Annie Murphy Paul's 'The Cult of Personality' a Missed Opportunity

Annie Murphy Paul’s book, The Cult of Personality, comes with a long and ambitious subtitle: How Personality Tests are Leading Us to Miseducate Our Children, Mismanage Our Companies, and Misunderstand Ourselves. This seemed like a grand claim, since I had never thought personality tests had a great deal of influence in American society, or any other one. Like most people, I had been subjected to the Myers-Briggs test in school, and have occasionally succumbed to various brainless but amusing online tests, on subjects as weighty as whether or not I am a flirt. The results never changed the way I behaved, or thought of myself; even when they struck me as accurate, they were roughly as useful as someone telling me what color shirt I was wearing. In high school, I remember feeling a slight shock of recognition at my four-letter code, but even then I knew that, at times in my life, I had felt like every one of the other personality types. The test may have sketched my dominant mood—or perhaps just how I was feeling that day—but it in no way confined my life inside the four walls sketched by those letters. Paul’s book is a catalog of the recent attempts to build those walls, and declare that was everything really important about a person had been captured within them. Going through recent history’s most popular personality tests, from the Rorschach to the NEO Personality Inventory, she attempts to show how the tests fail to capture even the barest fragments of the human personality, and often produce summaries of people that are not only oversimplified but totally inaccurate.All of this would seem like a waste of the author’s critical talents if these tests, armed with the patina of science, weren’t taken so seriously in arenas where peoples’ lives are effected. She goes through several examples of how the Rorschach test is used in courts to help determine things like child custody, and how the MMPI (Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory) is often used by companies to decide who gets hired, or who is even granted the privilege of an interview. She points out how few of these personality tests have been held to rigorous standards of scientific accuracy, and how many have actually had holes poked in them through serious testing. A recent examination of the Myers-Briggs, for example, found that 53% of people who took the test again got a different four-letter type the second type—posing serious problems for a test that claims to measure a standard, unchanging quantity.Most of the tests, however, have not faced such obvious proof of their ineffectiveness—or, if they have, Paul does not bother to go into it. I think this is the major weakness of the book. Personality tests are popular because they purport to measure things that are so difficult to measure or describe in any other way. To prove that they are inaccurate, then, one must set up experiments very carefully, and prove that the tests return bogus results. Then, one must explain why your measure of the quantity is closer to reality than the one the test offers. For example, in a chapter on the MMPI, Paul writes that “according to a review conducted by the federal government’s Office of Technology Assessment, 95.6 percent of people who fail integrity tests are incorrectly classified as dishonest—an error rate far worse than that of the notoriously unreliable polygraph machine.” So what questions measure integrity on the test, I thought, and how exactly was this Office of Technology Assessment test conducted? I think describing a study designed to determine whether someone was honest or not would be fascinating.But Paul doesn’t tell us any of this, or why this study is to be believed. All the book has is a footnote in the back, telling us where to find the study if we want to read it. Perhaps it seems like I’m splitting hairs, but this is the pattern throughout the book—for a book intimately concerned with how science takes our measure as individuals, The Cult of Personality is singularly uninterested in the actual science. Flipping through each chapter, I would estimate that 85% of the pages are devoted to the stories of the people that invented these tests, and the rocky road the tests took to popularity; the remainder are devoted to the barest sketches of why the tests might not be accurate.To be fair, the stories of the test’s creators are without fail fascinating and well-written, but one can’t help but ask what a scientist’s sexual habits or marital relationship have to do with how the tests misrepresent humanity. There are exceptions: in a few cases, the history of the test alone is enough to cast some doubt on its accuracy. Paul points out that the control group used in the creation of the MMPI consisted purely of Protestant Minnesotan farmers, and their responses to bizarre questions like “I believe everything is turning out just the way the Bible said it would” were supposed to be the nation’s standard for mental normality. But on the whole, the stories are there purely for color—and when we come to the end of the chapter, the real evidence against the test’s efficacy is either summarized and buried in a footnote, or Paul simply writes that there is no scientific evidence to support the test’s claims. It seems strange to confidently claim on the cover that things are being mismanaged, and our children miseducated (a subject, by the way, that is barely touched upon) if all she can truly assert is that tests should be approached with caution.Lacking scientific evidence that all of the tests produce false or useless information, Paul oscillates between objecting to them on utilitarian and ethical grounds, occasionally objecting to the tests for contradictory reasons. She objects, quite rightly, to the rigid formulas of the Rorschach and MMPI, where guidelines written