Tellio’s InterWeb Notes 12/09/2008 (p.m.)
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Against types – The Boston Globe
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Do you think questions like these tell us anything meaningful about ourselves, or do you think they’re nothing more than parlor game fodder?
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The test’s popularity stems from the basic belief that “personality influences how you interact with other people, so having a detailed understanding of personality allows you to adjust for individual differences,” says David Thomas, a Harvard Business School professor who has studied its use in corporate America. The questions the test asks are straightforward: “Do you usually: A) share your feelings freely, or B) keep your feelings to yourself?” or “Do you: A) rather prefer to do things at the last minute, or B) find that hard on the nerves?” None of its 16 personality types are considered more healthy or normal than the others. Because it’s free of the language of mental illness, the Myers-Briggs manages to classify without stigmatizing.
But for all its ubiquity in the boardroom and as an online quiz, the test is generally ignored or ridiculed by psychologists. Robert Hogan, a former psychology professor at the University of Tulsa who now runs his own testing company, Hogan Assessments, says, “I used to use [Myers-Briggs] as an icebreaker. People like taking it, and when you get the results back you feel good. But it has the intellectual content of a fortune cookie.”
“There’s no evidence,” Hogan concludes, “that it predicts job performance or any meaningful non-test outcomes.”
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For Annie Murphy Paul, this isn’t necessarily a good thing. In an interview, she pointed out that Myers-Briggs is distinctive in that it’s not only driven by institutional needs, but sought out by individuals. “People really, really like it — they latch on to the results,” she says. For her, the problem with the test, and with all personality tests, is that it “limits and stereotypes the ways institutions think about individuals and the way individuals think about themselves.” Personality types, she says, are “one-dimensional labels.”
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Science and Pseudoscience in Clinical Psychology (Book Review, Skeptical Inquirer July 2003)
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Each of the book’s five sections represent major areas of controversy. Part I
discusses questionable assessment practices and diagnostic entities. This
includes critiques of common “projective” tests such as the Rorschach Inkblot Test, and of controversial
diagnoses such as Multiple Personality Disorder
(MPD). Part I also provides some understanding of why clinicians may fall
prey to errors in judgment, leading to erroneous beliefs like the diagnostic
power of the Rorschach or the validity of MPD. Howard Garb and Patricia Boyle
review the evidence from a wealth of experimental studies showing just how poor
our judgment can be when based solely on experience. Many cognitive biases
cloud our interpretations, requiring the use of objective methods and
controls. Clinicians are no more immune from these biases than
laypersons. Psychologist Paul Meehl put it this way: “It is absurd, as well as
arrogant, to pretend that acquiring a Ph.D. somehow immunizes me from the
errors of sampling, perception, recording, retention, retrieval, and inference
to which the human mind is subject.”
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Rorschach Inkblot Test, Fortune Tellers, and Cold Reading (Skeptical Inquirer July 2003)
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The Barnum Effect
In the late 1940s, psychologist Bertram Forer published an eye-opening study
that he called a “demonstration of gullibility” (Forer 1949). After
administering a questionnaire to his introductory psychology class, he prepared
personality sketches. For example: “Disciplined and self-controlled outside,
you tend to be worrisome and insecure inside. At times you have serious doubts
as to whether you have made the right decision or done the right thing. You
prefer a certain amount of change and variety and become dissatisfied when
hemmed in by restrictions and limitations.”Forer asked the students to rate their own sketches for accuracy. The
students gave an average rating of “very good.” More than 40 percent said that
their sketch provided a perfect fit to their personality.The results seemed to show that Forer’s personality questionnaire possessed
a high degree of validity. However, there was a diabolical catch: Forer had
given all the students the same personality sketch, which he manufactured using
horoscopes from an astrology book. The students had gullibly accepted this
boiler-plate personality description as if it applied to them uniquely as
individuals.Although the statements borrowed from the astrology book were seemingly
precise, they applied to almost all people. Following the eminent researcher
Paul Meehl, psychologists now call such personality statements “Barnum
statements,” after the great showman P.T. Barnum who said, “A circus should
have a little something for everybody” (he’s also credited with, “There’s a
sucker born every minute”).As Forer had discovered, people tend to seriously overestimate the degree to
which Barnum statements fit them uniquely. For example, students in
one study who were given Barnum statements disguised as test results responded
with glowing praise: “On the nose! Very good”; “Applies to me individually, as
there are too many facets which fit me too well to be a generalization.”
