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

by Annie Murphy Paul

A cautionary account of the history and misuse of personality tests argues that most personality tests are flawed or altogether wrong, citing the consequences of erroneous test results when applied to education, careers, and legal disputes. 30,000 first printing.

Genres: Psychology, Nonfiction, Science, Business, Social Science, Cults, Self Help

320 pages, Hardcover

First published September 14, 2004

Reviews

[Trevor · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the things that annoys me about myself is that there are times when I utterly miss the obvious. This book provides a case in point. It is such a clever book, but it took me to the end to appreciate just how clever it was. I mean, this book is actually a working out of a theory of personality as it goes along and it was right there in front of my nose the whole time and I completely missed it.

Here’s how this one works. Each chapter discusses a personality test. We start off in the nineteenth century with one on my personal favourites, the ever-green Phrenology: yes, the feeling of bumps and lumps on people’s heads, so lovingly referred to by Professor Moriaty while giving his initial appraisal of our dear friend Sherlock Holmes, "You have less frontal development than I should have expected”. However, we generally don’t start with the test itself, but rather with a biog of the people who initially developed the test. We get a glimpse into their lives and what it was they thought they were going to achieve by coming up with their particular personality test. Generally they thought they were going to achieve great things. Then we are given a description of the test itself and finally a conclusion on why the test is so much less effective than its supporters like to admit.

I could go over much the same ground as the book does here, particularly for my favourite, the Myers Briggs Type Indicator (last time I was tested I was an INTP, but given that somewhere between 39 and 76 percent of test re-takers end up with a different four letter category, that says much less about me than you might think). But rather than do that I’m just going to recommend you read this one – the joy here is in the detail and I would only ever be able to give a thumbnail sketch. This book is all the things Barbara Ehrenreich promises and more when she tells us Ms Paul is ‘skeptical, smart, funny and relentlessly thorough’.

I do need to tell you what was right under my nose and to do that let’s think about what personality is and how you might go about ‘measuring’ such a thing. Some of the ways people have gone about trying to measure personality are really very bizarre, you know, feeling lumps on people’s heads is fairly bizarre, as is the MMPI which asks test takers lots of strange questions and then compares their answers to the averages of other test takers who have mental problems to tell if the test takers themselves have mental problems. One of the tests here essentially takes all of the adjectives in our language used to describing personality and does a factor analysis (some sort of mathematical / statistical procedure that must group things like-to-like in some way that was annoyingly not really explained) on all of these thousands of words until they are grouped into either 16 or 5 general personality categories. Or you get to look at ink blots or add captions to cartoons or draw a house, person and tree. Lots of ideas, but mostly they all group you into a series of adjectives that are supposed to then describe your personality.

The problem with these ways of measuring personalities is that they are all too often based on the self-perception of the people taking the test. And if there is anything I’ve noticed during my all too brief stay on this planet, it is that people have the most remarkable ideas about the kinds of people they are. Nonetheless, people are given some kind of test and out the other side of that test they are given some kind of code to describe their personality to themselves, but also more often, to other people. Like I said, I’m an INTP, but there are other tests that are given to school children that group them into colours and other tests that group people into various kinds of neurosis. That is, take the test and be fit into a box. But are people really so simple and so similar that a mere four or even 16 categories can sum up all of the available personalities? It seems blindingly obvious to me that this can’t be the case, although given the incredible popularity of these tests, clearly that isn’t as obvious as I might like to imagine.

If I was to describe my personality I’m not sure I would start with my level of introversion or extroversion or any of the other things generally tested for. I think I would perhaps start with my odd capacity for boredom – how I can endure boring tasks more than many other people I know and yet how this has proven both a boon and a burden in my life. Then perhaps I might move on to my dislike of nationalities and religions – those twin clumpers of people – the twin hates jointly responsible for so much human misery. Then there is perhaps my terribly strange relationship with the country of my birth, one filled with both sadness and a kind of loathing. Then maybe I would think of my strange decade of being alone and how that has twisted my mind in ways it probably should never have been twisted. That is, I think of my personality is a series of paradoxes and contradictions that needs to be told as a narrative and yet those really aren’t the sorts of things any of the tests generally taken really test for. They don’t want contradictions, they want the clear and the obvious. They don’t want narrative, they want adjectives.