decades ago are still used, and then uses the mutability of TAT (Thematic Apperception Test) against it. The TAT is a series of pictures, essentially whatever images one wants to use, out of which a subject can create a narrative—so the tests can be tailored to any subject. Paul decides that this is a mark against it. “Within a few years [of its invention],” she writes, “there was no agreed-upon way to administer, score, or interpret the procedure.” Wait a second, I thought, isn’t that what you wanted—no rigid rules, just a flexible item for diagnostic purposes? But then Paul switches to an ethical argument: the TAT was soon used by corporations to try to tap into the secret desires of the consumer. I agree that there is something seamy about using such psychological methods to get people to buy things, but it has nothing to do with whether the TAT is a useful tool in the hands of a therapist. Several of the tests, in fact, might be useless but are also fairly innocuous, as long as a therapist doesn’t pretend that they absolutely mean one thing or another. One test asks a child to draw a person, after which a therapist analyzes the drawing. Paul thinks this test should be discontinued, as it has not been proven to show anything, but unless there are hard and fast rules for this analysis that can be shown to produce inaccurate diagnoses, I don’t see why this wouldn’t be a perfectly valid way of (cautiously) assessing a child’s state of mind.More than real evidence that these tests produce bad data, Paul has the perfectly honorable conviction that they are used primarily by corporations for the purpose of sorting and fitting people into a predetermined space on the production line, and that they represent a cramped and stultifying view of human nature. Frankly, I agree, but I think if she expects corporations to stop using such tests, she’ll have to actually show how they misrepresent human nature for the company’s purposes as well. Four letters, or the story one tells about an inkblot, are obviously not enough to sum you up as a person; but they may be perfectly valuable as a tool for determining if you’ll make a good sales representative, or would like to buy a Toyota Corolla. The fact that Paul doesn’t bother truly discrediting the tests or, when such debunking studies already exist, doesn’t bother going into detail about the actual experimental apparatus, makes this book much less valuable than it could have been.The book is short, just 226 pages, and there would have been plenty of space for this missing detail. But all Paul wants to do, it seems, is tell good stories. There is a long narrative about a man named Dodge Morgan sailing around the world, while taking personality tests, that is never integrated with the rest of the book; I have no idea why it is there. The same could be said of the story of Kenneth Clark, the man who tested black children on their response to white and black dolls—something which doesn’t even fit the putative subject of the book, although I’ll admit it makes a good story. The emphasis is continually on of the lives of brilliant, eccentric scientists, with smoothly summarized bits of science popping up here and there—the style is reminiscent of Malcolm Gladwell, where it is annoying for the same reason. Occasionally this focus on narrative creates what I consider a form of dishonesty. Here is an example. Paul is writing about how many people know how to fake the Rorschach tests used in court, and decides to produce this sentence: “Estimates of the rate of deliberate deception on tests taken in a legal context run as high as 60 percent.” I looked that over, and it was filled with so many qualifying words that I had to check her source in the back of the book. Apparently this estimate comes from Paul’s own interview with Paul Lees-Haley, a forensic psychologist. So how exactly is 60% a number worthy of giving the reader? Simply because this one guy said it? I suppose it is technically accurate, in the sense that estimates certainly run that high as long as that one guy came up with sixty—how, of course, we don’t know—but unless the number is somehow defended, a careful author shouldn’t present it to the reader. I understand that she didn’t want to interrupt her narrative to get stuck in the nitty-gritty of how this educated guess was made, but I will take scrupulosity over a smooth read every time; they are, in any case, not mutually exclusive.Several years ago, I read a book that had many of the qualities lacking in The Cult of Personality, and covered some of the same ground. Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man has detailed sections on phrenology, and even mentions Cyril Burt and factor analysis, both of which have a small place in Paul’s book. The difference is that Gould realizes that the science is just as interesting as the lives of the people involved, and gives equal space to both. He also realizes that his ethical convictions must have the support of scientific analysis, and takes the time to lead the reader through how the theory is not only morally but factually wrong. Some of it is abstruse, but it necessary for getting an understanding of the subject instead of a watered-down gloss. Paul’s book is useful for much of the information it provides, and for sounding a note of caution about a largely ignored danger, but it seems to me a missed opportunity. Her ethical foundation is more sympathetic, for me, than those of the test-makers, and her emphasis on trying to understand the entire person more humane—but ideas have always required more support to triumph. After all, John Stuart Mill summarized Paul’s conviction, perhaps more beautifully than anyone else, a century before anyone thought of using a test to place a human being in Cubicle 34 of Sector H: “Human nature,” he wrote, “is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing.”