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gladwell dot com – personality plus
- reacting in situ – post by tellio
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- an assumption – post by tellio
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Suppose that you were a senior Army officer in the early days of the Second World War and were trying to put together a crack team of fearless and ferocious fighters. Sandy Nininger, it now appears, had exactly the right kind of personality for that assignment, but is there any way you could have known this beforehand? It clearly wouldn’t have helped to ask Nininger if he was fearless and ferocious, because he didn’t know that he was fearless and ferocious. Nor would it have worked to talk to people who spent time with him. His friend would have told you only that Nininger was quiet and thoughtful and loved the theatre, and his commanding officer would have talked about the evenings of tea and Tchaikovsky. With the exception, perhaps, of the Scarlet Pimpernel, a love of music, theatre, and long afternoons in front of a teapot is not a known predictor of great valor. What you need is some kind of sophisticated psychological instrument, capable of getting to the heart of his personality.
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Over the course of the past century, psychology has been consumed with the search for this kind of magical instrument. Hermann Rorschach proposed that great meaning lay in the way that people described inkblots.
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nnie Murphy Paul tells us in her fascinating new book, “Cult of Personality,”
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twenty-five hundred kinds of personality tests. Testing is a four-hundred-million-dollar-a-year industry. A hefty percentage of American corporations use personality tests as part of the hiring and promotion process. The tests figure in custody battles and in sentencing and parole decisions. “Yet despite their prevalence—and the importance of the matters they are called upon to decide—personality tests have received surprisingly little scrutiny,” Paul writes. We can call in the psychologists. We can give Sandy Nininger a battery of tests. But will any of it help?
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It is tempting to think, then, that we could figure out the Myers-Briggs type that corresponds best to commando work, and then test to see whether Sandy Nininger fits the profile.
- It would be interesting to decide whether tests are predictive. Shouldn’t they be? But you would need to find a way to adminster them secretly then decide whether the subject’s behavior matches the predicted behavior. – post by tellio
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but the basic question here is surprisingly hard to answer.
- man, this is the crux of it–can we simplify the complex. Nope. – post by tellio
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This is the first problem with the Myers-Briggs. It assumes that we are either one thing or another—Intuitive or Sensing, Introverted or Extroverted.
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We have a personality in the sense that we have a consistent pattern of behavior. But that pattern is complex and that personality is contingent: it represents an interaction between our internal disposition and tendencies and the situations that we find ourselves in.
- This goes to the heart of the problem–what does it measure and if it measures what it says then how useful is it in the complexity of the world. – post by tellio
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And since personality is contingent, not stable, how we answer is affected by which circumstances are foremost in our minds when we take the test.
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I’m quite pleased with the personality inventory we devised. It directly touches on four aspects of life and temperament-romance, cognition, family, and work style—that are only hinted at by Myers-Briggs. And it can be completed in under a minute, nineteen minutes faster than Myers-Briggs, an advantage not to be dismissed in today’s fast-paced business environment. Of course, the four traits it measures are utterly arbitrary, based on what my friend and I came up with over the course of a phone call. But then again surely all universal dichotomous typing systems are arbitrary.
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Jung didn’t believe that types were easily identifiable, and he didn’t believe that people could be permanently slotted into one category or another. “Every individual is an exception to the rule,” he wrote; to “stick labels on people at first sight,” in his view, was “nothing but a childish parlor game.” Why is a parlor game based on my desire to entertain my friends any less valid than a parlor game based on Katharine Briggs’s obsession with her son-in-law?
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This idea—that our personality can hold contradictory elements—is at the heart of “Strangers to Ourselves,” by the social psychologist Timothy D. Wilson. He is one of the discipline’s most prominent researchers, and his book is what popular psychology ought to be (and rarely is): thoughtful, beautifully written, and full of unexpected insights.
- Rather than just criticize, perhaps it would be fair to suggest this book and author as a partial solution to this desire to simplify. – post by tellio
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The adaptive unconscious is more likely to influence people’s uncontrolled, implicit responses, whereas the constructed self is more likely to influence people’s deliberative, explicit responses. For example, the quick, spontaneous decision of whether to argue with a co-worker is likely to be under the control of one’s nonconscious needs for power and affiliation. A more thoughtful decision about whether to invite a co-worker over for dinner is more likely to be under the control of one’s conscious, self-attributed motives.
- an example of adaptive unconscious v. constructed self – post by tellio
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What we really need is an understanding of how those two sides of his personality interact in critical situations.
- yes! – post by tellio
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But the reason employers want a magical instrument for measuring personality is that they don’t have a year to work through the ambiguities. They need an answer now.
- And this is exactly the reason we need to be damned careful with these. Part of business’s problem these days is a demand for quick solutions. Problem/solution is printed on their foreheads inside and out. That is a problem begging for a solution, but I am in no hurry. – post by tellio
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When I contacted D.D.I., I was told that I was going to be Terry Turner, the head of the robotics division of a company called Global Solutions.