The other things they don’t want is for you to have either a sex or a sexuality, a race or a religion, a creed or an ideology. But imagine telling a black, gay Marxist that none of those things about her are relevant to her personality. As someone who truly believes that a sense of otherness is about the most important sense one can develop about oneself, these tests are about the exact opposite; they provide a grouping together and a smoothing over of differences.

And these tests are dangerous. Dangerous because they are used by people to decide if we can have access to our kids or get jobs or get out of gaol or receive social security payments. They are dangerous because lots of work has been done on the front end, where questions are developed to supposedly test for certain traits – but very little work seems to ever get done in deciding what it means to be someone with those traits. So that children may get told they are ‘blue’ and therefore like to offer help and support to others or they may get told they are ‘orange’ and therefore are the life of the party, but how does this actually play out in their lives? Has anyone ever followed the lives of Blue children to see where they ended up and how deciding they were blue affected their life path? The answer is that we are simply much more complicated than that. We are each an entire rainbow, and we are different from ourselves depending on place, circumstance and so much else.

There is some wonderful advice right at the end of this book – if you are asked to take one of these personality tests and something important depends on the outcome of the test then you should walk out of the room. If you don’t walk out of the room, then you should ask the person giving you the test why they are relying on something that has been repeatedly shown to be flawed. This second approach is a much less effective strategy than walking out of the room, for if you do take the test you risk being slotted into a box that you might struggle to get back out of. These tests are designed to make you feel responsible for how governments, businesses, schools and others decide they will pigeonhole you – the solution is not to co-operate.

Now, the thing that was under my nose while I was reading this book was the fact that she started each chapter with a biog of the main characters. She wouldn’t start with a four letter descriptor or tell me their personal colour, she wouldn’t say they were introverted with a touch of autistic depression and three parts gin. What she did do wasw tell us about their lives, she gave us narrative and often also gave us glimpses of what other people had to say about these personality test developers – Isabel Myers sounds like the bitch from hell, by the way. That is, she treated them like people, not like types. She accepted that people are more than a couple of generalised categories, but rather are improbably complex and interesting and often surprising. Now, wouldn’t you rather be a narrative than an INTP or even an Aries? I’m just going to pretend you’ve answered yes to that question, because the thought you might answer no makes me feel far too depressed.

[Donald Linnemeyer · Rating 3 out of 5]

First, the strengths. Annie Murphy Paul is a great story-teller, and her biographies of the famous authors of personality tests keep your attention. And she weaves some devastating critiques of their personality tests into their stories. Her hatred of personality tests come out too strongly at times, but she knows her stuff, and it shows. If you're at all interested in personality tests, you should read this book; the stories alone are worth it.

Throughout the book, though, the author overstates her case. If a therapist of a counselor ever asks you to do a personality test, the author says, walk straight out of the office. Avoid them like the unscientific, money-driven myths they are.

But that's not really where the evidence needs to lead. What about responsible, qualified uses of personality tests? Sure, horror stories are interesting - there was one story of a business giving their managers an ultimatum: become ENFJ's, the proper manager personality, or else - but what if we approach the tests more sanely? Obviously there is something to the tests. Human nature may be too elusive to quantify, but just because all systems fail on some level doesn't mean they have no use, that there is absolutely no truth to the perspective they bring.

Oddly enough, in demanding scientifically proven personality tests, the author makes the same error as the psychologists she attacks. She claims personality tests are too decontextualized, too simplistic. They don't recognized the glorious complexity, the incomprehensibility of human nature. People's personalities are dependent on too many factors to encompass them in a few letters or percentages.

But that's exactly what scientific testing so often does, though. For example, take the psychoanalytical drawing tests, one of the weirder examples in the book. On the one hand, we have psychologists who do treat them like magical incantations or like newspaper horoscopes, and the author has a pretty devastating critique of that approach. Certain studies have shown that no, simply the way a child draws a person does not necessarily prove anything about that child's abnormalities. The test, in itself, proves nothing. But what of psychologists who use drawing tests along with other tests and interviews? What of a careful, holistic, contextualized approach, that uses drawing tests responsibly?

The author doesn't really deal with this option, and decontextualized scientific studies do nothing to disprove it. That's the huge tension in the author's approach. She wants to treat people holistically. She wants human nature to be complex, not easily quantified. But she still wants to rely on modern science, in its all quantifying and decontextualizing. The two just don't fit. It's hard to get holistic methods out of such a compartmentalized review process as modern science is.

