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Tuesday, Feb 9, 2010
A new book says that bizarre personality tests like the Myers-Briggs, the MMPI and the Rorschach are overused, potentially damaging and an utter sham.
Sep 29, 2004 | One day back in eighth-grade social studies, my teacher told the class to set aside our usual work because we'd be taking a special test. We were handed several pages of bizarre, intrusive, out-of-nowhere questions that seemed unrelated to social studies or anything else. Perplexed but obedient, we filled in the answers. As far as I recall, we never saw the results or knew how they were used.
Reading Annie Murphy Paul's new book, "The Cult of Personality: How Personality Tests Are Leading Us to Miseducate Our Children, Mismanage Our Companies, and Misunderstand Ourselves," I gathered that the baffling test I was given years ago was the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, or one of its many variants. The MMPI is the world's most widely used clinical personality test, administered to an estimated 15 million Americans each year. The original version (it was revised in the late 1980s) contained 504 true-or-false statements, many of them even stranger than I remembered. "I believe my sins are unpardonable"; "Everything tastes the same"; "Often I feel as if there were a tight band around my head." Then, Paul says, there's one that many who take the test can quote word-for-word years later: "I have never had any black, tarry-looking bowel movements."
Though they might seem absurd, personality tests like the MMPI are a $400 million industry catering to businesses, government, schools, courtrooms and therapists. And they often carry grave consequences -- influencing whether people are hired for jobs, admitted to schools, receive custody of their children. Paul argues that the tests are so flawed as to render their results misleading or even meaningless.
Paul, a former senior editor at Psychology Today, tells the colorful and often alarming stories behind the widely used personality tests that date back, in many cases, to the early decades of the 20th century. If you assume these tests were developed under meticulously scientific circumstances, Paul's book is disillusioning: the Rorschach ink-blot test, frequently used in court cases, was inspired by a 19th century parlor game. The Myers-Briggs type indicator, used by most Fortune 100 companies, was devised by a housewife in her living-room chair. The Thematic Apperception Test, used by 60 percent of clinical psychologists, was concocted by a maverick psychologist and his mistress. And for decades, the MMPI's control group -- the "normals" against whom countless people, including me and my eighth-grade classmates, were judged -- was a scavenged hodgepodge of rural white Depression-era Minnesotans.
Salon spoke to Paul by phone about the strange history of personality tests, their potentially damaging uses, and the false impressions they can perpetrate.
How did you decide to write this book?
About two and a half years ago, I started to notice that personality tests suddenly seemed to be everywhere. I had a friend who applied for a part-time job at a clothing store, and she was given a personality test called an "honesty test." She actually failed it, because of a question like "Everybody lies sometimes." She said yes. She didn't get the job and was told that part of the reason was that she had failed the honesty test, because you were supposed to say, "No, I don't lie. People don't lie."
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