Cult of Personality How Personality Tests Are Leading Us to Miseducate Our Children Mismanage Our Companies and Misunderstand Ourselves

Epilogue An X-ray of personality." Since the early days of personality tests, this has been the testers' favorite metaphor, and no wonder: it calls to mind a precise and powerful instrument, capable of penetrating mere surfaces to produce an image of what's within. And yet this metaphor has never been more than an alluring fantasy, or perhaps a willful delusion. The reality is that personality tests cannot begin to capture the complex human beings we are. They cannot specify how we will act in particular roles or situations. They cannot predict how we will change over time. Many tests look for (and find) disease and dysfunction rather than health and strength. Many others fail to meet basic scientific standards of validity and reliability.The consequences of these failures are real. Our society is making crucial decisions -- whether a parent should receive custody of a child, whether a worker should be offered a job, whether a student should be admitted to a school or special program -- on the basis of deeply flawed information. If these tests serve anyone well, it is not individuals but institutions, which purchase efficiency and convenience at the price of our privacy and dignity. Personality tests do their dirty work, asking intrusive questions and assigning limiting labels, providing an ostensibly objective rationale to which testers can point with an apologetic shrug.But perhaps the most insidious effect of personality testing is its influence on the way we understand others -- children, coworkers, fellow citizens -- and even ourselves. The tests substitute a tidy abstraction for a real, rumpled human being, a sterile idea for a flesh-and-blood individual. No doubt these generic forms are easier to understand (and, not incidentally, to manipulate) than actual people, in all their sticky specificity. But ultimately they can only diminish our recognition and appreciation of others' full humanity, only impede our own advance toward self-discovery and self-awareness.The current prevalence of personality testing, of course, is evidence that many feel otherwise -- that such testing is filling a need, or at least a perceived need. And so a reconsideration of our reliance on personality tests must begin with an acknowledgment of their potency. Tests are powerful; the categories in which they place us are powerful. That's exactly why they must be employed with caution and care. These days a personality test may serve as a corporate icebreaker, a classroom game, a counseling exercise. Though such uses may seem harmless, we ought to be wary of the tendency of tests and their apparently definitive judgments to take on a life of their own. When our objectives -- to get a discussion started, to stimulate self-reflection, to offer guidance -- can be met without a test, they should be.There's no question that this approach asks more of us as a society: the work that a test makes so smoothly automatic must be replaced by an effort of sympathetic curiosity and attention. But the rewards will be proportional to our exertions, an equation that also holds for the time and energy we invest in trying to understand ourselves. A guide to applying the life story approach pioneered by psychologist Dan McAdams can be found in his 1993 book, The Stories We Live By: Personal Myths and the Making of the Self (William Morrow). Recalling and analyzing in depth the principal events of our lives is far more intellectually challenging and emotionally involving than penciling in a series of bubbles -- but at the end of it, we'll have a self-portrait that is more than a diagnosis, a job description, or a glorified horoscope.When some kind of formal assessment is necessary (as evidence in a court case, for example), personality tests are not the only option. Alternatives include the structured interview (a dialogue guided by an established protocol); the collection of relevant biographiPaul, Annie Murphy is the author of 'Cult of Personality How Personality Tests Are Leading Us to Miseducate Our Children Mismanage Our Companies and Misunderstand Ourselves', published 2004 under ISBN 9780743243568 and ISBN 0743243560.