[Marie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I mean no offense to the many of you who like personality tests and know your INFJ/ENFP/HTTP/whatevers by heart, but I've never really been a fan - used merely for fun, maybe, but even then I have a problem being "told" who I am or being labeled and put into a box. That's just me personally, though - what was interesting in this book was the subtle and not-so-subtle ways some of these tests can be used by schools, businesses, and other institutions, and the ways these decisions can affect your life - not to mention the serious question raised about how accurate these tests are anyway (not very, according to this book).

This excerpt pretty much sums up both the book and my reservations about personality testing:

In life, he observed, our actions are driven not only by our personalities, but by the situations in which we find ourselves. We adjust our behavior according to our role (worker, parent, friend), to the occasion (a meeting, a family outing, a party), and to a thousand other details of our ever-changing environment. Such mutability, though "acknowledged in the abstract" by personality researchers, was ignored by them in practice, largely because it seemed to defeat the possibility of accurate measurement. From the time the very first personality tests were developed, psychologists attributed stable, consistent personalities to their subjects - not because they had proof such personalities existed, but because the task of assessment would be much easier if they did.

The Rorschach and the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory imagine us as an assemblage of ailments, the sum of our sicknesses; they are like "mental thermometers," in the words of one critic, equipped to detect illness but incapable of describing health.

These tests have serious real-life consequences, in our classrooms, courtrooms, and workplaces. And [...:] the narrow, self-interested way we've been imagined by institutions has left us without a satisfying way to imagine ourselves.

[Liquidlasagna · Rating 5 out of 5]

here is an interesting comment


The New Yorker

Merve Emre - The Personality Brokers

Emre’s book follows closely the account of the development of the MBTI given in Annie Murphy Paul’s “The Cult of Personality Testing,” published in 2004 (a work that Emre surprisingly does not acknowledge).

Both books describe Briggs and Myers as intellectually driven women in an era when career opportunities for intellectually driven women were slim. Neither one had any training in psychology or in psychiatry—or, for that matter, in testing—and neither ever worked in a laboratory or an academic institution. A third woman, Mary McCaulley, who came upon the test in 1968, the year Katharine died, was a professor of psychology at the University of Florida. She teamed up with Isabel, and was indispensable in turning the MBTI into a professional operation. But, essentially, the MBTI was home-cooked.

[Bob Anderson · Rating 2 out of 5]

One would hope that with a subtitle as long and detailed as this book’s ridiculous mess, that at one of the implicit promises made would be fulfilled. Instead, none were; while this might be acceptable in a particularly ironic piece of 19th century British throwback fiction, here it goes over like a rodeo clown at an art gallery. I’ll cut to the chase: the vast majority of this book is devoted to the historical development of various personality tests, and is the type of pop history where the flavor of the cereal one brave soul ate the morning of her great discovery is of prime importance. I realize that often, book publishers are the ones to choose subtitles, which may not be related to the actual content of the book. But ultimately the interesting things about personality tests are not the sexual proclivities of the authors but their use, the validity of the underlying theory, the potential of the test to assign qualities from those theories to the test takes, and other, scientific, investigations of the tests themselves instead of the mere circumstances of their writing and adoption. The Cult of Personality does very little to approach this side of the question. Mere paragraphs cover the actual science by researchers into these tests; the most extensive discussion of the actual use of tests is the quotation of people offended by the sexual and scatological nature of some questions. Do not read this book expecting anything like a scientific examination of personality or even these particular theories of personality; such a work may exist, but this is not it. If a surface-level history of the personality industry appeals to you, this book may be for you. It is inoffensively written and hangs together well, even if dressed up as something else.

[Jack · Rating 3 out of 5]

Against Personality
---
Is there anyone so bullishly wrongheaded than the personality theorist? These people believe they can rein in individuality into a comprehensive, comprehensible system, implicitly pushing this new system to serve the interests of another - an older and more authoritative system - capital. The personality test as anything more of a tool of internet timefuckery - a selfie of the soul - is a dangerous thing. People are simultaneously far more and far less interesting than the systemization of our natures indicate.

