The inescapable situation in psychometric assessment: moving practise on withnew blends of psychological science

The context for this research is the use of simulation-based assessment techniques (e.g. assessment centres and situation judgement tests) in applied psychology for hiring and developing individuals and for team development. The research programme combined the use of psychometric measures (competency, personality trait and cognitive ability) with cognitive measures (comprehension, event memory and situation model construction), and manipulated the content and structure of situations to help unravel performance in simulations using variations of the situational judgement (SJT) paradigm.. Personality trait and competency measures consistently account for a proportion of the measured variance indicating their value. However, in higher fidelity simulations greater measurement variance is attributable to within-situational factors over and above that accounted for by personality traits (Implicit Policy Theory (IPT)) or competencies. The effective formation and use of cognitive situation models appear to provide an explanation for individual differences in addition to trait and competency factors