TL;DR: While traditional behavioural assessments have limitations, language-based assessments offer a nuanced understanding of individuals' cognitive, emotional, and psychological aspects that compliment behavioural assessments and improve their predictive capability:
Language-based assessments are less biased, capture unique nuances, and provide insights into how people are likely to act in various situations.
Integrating language-based assessments with traditional methods can enhance the validity and fairness of assessments, especially in important decision-making contexts.
Language-based assessment can leverage language that was previously captured for other purposes, such as questionnaires, surveys, interviews, meeting transcripts, or digital communications.
Language is the bridge that enables people to translate the complex and intricate information that’s stored in their brains into thoughts they can share with others. But, when people communicate, they’re not merely transmitting information about the topics and concepts they’re thinking about, they’re also, unknowingly, sharing nuanced information about how they think, how they make decisions, and how they’re likely to behave across a wide range of situations.
Industrial-Organizational Psychology and Behavioural Assessment
For decades, Industrial-Organizational (IO) psychologists have relied on behavioural assessments to help understand and anticipate human behavior, aid with selection, and investigate issues related to workplace motivation, leadership effectiveness, team dynamics, and organizational culture. Based on the premise that past performance is a strong predictor of future behavior, they are typically facilitated in the form of structured interviews or observation-based assessments. But, predicting future actions accurately based solely on observable behaviours, without considering underlying psychological, cognitive, or emotional factors, can be challenging due to the potential for memory errors and social desirability bias in candidates' recollections and observed actions.
These limitations have led many practitioners of industrial-organizational psychology to explore alternative methods for behavioural assessment that reduce biases and increase predictive validity. Assessment methods that evaluate how people encode their thoughts with language, both written or spoken, is one way IO psychologists have begun to evaluate individuals’ personality traits, cognitive processes, and values, and leverage this information to predict how they’re likely to behave in a wide range of workplace scenarios.
What Can Language Reveal About Behavioural Psychology?
Because language-based assessment is conducted without human intervention, it is less susceptible to observer biases, and it can capture nuances that may be challenging to discern through behavioural observations alone. Additionally, language-based assessment can leverage language that was previously captured for other purposes, such as questionnaires, surveys, interviews, meeting transcripts, or digital communications.
Linguistic Encoding and Decoding
When people conceptualize thoughts in their minds, they form mental constructs, images, and associations that represent their ideas and feelings. These mental representations are often intricate, multifaceted, and highly individually unique, involving connections to memories, emotions, and knowledge. To share these mental constructs, our brains engage in a process called “linguistic encoding” where our thoughts are translated into a linguistic code that is comprised of the appropriate words, arranged into sentences, and conveyed through speech or writing.
On the receiving end, others decode our words and sentences to reconstruct the mental constructs that originated in our minds. Successful communication occurs when the recipients of the message understand and reconstruct our thoughts in a way that aligns with our intended meaning. The magic of language lies in its ability to bridge the gap between our own private cerebral libraries and the world outside of our own minds, enabling each of us to convey the intricacies of our thoughts and experiences to those who we want to share them with.
The encoding of language is complex and happens largely unconsciously. Our individual differences, personal experiences, feelings, and values all influence how our thoughts are encoded. It is these subtle differences in how people encode language that makes it such a powerful vehicle for understanding humans, who they are, how they think, and how they are likely to behave.
Language Reflects How We Think and Behave
The way people structure language reveals a great deal about how they process information. The use of concise and straightforward sentences as compared to more complex and elaborate phrasing reflects a person’s cognitive processes and if they are thinking analytically, creatively, or are focusing on details. At the same time, language also conveys behaviours like whether a person is being empathetic, humorous, serious, or sarcastic, and it can also provide a great deal of insight about a person’s current psychological state. For instance, someone who focuses more on themselves than other people as evidenced by high rates of first person-singular pronouns, may be signalling that they are somber or introspective. If their self-focused language is mixed with high rates of absolutist language, they may be unconsciously signalling signs depression. In many situations, these cognitive, emotional, interpersonal, and psychological signals are more important and more predictive of the communicator’s future behaviour than the substance of what they are intending to communicate.
Augmenting Behavioural Assessments for Better Insights
To realize more nuanced insights into the drivers of individual behavior, augmenting traditional behavioural assessments with language-based assessment offers a transformative approach. This method delves deeper into cognitive and emotional aspects of individual psychology. It provides a richer and more holistic understanding of who people are and gives insight into how they are likely to act in a wide range of scenarios, while at the same time allowing for cross-verification of results. It also aligns with professional standards and ethical considerations, while enhancing the validity and fairness of the assessment process, especially in high-stakes decision-making situations.
Contact us if you’d like to learn more about language-based assessment, or to find out about Receptiviti partners who have incorporated language-based assessment into their methodologies.