I was a great admirer of the personality test as a young teenager. Occupying a secular world where religion's rod and staff could not guide me through the valley of adolescence, I accepted the idea of Science as my master narrative. To know thy self was to be psychologically vivisected. I was a Enneagram Type 5w4 INTJ Taurus.
Being a Enneagram 5w4 meant I was a withdrawn, contemplative type with a secret emotional center.
Being an INTJ meant I was blunt, unemotional and someone who struggled to form romantic relationships, but I was also a rarity of the population, a secret genius who hardly needed a drop of water to realise my innate worth.
Being a Taurus meant that my mother and I were very alike as our birthdays were two days apart, although I'd never considered us so.

I leaned into the character handed out to me so far, I became a hunchback. The system was good to me. I liked what it said - before personality tests I couldn't find the words to do myself justice. I was barely anything, I didn't like myself. And so I could use these to understand others, as I never had before. Testing and sorting my friends into neat boxes became my main hobby. Because these tests told me I was 'naturally extremely intelligent and capable', I wouldn't need to work hard; everything would work itself out.

It didn't. To some degree my self-worth as I got older relied upon my ability to live up to the descriptions to which I were assigned. I was shy and lonely, but the MBTI told me that was a natural consequence of who I was, and that it was best to wait until someone liked me by happy accident. Withdrawing does not really help. I'm still an mix of overconfidence and awkwardness, of arrogance and shyness, in my attempts to flirt. It is easier to act natural when your nature is ascribed and your lines can be learnt off. I took the MBTI again as I read this, out of curiosity, and now I'm an INFJ. Too much literature has eroded my ability to think, and now I'm a quivering ball of emotion! Nevermind the fact that most of what I've learnt, to crib from Socrates, concerns my ignorance and a healthy skepticism toward anything that is so-called 'rational'.

The personality hobbyist ritualistically becomes a misinterpreter of character by studying people as types rather than as active participants of a private performance, characters in an unfolding narrative. Murphy Paul criticises a series of personality models before promoting the concept of a 'life story', but even her framing in that chapter is too anodyne to reach for the basic truth that all the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players. Literature is the surest way to gain an understanding of others and, perhaps (the tempering of my conclusion is critical), know thyself. Making a system of that is damn near impossible, but that's not a problem in and of itself.

We should respect others by assuming, in the art we love and find profound, that there is something to love and admire in them, too. In us, too. Put the neologisms and butchery of language scientists reach for away. Tell them to go read Clarice Lispector or Virginia Woolf or Thomas Mann. Do not be afraid to be opaque on self-examination; maybe your self is a pallid thing. Maybe it is ineffable.

[Glenn · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Jafar · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you ever had to take a management course in which some business school instructor administered a silly 40-question personality test and then, upon seeing the answers, gave you an all-knowing smile in the manner of “I now know everything that there is about you,” you’re right to have felt that something is seriously wrong with this business of sorting people into different types. And if you’re wondering why most of these personality tests come up with four types, you can blame the Greeks and their four humors. The number four stuck. Jung picked it up at the beginning of the 20th century with his personality types. You might object that Jung was particularly weird and superstitious – even Freud found him irrational – and other personality tests must be more rigorous. Not so.

Murphy goes through the history and methods of different types of personality tests that were or still are popular: phrenology, Rorschach inkblot test, MMPI (Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory), TAT (Thematic Apperception Test), MBTI (Myer-Briggs Type Indicator), and a few others. These tests are used, often over the objection of scientists and serious psychologists, in courts and educational institutions and corporations and other places with sometimes significant consequences. The popularity of these tests, as Murphy demonstrates over and over, has nothing to do with the rigor of their methods and the accuracy of their results. There’s no shortage of people who think that a person’s personality can largely be identified just based on the zodiac sign. Many of these personality tests are not much better than horoscope. There must be something very appealing with reducing a complicated and conflicted human being to one of the few personality types with their corresponding shallow descriptions.

I have to make a special mention of Murphy’s superb writing style. Thoroughly enjoyed it.

[Emma Sea · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've always been rather a closet fan of the Myers-Briggs, for no other reason than it made me feel it was OK to be an introvert before it was all hipster, and understandable that I went back to work when my daughter was 6 months old. Apparently (insert eye roll here) my 'type' is the only type with which women don't value child raising above not going completely insane working outside the home.

