the NSA and the deviousness of the US ‘intelligence community’, I think that responsible universities and colleges ought to strongly discourage standardized testing of this nature. After all, as John Marks tells us, Gittinger would look for PAS data wherever he could get it.
