6. Tests should sample operant thought patterns
to get maximum generalizability to various action
outcomes. As noted already, the movement toward
denning behavioral objectives in occupational test-
ing can lead to great specificity and huge inven-
tories of small skills that have little general predic-
tive power. One way to get around this problem
is to focus on defining thought codes because, al-
most by definition, they have a wider range of
applicability to a variety of action possibilities.
That is, they represent a higher order of behavioral
abstraction than any given act itself which has not
the capacity to stand for other acts the way a word
does. And in empirical fact this is the way it has
worked out. The n Achievement score-—an operant
thought measure—has many action correlates from
goal setting and occupational styles to color and
time-span preferences (McClelland, 1961) which
individually have little power as "actones" to pre-
dict each other. A more recent example is pro-
vided by an operant thought measure of power
motivation which has very low positive correlations
with four action characteristics: drinking, gambling,
accumulating prestige supplies, and confessing to
having many aggressive impulses that are not acted
on (McClelland, Davis, Kalin, & Wanner, 1972).
These action characteristics are completely unre-
lated to each other so that they would be unlikely
to come out on the same dimension in a factor
analysis. But what is particularly interesting is
that they appear to be alternative outlets for the
power drive because the power motivation score
correlates much higher with the maximum expres-
sion of any one of these alternatives than it does
with any one alone or with the sum of standard
scores on all of them. The thought characteristic—
here the desire to "have impact," to make a big
splash—is the higher order abstraction that gives
the test predictive power for alternative ways of
making a big splash in action—by gambling, drink-
ing, etc. The tester of the future is likely to get
farther in finding generalizable competencies of
characteristics across life outcomes if he starts by
focusing on thought patterns rather than by trying
to infer what thoughts must lie behind the clusters
of action that come out in various factors in the
traditional trait analysis.