Annie Murphy Paul's recent book, "The Cult of Personality," has as its subtitle, "How Personality Tests Are Leading Us to Miseducate Our Children, Mismanage Our Companies, and Misunderstand Ourselves." Or, as I confess to have shortened it for myself, "How Tests are Leading to the Decline of Western Civilisation."
As the subtitle suggests, the book is in part about how psychological tests are used and abused, and understood and misunderstood.
I have had the opportunity to speak with Paul (and read her work) on other occasions. She is a smart, thoughtful, skillful, and provocative writer.
Her book makes some valid points about the use and abuse of psychological tests. It is, perhaps, most interesting in respect to what it says about how we often feel about the tests we take, and in reporting on what test-makers often feel about the tests they produce.
One area in which Paul does a particularly good job -- and surprisingly so, given her often quite critical perspective -- is in describing many tester's moments of invention and discovery (see, for example, her description of Rorschach's thinking on page 20, or of her description of Isabel Briggs, or of Starke Hathaway (who helped develop the MMPI)).
One area in which the book falls short is in its failure to engage in the measurement rationale for tests. This is a failing that, regrettably, pervades our public discourse about tests, and is not unique to this book. Too much time is spent, it seems to me, in discussing public policy concerning tests, without sufficient attention being paid to how tests actually work and what, as a consequence, they might contribute to the field. So, Paul's book is far from alone in this shortcoming.
I think some of the issues that Paul raises in her book deserve some response from psychologists, particuarly those who are, as I am, avowed fans of psychological and personality tests.
One of her themes is that personality tests (and the theories they are based on) help us find order in the normally complex, even willy-nilly, world around us. She writes:
Human beings have long looked for signs of order in the unruly variety of our own natures. Today this need for coherence is met largely by theories of personality -- as measured, usually, by personality tests...All these systems serve the same clutch of deeply felt needs: They subdue the blooming, buzzing hive of differences among people. They allow predictions to be made and advice to be dispensed. They permit swift judgments about strangers. They authorize the assignment of individuals, ourselves included, to the comforting confines of a group. They often justify social arrangements as they are, extending a reassuring (to some) sense of stability. Most important, they offer to explain why -- why we are the way we are. (Paul, 2004, p. 4)
I think this description makes a lot of sense regarding why people seek to build and/or take tests. The question is whether you think that is a good or bad motive.
Paul attempts to shake us free of any complacency we might feel about such a process by noting that this same impulse was one also of phrenologists and astrologers. She makes the rather strong suggestion that the early theories of personality of the 20th century were little better. The difference in the case of the early personality theorists, at least when compared to such fields as astrology, was the ultimate willingness of those theorists and their followers to abide by a set of empirical, verifiable methods that would test their theories. True, early personaltiy theories were often incomplete and flawed, but it is just such scientific research that has allowed the field of personality psychology to improve upon them.
In other words, with the application of the scientific method to matters of the psyche, each of these waves of theorizing and measurement-building represents a successive approximation of what people are really like. The application of research distinguishes contemporary (and earlier sceintific) approaches from those of the past. Moreover, although we can understand that, although to some future generation our own work may seem crude, we have come a long way already.
Psychological tests, it seems to me, are important pieces of technology that have the potential to enhance our living and working with one another, as well as to enhance our self understanding.
Part 2: The Merits of Personality Tests
If I might, I would like to use Paul's book as a jumping-off point about what some of the merits of psychological tests might be. A point sometimes lost in "The Cult of Personality."
As a test maker, as well as a (mostly) former test-taker (I admit I don't take too many tests myself anymore), I am also excited by the sophistication possible in understanding and designing such instruments. There exists a world of exciting psychological reasoning and mathematics which apply to all tests, and which many test makers employ knowingly and wisely to create their instruments.
Here are some reasons I believe tests to be of importance and value:
1. Psychological tests "make personality tangible" -- by which I mean that one cannot have a science of personality without the capacity to measure features of an individual's personality or (more broadly) measure a person's psychological qualities.
2. Psychological tests, flawed though they are, typically outperform even highly trained individuals in assessing an individual's personality and in predicting the consequences of possessing certain personality characteristics.
3. Tests provide a relatively unbiased view of the individual. They can tell you things more honestly than your friends might, and more impartially than your enemies would care to.
4. Tests, because they are scientific procedures, are repeatable instruments, subject to study. For that reason, they constitute a (potentially) self-improving body of measurement instruments. That is, one can create them, study them, and then create a new, improved generation of them. One can't do that so readily with informal observations.
5. Tests help us form more accurate self-knowledge. For all the reasons above, tests can help us better understand ourselves and others.
Part 3: The Issue of "Knowing a Person" Through Tests
One of the concerns that Paul raises is that tests are ways of over-simplifying people. In one place, Paul writes (2004, p. 58):
Soon MMPI users abandoned the original names of the scales, replacing them with numbers…A neat shorthand was thereby created: a person could now be referred to as a "4-9" or a "2-3," the numbers summing up the personality with brisk economy…" (Paul, 2004, p. 58).
I can speak to the veracity of Paul's description above, based on my own clinical experiences in testing. And I agree that talking in such a way removes empathy in relation to the client or patient. She then continues, however:
Paul Meehl, once Hathaway’s student and now his colleague, applauded the fact that at last personality description could become "an automatic, mechanical, clerical kind of task." Each person was a lock, and the MMPI held the precise combination. (Paul, 2004, p. 58).
Those familiar with Meehl's writings will recognize this as a bit of a non-sequitor. Meehl, I think, would not have condoned a lack of empathy in discussing clients/patients. What he wished would become automatic was, rather, test interpretations...and that was in the service of making them more accurate on behalf of the patient (not in the service of reducing empathy). He wanted mechanical, clerical procedures that had been scientifically verified, so that one could be certain they were as correct as possible. Not to deny someone the empathy due him or her.
I do agree with Paul's sentiments that people not be reduced to personality types.
I have argued elsewhere (Mayer, 1999) that we drop use of the term "personality types" altogether, because we are rarely or never talking about all of personality. Rather, most of our measurement concerns the formation of specific mental features and traits that form a pattern in the mind. I have suggested such terms as "personality formations," and "formative types" replace the term personality type. This would better indicate that we recognize that we aren't speaking about all of an individual's personality, but rather, we are speaking about a part of personality -- the formation -- that the test is designed to predict.
Well, much more could be said in these regards, but this is a start, perhaps.
Part 4: The Contribution of the Systems Framework and the Systems Set Division of Personality
One contribution of the Systems Framework is the structural picture of personality that it provides, particularly including the systems set structural division of the system. These structural maps and divisions provide a "big picture" of the system. As such, they help remind us that no test by itself can cover the totality of a rich, complex individual. On the other hand, each test (or each valid test) serves the purpose of uncovering an important element of an individual's overall personality. Scientific progress is impossible without such tests, and social discourse about tests can be greatly enriched by a better understanding of tests.
References
Mayer, J. D. (1999). A framework for the study of individual differences in personality formations. In J. A. Singer & P. Salovey (Eds.), At play in the fields of consciousness (pp. 143-173). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Paul, A. M. (2004). The cult of personality: How personality tests are leading us to miseducate our children, mismanage our companies, and misunderstand ourselves. New York, NY: Free Press.