The cult of personality testing
This book tells the surprising and disturbing story of the tests that claim to capture human nature. It goes behind the scenes to discover how personality tests are used in America's companies, its courts, its schools, and in organizations from churches to community centers to dating services. It exposes the serious flaws of personality tests, explaining why their results are often invalid, unreliable, and unfair.
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What Hacker News says
- I have some other links about the test mentioned in the interesting submitted blog post here.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/on-leadership/myers-b...
"Now, 50 years after the first time anyone paid money for the test, the Myers-Briggs legacy is reaching the end of the family line. The youngest heirs don’t want it. And it’s not clear whether organizations should, either.
. . . .
"Yet despite its widespread use and vast financial success, and although it was derived from the work of Carl Jung, one of the most famous psychologists of the 20th century, the test is highly questioned by the scientific community."
http://www.skepdic.com/myersb.html
http://www.psychometric-success.com/personality-tests/person...
"Overall, the review committee concluded that the MBTI has not demonstrated adequate validity although its popularity and use has been steadily increasing. The National Academy of Sciences review committee concluded that: 'at this time, there is not sufficient, well-designed research to justify the use of the MBTI in career counseling programs,' the very thing that it is most often used for."
http://www.indiana.edu/~jobtalk/HRMWebsite/hrm/articles/deve...
The book-length treatment of the subject, by Annie Murphy Paul, in The Cult of Personality Testing, is quite interesting.
http://www.amazon.com/Cult-Personality-Testing-Annie-Murphy/...
There are many discussions here on HN about company hiring procedures. From participants in earlier discussions I have learned about many useful references on the subject, which I have gathered here in a FAQ file. The review article by Frank L. Schmidt and John E. Hunter, "The Validity and Utility of Selection Models in Personnel Psychology: Practical and Theoretical Implications of 85 Years of Research Findings," Psychological Bulletin, Vol. 124, No. 2, 262-274
http://mavweb.mnsu.edu/howard/Schmidt%20and%20Hunter%201998%...
sums up, current to 1998, a meta-analysis of much of the HUGE peer-reviewed professional literature on the industrial and organizational psychology devoted to business hiring procedures. There are many kinds of hiring criteria, such as in-person interviews, telephone interviews, resume reviews for job experience, checks for academic credentials, personality tests, and so on. There is much published study research on how job applicants perform after they are hired in a wide variety of occupations.
http://www.siop.org/workplace/employment%20testing/testtypes...
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: If you are hiring for any kind of job in the United States, prefer a work-sample test as your hiring procedure. If you are hiring in most other parts of the world, use a work-sample test in combination with a general mental ability test.
The overall summary of the industrial psychology research in reliable secondary sources is that two kinds of job screening procedures work reasonably well. One is a general mental ability (GMA) test (an IQ-like test, such as the Wonderlic personnel screening test). Another is a work-sample test, where the applicant does an actual task or group of tasks like what the applicant will do on the job if hired. (But the calculated validity of each of the two best kinds of procedures, standing alone, is only 0.54 for work sample tests and 0.51 for general mental ability tests.) Each of these kinds of tests has about the same validity in screening applicants for jobs, with the general mental ability test better predicting success for applicants who will be trained into a new job. Neither is perfect (both miss some good performers on the job, and select some bad performers on the job), but both are better than any other single-factor hiring procedure that has been tested in rigorous research, across a wide variety of occupations. So if you are hiring for your company, it's a good idea to think about how to build a work-sample test into all of your hiring processes.
The long version of my company hiring procedures FAQ was last posted at
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4879803
18 days ago, with uncharacteristic snark in response to a snarky blog post title.
- What I'm reading here is that the best thing it does is tell us whether someone is introverted or extroverted. Well, that's also the most obvious one and I don't agree that that justifies using such a flawed test. If you have a test where half the results and half are bad the test is more or less useless.
Consider this also: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/give-and-take/201309...
> I began to read through the evidence, and I found that the MBTI is about as useful as a polygraph for detecting lies. One researcher even called it an “act of irresponsible armchair philosophy.” When it comes to accuracy, if you put a horoscope on one end and a heart monitor on the other, the MBTI falls about halfway in between. [...] Research shows “that as many as three-quarters of test takers achieve a different personality type when tested again,” writes Annie Murphy Paul in The Cult of Personality Testing, “and the sixteen distinctive types described by the Myers-Briggs have no scientific basis whatsoever.” In a recent article, Roman Krznaric adds that “if you retake the test after only a five-week gap, there's around a 50% chance that you will fall into a different personality category.”