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Some of it was positive: I was a quick learner. I had good ideas. I expressed myself well, and—I was relieved to hear—wrote clearly. But, as the assessment of my performance made plain, I was something less than top management material:
- assessment – post by tellio
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You spoke of win/win solutions from a business perspective and your rationale for partnering and collaboration seemed to be based solely on business logic. Additionally, at times you did not respond to some of the softer, subtler cues that spoke to people’s real frustrations, more personal feelings, or true point of view.
- This is what we needed before we entered into the program. – post by tellio
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y day as Terry Turner was meant to find out only what I’m like when I’m the head of the robotics division of Global Solutions. That’s an important difference. It respects the role of situation and contingency in personality. It sidesteps the difficulty of integrating my unconscious self with my constructed self by looking at the way that my various selves interact in the real world. Most important, it offers the hope that with experience and attention I can construct a more appropriate executive “self.” The Assessment Center is probably the best method that employers have for evaluating personality.
- Very potent. This measurement in context is what we need in order not to waste precious time and money. – post by tellio
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The center makes a behavioral prediction, and, as solid and specific as that prediction is, people are least predictable at those critical moments when prediction would be most valuable. The answer to the question of whether my Terry Turner would be a good executive is, once again: It depends.
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he quality of being a good manager is, in the end, as irreducible as the quality of being a good friend. We think that a friend has to be loyal and nice and interesting—and that’s certainly a good start. But people whom we don’t find loyal, nice, or interesting have friends, too, because loyalty, niceness, and interestingness are emergent traits. They arise out of the interaction of two people, and all we really mean when we say that someone is interesting or nice is that they are interesting or nice to us.
- EMERGENT TRAITS!!!!! – post by tellio
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digital digs: the long tail of research citations
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icked this up from the WPA listserv: a recent article from the Boston Globe cites research that indicates that contemporary scholarly work cites a fewer range of sources than work in the past.
James Evans, a sociologist at the University of Chicago, analyzed a
database of 34 million articles in the sciences, social sciences, and
humanities, and determined that as more journal issues came online, new
papers referenced a relatively smaller pool of articles, which tended
to be more recent, at the expense of older and more obscure work.
Overall, Evans says, published research has expanded, due to a
proliferation of journals, authors, and conferences. But the paper,
which appeared in July in the journal Science, concludes that the
Internet’s influence is to tighten consensus, posing the risk that good
ideas may be ignored and lost – the opposite of the Internet’s promise.“Winners are inadvertently picked,” says Evans. “It drives out diversity.”
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digital digs: a pedagogy of strength
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- Ideation (I like ideas, particularly encountering new ideas and creating new ideas.)
- Strategic (I’m good at planning, problem-solving, and so on.)
- Relator (I’m good at connecting individually with others.)
- Learner (I enjoy learning new things.)
- Maximizer (I like to help people focus on their strengths and improve them.)
So here are my strengths…
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I have to say that I think the Relator strength is a little off. That’s one I’m going to have to think about. Otherwise though, these are right on. Maximizer in particular is telling. I think that might be why I’m better working with our professional writing majors, who want to write and enter writing careers, than with other students for whom writing isn’t a strength. (Rhonda, on the other hand, has the “Developer” strength which sees the potential in everyone.) I’m sure the Learner strength also informs my teaching. I guess I need to keep in mind that not everyone enjoys learning new things as much as I do.
Ideation and Strategic are obvious strengths for me. It’s important to note that I don’t have other strengths like Activator or Command which would take ideas and plans and execute them, or Analytic or Deliberative which would focus on all the details.
If I was going to put all this in a sentence I’d say this test says that I like to learn new things and develop new ideas and big picture plans to take things we are doing well and really push them toward excellence. I think that’s pretty well played out on this blog.
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In any case, a pedagogy of strength would seek to help students figure out how they can employ their strengths to best achieve their goals. Obviously, being a “learner” would probably be a good strength for being a college student, but every strength has a role to play if you can just figure out how to use it.
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Life Changing Tool – StrengthsFinder « Casual Observations
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we benefit more from building on our strengths than working on our weaknesses.
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online test that determines and calculates your strengths, an explanation on what the strengths mean, and how to use the strengths accordingly.
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to understand how I can best use my strengths in my career and my life.
- Assumes the direction of our lives is only relatively complicated rather than complex. I know that at 50 my life is pretty complex. – post by tellio
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Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
tellio :: Dec.09.2008 :: Good Reading :: No Comments »