When looking for a job, you might think that a good personality test is almost as important as a good exam from the university or college. Exam grades can be influenced by attending all lectures and otherwise studying diligently, but taking a personality test can make you feel like a "sitting duck", often you don't even know what you are being "examined" on.
It is not wise to pretent yourself as someone you are not. You wouldn't be able to live up to that in the long run anyway. But if you understand about how these personality tests work, you can avoid the most harmful and disastrous mistakes.
1. Personality
Personality tests are widely used in recruitment today. It is estimated that in Denmark between 40 and 70 percent of private and public companies use personality tests in recruitment.
You might think that a good result in a personality test is almost as important as a good exam in higher education. It is true that it is best to answer relatively forthright, so as not to contradict yourself. But it is wise to avoid scoring on a career killer, such as anxiety.
What is personality? Everyone talks about it, and it is described in psychology, in novels and poems, but no one has ever seen a personality.
Words that describe personality. Photo Sara Adelbarry Medium Reflector.
Immediately after World War II, Raymond Cattel collected 18,000 different words from dictionaries and literature that describe different personality traits, so that one would believe that it is something that exists, and not just a literary invention that authors use to describe the characters in their novels.
The same Raymond Cattell defined personality as "that which allows a prediction of what a person will do in a given situation."
But if such a well-defined personality controls the actions of the individual, what about the existential freedom of the individual. If each of us - without our knowledge - is programmed to react in certain ways in certain situations? Who is it that looks out of our eyes, listens with our ears and makes decisions on our behalf, if not our own free and independent soul, which freely decides to react as it finds relevant and appropriate in different situations?
Dostojevsky spent several hundred pages describing Rodion Raskolnikov's personality and his development in "Crime and Punishment", Tove Ditlevsen used several hundred pages in "The Street of Childhood" describing Esther's personality and its development. How can we believe that we can describe a personality in a concentrated tabular form as a transcript from a personality test?
Half a glass of water.
A student assists a psychology professor in organizing a quick personality test. Other students are test subjects.
The first test subject comes in and is shown a glass of water, half full.
"How would you describe this glass of water?" the professor asks.
1st test subject: "It's half empty".
The professor notes "pessimistic" in his report.
The second test subject comes in and is shown the glass of water.
"How would you describe this glass of water?", the professor asks.
Second test subject: "It's half full".
The professor notes "optimistic" in his report.
The third test subject comes in and is shown the glass of water.
"How would you describe this glass of water?", the professor asks.
Third test subject: "It's a small cylindrical container of transparent silicon dioxide designed for short-term storage of drinkable liquid. Only half of its capacity is currently used."
The professor looks disoriented and clearly doesn't know what to write in his report.
"Oh, sorry," says the student who is assisting with the practical administration of the test, "I forgot to tell you about - the engineers - they have no personality! They just want to solve problems."
Camus wrote: "We continue to shape our personality throughout our lives. If we knew ourselves perfectly, we would die." So according to Camus, a personality test can at most meassure a cross-section of time.
Arne Poulsen, professor of developmental psychology at Roskilde University, does not believe that you can put a label on a person. He believes that personality tests are often superficial and reminiscent of horoscopes found in newspapers. He says: "There are of course some very general traits that will be common to a person, which a test could reveal, but it is incredibly difficult to say anything exactly about how a person will act in a specific or upcoming work situation; or what triggers them".
An American professor, Walter Mischel, believed that "Most clinical assessments have ignored the individual's actual behavior in real life".
He explained in more detail: In real life, our actions are not only driven by our personality types, but by the changing situations in which we find ourselves. We adjust our behavior with regard to our roles - such as colleague, parent, friend, etc. - and with regard to the situation, which can be a regular work situation, a business meeting, a family outing, a cocktail party, a sporting event or the like. We adjust our behavior depending on whether we are facing a man or a woman, a child, an elderly person, the boss or an office student.
We adapt our behavior to changing situations. Photo habr.com
An American psychologist named McAdams asked how the Big Five in particular - but probably all psychological tests - can explain a man, who is normally passive but becomes combative when challenged. Or a woman who is usually reserved but becomes talkative when nervous. How can the models explain a man who usually does not show emotions but almost falls apart when offered sympathy?
Dan McAdams characterized the traditional personality types as "the psychology of the stranger", by which he means that they represent methods for quickly assessing a stranger, about whom we actually know very little. And that is probably what psychological tests are mostly used for, namely to gain more knowledge about people we do not know very well - for example in connection with recruiting.
In Denmark, the use of tests in business - but also in the school system and in psychiatric wards - is increasing. It is said that within the business world, around 15,000 personality tests are conducted each year in connection with filling mid- and top-level public and private positions. In addition, there are the tests that many companies' human resources departments themselves conduct internally.
In connection with the case of possible removal of children from some Greenlandic parents in Denmark, it has emerged that the social authorities use many different personality tests to test parents' abilities as parents, including:
- Rorchsach, which is an in-depth psychological test.
- WAIS test, which is an IQ test.
- MCMI, The Millon Clinical Multiaxial Inventory III, which is an in-depth psychological test similar to MMPI.
- RMET, Reading the Mind in the Eyes test, which tests social responses, including Asperger's and autism.
- SRS, The Social Responsiveness Scale, which is especially used to specify borderline cases of milder autistic syndromes.
- LEAS, Levels of Emotional Awareness, which measures emotional awareness.
In the USA, it seems there is widespread support for the philosopher Karl Popper's claim that psychology is not a science.
Popper developed the theory of falsification in the post-war period for testing the truth value of scientific theories. He defined a scientific theory as one that is practically possible to falsify, that is, to prove that it is possible not true.
As a pedagogical example of falsification, Popper put forward the theory: "All swans are white." This is clearly a scientific theory, since it is practically possible to study the species swan everywhere on Earth.
But it is not enough to go to the nearest park and find that all the swans there are white. You have to make more effort to try to falsify the theory, for example take a trip to Australia, and if you find even a single swan that is not white, or even a photograph of one, it will mean that the theory "all swans are white" is false, it is not true.
And as you know, you will find that the Australian swans are black, which falsifies the theory. Photo Falsificacionismo de Popper.
For example, a theory that states that "the backside of the moon consists of green cheese" is not scientific, since it is not yet possible to land there and take a sample. Until then, according to Popper, it will be a matter of faith.
Psychological theories cannot be proven in a final and unambiguous way - and certainly not falsified. One can only compare them with one's own life experiences, one's own feelings, the books one has read, and - if one is a psychologist or doctor - one's clinical experiences. And that is precisely why psychology was one of Karl Popper's favorite aversions.
In the United States, there is considerable suspicion of some states' public child welfare services. For example, James Roger Brown from Kentucky accuses agents within the state's child welfare services of "harvesting" children for adoption - or worse - by subjecting the parents to the MMPI test in particular, and concluding from the test results that they are unfit as parents.
We remember that the MMPI was developed in a psychiatric hospital with the aim of finding out what is wrong with the unfortunate people, who are admitted there. The test thus assumes that the test takers already have mental problems, but you just don't know which ones. It will inevitably divide even normal test takers into categories such as "hypochondriasis", "depression", "hysteria", "psychopathic deviant", "paranoia" and so on. One can imagine that if parents have an aggrieved and aggressive attitude towards the test, things could go completely wrong, even if they are completely normal.
