I love when I’m working on an idea and I can use one of the webcomics I read. Although, given the sheer number of them that I read I suppose it isn’t all that surprising.
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| Continued here |
So what does this XKCD have to do with anything? Well today we’re going to delve into the cult of personality and the idea that, given the right set of questions, you can figure out just what it is that makes a person tick.
First though, we should probably define some of the terms here. “Personality” is a bit too much of a nebulous term otherwise. Originating from the Latin word persona, or a mask used to represent the identity of a person, a personality is the set of characteristics that an individual possess which influence the way they think, how they behave, and what motivates them.
Basically, personality is a short cut for understanding an individual. And supposedly there’s an easy way to figure out that shortcut.
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| It’s strangely easy to find comics about this, actually. |
Why in the name of all that is good are these things so popular? Well, there are several reasons. One of the biggest driving forces in personality testing is currently the corporate hiring world. Hiring and training a worker is incredibly expensive and spending a year training someone only to have them not work out is even more so. But it’s also difficult to tell just whether or not a candidate will mesh well with others, or with the culture in place. A personality test promises to get around that entire mess altogether. And, obviously, the same is true about dating sites.
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| Thank you Gary Larson |
But there’s a certain psychological need that personality tests also fulfill. Naturally our brains look for shortcuts to help us deal with the world around us and these tests provide a perfect one. No longer do we have to deal with individuals as incredibly complex, unique, and unpredictable individuals. With the right label we can put them into neat, per-determined boxes that help us figure out a pattern for how to deal with them. Are they an introvert? Of course they get annoyed in meetings! Are they a driver/driver? Well that’s why they always want to run the projects.
Oh, and those two people have that messy workplace conflict? There’s no need to dig for real causes between them or why they’re constantly, destructively competing. They’re just on opposite ends of whatever personality test you’re using! No problems here!
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| Oh, that explains it! |
As you can probably tell by my tone, things aren’t quite that simple. There are actually quite a few issues with personality tests that make the fact that we’re starting to rely on them so heavily a little bit terrifying. Even more so when we take into account the fact that personality tests aren’t just used on dating websites or in interviewing candidates. They’re also used, quite extensively, to determine whether or not someone has a psychological disorder.
Want to figure out if someone is depressed? There’s a test for that. Or if someone has schizophrenia or Alzheimer’s? There’s a test for that. If someone should get custody of the children? There’s a freaking test for that too.
The biggest problem, on the surface, is that as early as forty years ago many psychologists started to struggle with the entire idea of personality in the first place. The idea is that an individual is a very different person depending on where they are, the social influences around them, and any number of outside influences that change from moment to moment. A stressed out motorist trying to get to work is a great deal more likely to run a red light than the same person driving home after a get-together with their grandma in the car.
Personality, according to these psychologists, seems to fall instead upon a continuum. What we want and how we act in one situation is different from another situation and our behavior is not constant. It gets even worse when time is factored into the equation, long term studies of personalities show that, while some individuals keep roughly the same personality over time, many people are affected by life changes enough that they effectively are different people- as far as the tests are concerned.
And when the data is calculated there is a very small relationship between personality and measures of job performance, according to a study performed by Professors Morgeson, Hollenbeck and Schmitt at Michigan State University and published in Personnel Psychology. Essentially, they reported that “the common-sense notion that personality is a strong predictor of job performance” is entirely wrong.
Professor Schmitt put it very simply when he asked, “Why are we looking at personality as a valid predictor of job performance when the validities haven’t changed in the past 20 years and are still close to zero?”
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| Okay, this is clearly designed to summon a demon. Well played personality test, well played. |
And none of this even touches on the problems inherent in the tests themselves. One of the biggest struggles in these tests is that many of them are self-reporting. The person being tested answers the questions in front of them, often in a multiple-choice or yes/no format.
First of all, it makes it easy to fake. If you are a candidate for a job and you know the kind of person that they’re looking for, why wouldn’t you try to answer the questions in a way that you know they want you to? Even if it’s only a subconscious desire you’re not likely to be entirely truthful when it comes to portraying yourself in a negative light.
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| So… what was it that you were looking for in a candidate? |
And even when the tested is taking the test in good faith, the tests themselves are ambiguous. If a test asks me if I make friends easily, I first have to define friend. Is a friend an intimate? Or simply someone I can talk to? Someone who will help me move a couch? A body? My answer is incredibly different depending on my reading of the test and who I am. Two different people, both equally popular to an outsider, may thus answer the same question differently.
And what if the test isn’t for a job, but to figure out whether or not I have a psychological disorder? If I’m convinced that I have a mental disorder than I’m probably going to exaggerate my symptoms and if I’m sure of the opposite- or worried about how I might appear to others, I may under-report them. Because of this tendency personality tests are just one tool used by psychologists for diagnosis, or at least they’re supposed to be.
Even if all of these issues are sorted out there’s a bit of controversy over whether or not personality tests actually measure anything useful. One common test is the MMPI, a test that was designed to diagnose mental disorders and is now used as a hiring tool in thousands of offices across the country. It, at least, has some logical basis. Essentially the test (a series of questions along the lines of “I wake up fresh and rested most mornings” or “Is someone else trying to plan events in your life?”) was given to a series of mental patients and patterns were correlated with their particular disorders, then given to a control group of “normal” individuals. Not only is it a bit strange to use this test for hiring purposes, which it was never intended for, but one common problem is that religious people tend to test psychotic. (We’ll let someone else make the joke here.)
Then there’s the famous Myers-Briggs, which was developed by Isabel Myers and her mother Katharine Briggs in the 1940s and ’50s and was based on Jungian theory. Ignoring the fact that the test was created by non-professionals with little idea of what they were doing, the amusing thing is that Jung himself disagreed with the test. He wrote that sticking labels on individuals was, “nothing but a childish parlor game.”
When analyzer bias is taken into account (especially with such tests as the Rorschach test), it’s scary to think that so many people count on these things to help lead their lives. Their careers, their interactions with those around them, their relationships, and their sanity- all of this could be based on these tests shaky foundation. When it comes down to it, people really can’t be shoved indiscriminately into pre-labeled boxes; even if it makes life easier.
But if the only way to really get to know someone is to put away the pens and questionnaires and to spend quality time getting to know them, I have the feeling that most people will stick with their tests.