You are aggressive and overly critical of others. You are timid, and tend to defer to people in positions of authority. We have determined that we cannot give you the managerial position you have applied for, despite your obvious paper qualifications.

Why? Well, you see, you must remember that personality test we administered to you, and I’m sorry to say that what we’ve found tells us that you would not be a good match for the position in question. What? What should you do then if the track you desire is suddenly cut off to you? I don’t know; personalities don’t change--our test told us that.

Or how about this: Let’s forget the test for a second, and…talk. Tell me your story, and perhaps, just perhaps…I can forget that the test told me who you were and how I can use you. And maybe through the mass of seemingly contradictory details, the awful and wonderful confusion of simply being human, we can learn who, and how we are, if not who, and how we will be.

In Annie Murphy Paul’s wonderful and in many ways terrifying “The Cult of Personality,” she tells us a story, a true cautionary tale. She shows, through a series of tales, how scientists, business people, educators and some strange amalgamations of all of the above and more have tried to reduce the beautiful complexities of us into neat little boxes. And while time after time their methods have been revealed to have deep, disturbing flaws both in methodology and in interpretation, people have continued to be categorized not by who they are, but by what a test--a sliver of a vision--shows.

Annie Murphy Paul is the person lining up outside the circle as the consensus forms, saying “Wait a minute.” She tells these stories with a minimum of academic dryness, but with no lack of scholarly rigor. She brings alive the times, people and circumstances within which these tests came to be, and came to be utilized, or misused. She fires a much-needed warning shot, telling us to beware. It is a welcome wake-up call.