The Cult of Personality Testing: How Personality Tests ... (ISBN 0743280725)

Stopping the madness: Type is hype:
This is by far the best book I've read about the weird and twisted world of personality testing. As a psychologist and an academic, I deeply appreciate Ms. Paul's extensive research as well as her ability to craft orienting generalizations from a vast research literature and then compare the literature to the feeding frenzy of the popular testing market. What she gives us is what psychologists already know and test makers don't want us to know - that most personality tests provide as much insight as an alcoholic screeching down the highway at 100mph with the gear shift in one hand and a bottle of Maker's Mark in the other. Her assault is well-reasoned and integral in nature. She discusses how objective science has shown the majority of tests (regrettably still in use) lacking in reliability and validity. This does not stop the marketing machine of testing corporations from telling people what they want to hear. Ms. Paul's conclusion is that peoples' attachment to tests like the over-hyped Myers-Briggs Type Indicator - is really a love affair - rationality has nothing to do with it. This hits the mark exactly. The book also informs the consumer and possibly the victim of testing what to ask, what rights to demand, and how to find out if the test is useful or simply swill. Her writing is so polished I can forgive her missing Jane Loevinger's research on ego development that would have lived up to the author's litmus test for what is valid and reliable. She also bypasses the Enneagram probably because it is so pitifully understudied it can't even claim the status of a test. Be that as it may, I'd recommend this book to anyone interested in psychology or coaching. If you read this book, the next time someone asks you what your "type" is, you'll have a very scholarly way to tell them to get lost.

A Welcome Wake-up Call...:
(Annie Murphy Paul read at the West Side YMCA as part of the Writer's Voice Visiting Authors Series on October 29, 2004. This is from my introduction to that evening). 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.

get real!:
The author discredits every psychologist and scientist for their earnest effort in pursuing something that can be a scientific breakthrough one day. She claims that individuals are far too complicated an organism to try to understand through personality testing and although she may make a few rational and reasonable points against why the tests should not be administered for students and job applicants, she undermines the very attempt scientists made to use common human behavior using observation and language. She doesn't offer any real solutions. She's on this bandwagon and she would also like to have you get on it too maybe she can take some more scientists with her as well; you know the kind who are working on trying to find a cure for cancer, the organism that is also very difficult to understand. Should we stop from attempting to find a cure for cancer? What would happen if we did? I thought this book was out to discredit the tests administered to job applicants and while I was looking for reasons why the tests are not effective I ended up getting an education of the test makers. This book is ridiculous, pointless, insinuating, and falls too short of my expectations.

Think before you Buy!:
The author discredits every psychologist and scientist for their earnest effort in pursuing something that can be a scientific breakthrough one day. She claims that individuals are far too complicated an organism to try to understand through personality testing and although she may make a few rational and reasonable points against why the tests should not be administered for students and job applicants, she undermines the very attempt scientists made to use common human behavior using observation and language. She doesn't offer any real solutions. She's on this bandwagon and she would also like to have you get on it too maybe she can take some more scientists with her as well; you know the kind who are working on trying to find a cure for cancer, the organism that is also very difficult to understand. Should we stop from attempting to find a cure for cancer? What would happen if we did? I thought this book was out to discredit the tests administered to job applicants and while I was looking for reasons why the tests are not effective I ended up getting an education of the test makers. This book is ridiculous, pointless, insinuating, and falls too short of my expectations.

"The Cult of Personality" - Not Worth Your Time:
If you're looking for a fair evaluation of personality tests, based on their validity and merits, don't look here. This book is clearly written from a very strong personal bias of the author against personality tests. It'd be interesting to read any objective criticism the author would have to offer, but apparently she isn't interested in providing us with scholarly criticism here. The author asserts that "Personality Tests Are Leading Us to Miseducate Our Children, Mismanage Our Companies, and Misunderstand Ourselves," yet she fails to back this up with studies, research, logical arguments, or cited expert opinion. If the author wants to prove her point,she is required to provide at least some kind of evidence showing that the personality tests are either completely inaccurate or consistently being misused. In her chapter on the MBTI (one of the personality tests), the author devotes the majority of her discourse to a biography of Isabel Myers (the creator of the MBTI). The author quite cleverly (and unfairly) paints an unfavorable picture of Meyers in attempt to discredit Meyers' work, by discrediting Myers herself. Unfortunately, this type of argument carries about as much weight as if one were to argue :Einstein was was really off-the-wall, in fact, he was kind of strange...therefore his theory of relativity is wrong. Honestly, this book isn't worth your effort.