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. ( )

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." ( )

A helpful antidote for all the personality-type books and articles out there. ( )

Fascinating take-down of personality testing across the board, starting with phrenology and working through more or less chronologically.
It's a good exploration of how many of the tests have been used for purposes well beyond their initial design, and how little evidence there is for their utility in most settings. I think the part of this book that was most chilling was the section that looked briefly at a high school using the 'Colors' personality test (which I hadn't heard of before). Teachers suggesting that further study wouldn't be worthwhile because someone was an 'orange' or whatever .. ugh. ( )

This book looks at various supposedly scientific tests used to describe and categorize human personalities, from phrenology (which was taken quite seriously in its day), to inkblots, to the 504-question MMPI, to Meyers-Briggs, and beyond.

From the title, you might expect this to be one long, heated anti-personality-test rant, but it's not. Most of the book is spent looking at the history of the various tests, the philosophy behind them, and the often quite colorful people who created them. All of which is interesting in its own right, but it does become very clear from those histories that none of these approaches is exactly resting on a rock-solid scientific foundation, and that even the ones with some empirical basis are of rather limited value. Which is a problem, because these tests are often used by courts and corporations, and their results can have profound impacts on people's lives, from losing a job to losing custody of a child. Paul is particularly critical of the corporate use of personality tests (which are often not even the already dubious tests developed by psychologists, but produced-for-profit knockoffs with even less scientific credibility), which she sees as tools for companies to pigeonhole and manipulate their employees. We're much better off, she contends, not trying to reduce something as complex as human personality to neatly labeled and over-simplified types. And it seems very hard to disagree. ( )