Paul Meehl is a leading world expert on personality and its measurement; his experience stretches as far back as the construction of the MMPI in the late 1930s. Nearing the end of his career (1978), he wrote despairingly about ‘the slow progress of soft psychology’; the study of personality ‘shows a disturbing absence of that cumulative character that is so impressive in disciplines like astronomy, molecular biology, and genetics’ (emphasis in original). The astronomer of today knows things the astronomer of 1940 could not begin to think of. The geneticist of today is poised to perform incredible and frightening feats of genetic engineering. But what about personality theorists? They are still using the MMPI, and still writing papers saying how limited is the measure and the approach it represents. Soft psychology does not seem to have progressed noticeably since before World War II. Indeed, to Meehl's pessimistic eye it seems to be floundering round in circles. A new theory is put forward; ‘there is a period of enthusiasm,…a period of attempted application to several fact domains, a period of disillusionment as the negative data come in, a growing bafflement about inconsistent and unreplicable empirical results, multiple resort to ad hoc excuses, and then finally people just sort of lose interest in the thing and pursue other endeavours.’ Topics that ‘just kind of dried up and blew away’ include authoritarian personality, and the good judge of personality. Following the publication of Adorno et al.'s work on The Authoritarian Personality in 1950, there was a flurry of research on the issue. By 1965 no one was researching authoritarianism any more; now no one even teaches it. The early 1950s also saw a lot of research on the good judge of personality, until interest in the topic was killed outright by Cronbach's (1955) critique. Little research is reported these days on why some people are better at summing up their fellows, despite the obvious practical significance of the issue.