Words Like Locusts Flew From Her Fingers

The Cult of Personality

Salon.com Life | Yes, I’ve had tarry bowel movements! So what?: “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.’”

This is from a review of 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”. Salon introduces this review with the words, “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”.

I’ve already sent a letter to salon.com’s editor, but I want to mention it here too. Although it is often misused as one (and despite the word “personality” in the test’s name), the MMPI is not a “personality test”. It was designed for diagnosing mental illness in adults. While there are such things as personality disorders, personality in general is not an indicator of psychopathology (what the MMPI measures.) Like mood and cognition, personality is just one aspect of human psychology. (And, by the way, I’m not just blowing hot air here. One of my undergraduate degrees is in psychology.)

Okay. So…what about personality tests? Are they an “utter sham”? Certainly some of them are. There can be no doubt, though, that individuals have persistent traits– personalities –that frame their experiences of the world around them.

In the interview, Paul complains: “One of the basic flaws that all personality tests share is that they leave out the power of situation. Psychologists know, and I think all of us know from our daily experience, that each of us acts differently in different situations at different times with different people. A personality test is a one-time intervention that at best can take a snapshot of you at one particular moment in this very contrived artificial situation of filling out a pencil-and-paper test.”

This is simply incorrect. All personality tests do not have this flaw. Only bad personality tests fail to account for situational factors. The very definition of personality is that it is traits that persist through varying situations. People don’t act entirely differently “in different situations at different times with different people.” There are individual traits that persist in most people’s approach to daily life. These traits are what we identify as “personality” and their persistence is what enables each of us to accurately predict how the people we know well will behave. My introverted spouse will not suddenly yearn for a career as a car salesman. It’s not in his personality to want (or be good at) that kind of interaction with other people.

Paul goes on: “A lot of personality tests, by their very nature, are engaged in labeling people, stereotyping them — whether it’s a string of four letters, or measuring someone on five dimensions. A personality test would have to be as huge as the universe itself to really measure how unique and individual a person is.”

We all like to think of ourselves as being totally unique–unlike anyone else on earth. The reality is, though, that there absolutely are common identifiable personality traits. Introversion and extroversion are probably the most obvious. Persistent traits like introversion are what constitute personality. Anything that does not persist simply isn’t a part of an individual’s personality. If a test is measuring something that isn’t a persistent trait–then it’s not a good personality test. That doesn’t mean that personality doesn’t exist or that good tests for it don’t exist!

Paul is critical of the Myers-Briggs test, saying: “These descriptions have a little something for everybody. They hint at things that we all would like to think about ourselves. Or they’re hedged carefully enough so that, sure, they could apply to me. They could apply to anybody. All it takes is for our imagination to fill in the gaps and say, “Oh my god, that’s exactly me, they really hit the nail on the head.”" She (Paul) also goes on to say that 75% of people who re-take the Myers-Briggs test get a different personality type result from what their first test gave.

It would be interesting to know where this 75% figure comes from. Who were these re-testers? How many of them were there? Were they given the exact same version of the Myers-Briggs or some other version? How different were the second results from the first?

I’ve taken the Myers-Briggs several times and, while it’s not perfect, I believe it to be a fairly accurate test of my own personality type at least. I have consistently tested as an INTJ type. I have read the descriptions of the other types and I don’t believe they’ve “got a little something for everybody”. The other type descriptions do not fit me. Only the INTJ type comes close to describing what I (and others with whom I’ve spoken) see as my persistent personality traits. I’m introverted. Big time. Intuitive, yes. Thinking, absolutely. Judging, yep. That’s me.

I can agree with Paul about one thing, though: Personality tests are frequently misused by employers (and others, I assume.) While some personality traits truly are relevant to performing a particular job–you’d almost certainly want an extrovert as a car salesman, for example–in general, personality is no predictor of how trustworthy a person will be on the job.