I have no issue with Paul's assertion that all such tests are basically bullshit (I can never see anything in those damn inkblots, which allegedly means I might be mentally ill). I'm a little uncomfortable, though, with how the bullshit label was indicated when it comes to Isabel Myers. I think it's supposed to be inherently appalling that the Myers-Briggs was developed by a "Pennsylvania housewife" (p. xii). As far as I'm aware only hikers have anything against Pennsylvania, so it must be the "housewife" part that should cast immediate aspersions. Myers's sins are far worse than this, though: as her son notes, when developing the test "her tremendous enthusiasm for anything that was happening in our family, or that could be made to happen, was gradually withdrawn from people around her" (p. 111). Her husband "began complaining about her absorption"; the test "monopolized her attention" (p. 121). Well! How fucking dare she!

So, I didn't find the writing style very appealing. I could happily have done without a great deal of the detail about how each test was developed and then applied in its infancy. However the book raises good questions about how and why these tests are applied: especially to children, adolescents, and within the criminal justice system. And Paul also makes me feel justified about always cheating on my Myers-Briggs :)

2.5 stars, rounded up

[Sarah · Rating 2 out of 5]

The historical aspects of this book were very interesting, but the conclusions about how "dangerous" these tests are seemed overly dramatic and lacking in any evidence, virtually the same flaws that the author complains about in so many of the tests themselves.

[Nancy · Rating 3 out of 5]

An in-depth and interesting look into the nonsensical and cyclical development, history, and industry of pseudo-scientific personality tests. The reading experience was certainly a sermon towards the choir; I would be interested to hear the reaction of a reader who DOES believe in personality tests.

Two wishes:
1. The wish that this book had a 2021 update. I would be fascinated to know more about how things have changed or not since this book was published in 2004.
2. The wish that the book had spent more time examining the (mis)use of these tests in society and less on the personal lives of the tests’ creators.

[Joyce · Rating 2 out of 5]

DNFed because too repetitive but interesting in beginning

[Vappu · Rating 2 out of 5]

Luettu töitä varten, silmäillen.

[Max]

neat info but it feels like the author was vibing while researching then kinda lost interest when it came to writing it. content-wise it feels like it should be a fun little romp but i really didnt super enjoy actually reading it

[Neal Alexander · Rating 3 out of 5]

There’s a modern tendency to turn personality descriptions into nouns. For example ‘neurotic’, in its modern senses, dates from the late 19th century both as adjective and noun while ‘choleric’ is 500 years older and has stayed as just an adjective.

The Myers-Brigg classification, which assigns everyone to one of 16 available groups, denoted by four letters, is essentially Jungian, and its enthusiasts make statements such as “INFPs do not like to deal with hard facts and logic” (https://www.personalitypage.com/html/...), from where it’s a short step to saying that what you can and can’t do depends on your personality type.

There’s plenty in this book about how scientists get carried away with personality typing, and, even allowing for a bit of journalistic over-egging, it becomes scary when such tests (even the Rorschach) are used to judge real-world situations such child custody disputes (http://www.americanbar.org/newsletter...). In the workplace the author aptly says ‘Whether we are “thinkers” or “feelers,” “sensers” or “perceivers” makes an effective distraction from other kinds of questions: whether the work we do is fairly managed and adequately paid, whether it’s personally rewarding and socially useful. Looked at from this less entertaining perspective, our economy is full of jobs for which no one is really “fit.”’

[Joanna · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have found yet another genre of book that doesn't do much for me. Sensationalist pop journalism. Which this is. I mean, look at that subtitle! "How Personality Tests Are Leading Us to Miseducate Our Children, Mismanage Our Companies, and Misunderstand Ourselves." After skimming through this book and reading a couple of chapters, I feel stupid. I was tricked by clickbait! Dammit. It's like an overblown buzzfeed article. Not a lot of meat. A good bit of history, a good bit of biography on a few people interested in psychology, and good bit of bloviating about how labeling personality traits are just like, not goooood, maaaan. I just wanted to like... FOCUS! EVIDENCE! WHERE IS IT?

It is not here. Part of the reason why I mentioned journalism is that... it kinda reads like someone is researching information in a superficial way, like... not journalism, actually, but reporting on something that someone thinks we should have a book on. Like a rushed celebrity biography. Like, "hey people are talking about that thing. let's write about that thing. Do you care about that thing? Not particularly, but yeah, I will condense some information on it, write a little something on it, and sell it."

[David Thomley · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book provides a very clear and readable overview of personality testing. Perhaps even more interesting are the character profiles of the individuals who developed and advocated for these tests.
Millions of people in various situations have taken personality tests. Some examples are job seekers, employees instructed to take them by management or human resources, those in counseling or therapy, sometimes even those who are engaged in custody battles or other legal conflicts. Many people know the names- the Rorschach test. The MMPI. The Meyers-Briggs. Probably very few know the backstories of how these tests were developed and promoted. The author provides the colorful and entertaining details of the scholars, the outsiders, and the eccent
rics responsible for personality testing. She provides a valuable service by casting an objective light on the successes and failures of these testing procedures. She clearly shows how, despite their popularity, they remain controversial and often outside of the academic mainstream.

[Candy · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book provided some interesting accounts about the history of personality testing. I appreciated learning about test designers such as Henry Murray and Raymond Cattell. I also found the idea of a life-story approach to understanding personality to be an intriguing idea. I will look up information on Dan McAdams, a psychologist with a narrative approach to understanding personality who Paul discusses in the last chapter of her book. However, I had hoped that the book would provide a bit more on just how personality tests are "leading us to miseducate our children, mismanage our companies, and misunderstand ourselves."

[Daniel Joshua · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is outdated. Things change, nonetheless she does bring up some fascinating points. The argument that seems the most reasonable to me is the mere fact that humans ought not to confine themselves to "Static norms". That in order to be a fully actualized person one must have full control over one's psychological identity and should therefore be more fluid in social settings. Adapting to the situation could be seen as having a healthy personality.

[Heather · Rating 2 out of 5]

It was dry at times. I really liked the historical perspective of each type of personality test and how each are intrinsically flawed for their present purposes. I have always been fascinated with personality tests, so this one was an eye opener for me.

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book opens with a chapter on phrenology. Walt Whitman, it turns out, had the bumps on his skull read early in his life and became a life long advocate of the science, which went from the hot new thing to embarrassing pseudoscience in his lifetime.

This sets the tone for most of the book. Personality tests (covered at chapter length are the Rorschach, TAT, MMPI and Myers-Briggs, in addition to countless others discussed) can evoke grand claims from their creators and inspire the test takers, but do they hold up much better in the annals than phrenology? Not really, under close examination. Paul doesn't get into the nuts and bolts of the statistics, but relies on reviews and professional guidelines. These are convincing and supplemented by anecdotes, like a psychologist who embraces a meaningless drawing test with the argument that, while paranoid people may not sketch big eyes on people in lab settings, they sure do it in her office.

The real problem with the tests though is their embrace by governments and corporations. There is an industrial testing complex and it caters to things like mandatory tests for employees, or subjecting welfare recipients the invasive MMPI to "find out" if they are addicts (in liberal Contra Costa county no less, right across the bay from me.) This is all nonsense, and Paul is good at pointing out how it impersonalizes the preservation of the status quo: Maybe you aren't being groomed for leadership because you have the personality of an administrative assistant.

[Jamuna · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have mixed feelings about this book. The title is misleading about the actual content. It should have been named in the lines of History of Personality Testing to make it more appropriate. I understand the author's attempt to describe the rich inner lives and complex character of the inventors of various tests over the last 100+ years, as a parallel to the tendency of their respective inventions to simplify and categorize people into neat boxes (the author herself points this out in the final chapter - these are the people who can hardly be described by their own tests). But what it becomes is pages and pages of biographical narrative which could have been cut down and still communicated the intended message. I felt the space could have instead been devoted to more information on how the specific tests affect people and institutions, and how we can overcome the problems posed. It could just be a case of failed expectations on my part. Other than this disappointment, the book does a good job of describing the development of various personality tests over the decades and how each claimed to get to the essence of human behaviour. It was surprising to learn how most of these tests ended up as a tool for corporate machinery, along with its scary implications, I had never seen it from this perspective before. Worth a read

[Harrison Gerard · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good overall, although Paul is a little heavy-handed at times with her disdain for her subjects. As a sort of crash course on personality tests I think the book succeeds, but it wavers in that its never quite sure how academic to get -- most of the book is (admittedly interesting) biographical sections, but the lack of focus on the flaws of the tests themselves is frustrating. Paul is more likely to tell you that a test doesn't work, than why.

Good overall. If the subject sounds interesting, you'll probably like it.

[Stuart · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book explores the inexorable redundancy of monkey categorisation. I read it for a class that focuses on business culture and strategy. For me, what I take away from this academic approach is that our (occasionally obsessive) driven need to distinguish ourselves from each other is both futile and conducive toward counterproductive division.

[Linnea Meyer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although the book was interesting and well written, it is more of a history of personality theories than anything else. I do not agree with Annie Paul's complete disgust with personality tests, and feel that she presented her case rather poorly.

[Niklas Laninge · Rating 3 out of 5]

I mainly read this book for the chapter on MBTI, which was 4 stars. Same goes for the last chapter about the future of personality testing. A boring but important book who’s purpose could be filled by a few blogpost on the same topic.

[Patience · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars. Really interesting information, really good points about the weaknesses of personality testing and the serious ethical concerns about ways that they've been used, but also a little strident at times.

[Bjorn · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author writes well, but doesn’t hide her personal biases against personality tests. She was convincing, but probably overstated her case. It seemed like much of her criticisms were aimed at straw men, and not honest disagreements with her peers.

I guess what bothered me most about the book is that she placed all tests under the same umbrella of guesswork. Just reading her descriptions of the origins of these tests made it obvious that some were more grounded in evidence than others. She liked to compare them all to the arbitrary and magical thinking of phrenology, and I thought that was unjustified.

Tests do simplify the complexities of personality, and knowing that doesn’t make them all completely useless. They can be helpful, but she disparaged almost every use of them except when her political point of view blinded her to some of the more obvious abuses in a 1950’s Civil Rights case. I enjoyed reading her justification for that, watching her gently dance around the issue. Corporate misuse was stressed throughout the book, and so was the misuse in other court other cases. I found the abuse in court cases compelling, but her claims of corporate misuse were a little confusing. She claimed corporations increase efficiency by testing, but then claimed the tests are useless. You can’t have it both ways. If they were detrimental to efficiency, corporations would eventually discover that and discontinue their use; courts wouldn’t, and that’s why I tended to agree with her on court abuses.

I learned the MMPI and the general agreement about 5 personality traits were more valid than I thought. I’m sure that wasn’t her intent. I learned the Briggs-Meyer and most other tests are likely bogus. I’m sure that was her intent.

The last 2 chapters (not the Epilogue) were the best, so the book ended with a bang. The whole book is well written, even though some of the claims against the tests seemed over generalized.

[Judith · Rating 5 out of 5]

The truth about personality testing. Ms. Paul takes us through the history of each of several types of personality tests: who developed them and for what purpose, how they are now used, who else has created similar tests. She then points out the failures of these tests, based on studies and common sense.

The upshot is that personality tests try to place each of us into confined boxes and we will not fit. It is impossible to simplify a personality because we are all a combination of many influences.

Yet these tests are used to make crucial decisions about us, from where we work and what we do to whether or not we receive custody of our children in divorce cases. In the end, Ms. Paul suggests that if we do not choose to refuse to take these tests when requested that we investigate the test itself before taking it, and proceed informed. The situation is analogous to the use of lie detectors, although lie detectors may actually be more accurate. In either case, it is unwise to allow decisions to be made based on either.

The book is loaded with examples and is backed up by many pages of notes and references. More people need to read this book, not least the psychologists who routinely rely on such tests.

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good investigation of the origins of each of the major psychological tests on the market. It starts with a discussion of phrenology, moves to the Rorschch ink blots,MMPI, and the TAT. She saves her most biting analysis on Myers-Briggs and its many successors. She does a fantastic job in looking at the creators of the tests and how some of them may have been a bit unsavory. With great clarity, she explores the limits of tests in schools, industry and even for personal self-rating.

Unfortunately, you don't get the full impact of the book unless you read the endnotes. There you find that testing companies around the US reported expressed interest in personality tests following 9/11, that 30 percent of companies now administer personality tests and that some of these tests have "an error rate far worse than that of the notoriously unreliable polygraph machine."

The book was well researched, and fun to read, but it could have been so much more powerful. I feel she laid the groundwork and then pulled her punches.