From Publishers Weekly
Personality tests are administered to millions of people every year for purposes ranging from career counseling and educational guidance to determining parental fitness in custody battles. But Paul, a former senior editor at Psychology Today, contends that the accuracy of these tests and their diagnostic value have never been convincingly demonstrated; their results are, she says, "often invalid, unreliable, and unfair." This study entertainingly chronicles the often surprising stories behind the creation and promotion of the most popular tests. The Thematic Apperception Test, for example, was developed by the freethinking Harvard psychologist Henry Murray in collaboration with his longtime mistress; its original purpose was to facilitate "deep dives" into the unconscious in search of self-actualization, but today it is used more often by corporations seeking to evaluate job applicants and manipulate consumers. Paul's book is not a closely reasoned assault on the theoretical underpinnings of personality testing (like the critique of IQ testing in books like Stephen Jay Gould's The Mismeasure of Man), but its anecdotal account of how personal quirks, intellectual hubris and institutional biases have shaped the use and misuse of personality tests should lead lay readers to ask hard questions the next time they are invited—or required—to submit to such testing. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
Paul, mental health journalist and former senior editor at Psychology Today, notes a cyclical pattern in psychologists' devising personality assessments that are widely acclaimed, later debunked, and eventually superseded by the next new tool. She traces the historical roots of personality testing from phrenology in the 1830s to the Rorschach inkblot to the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. The personalities behind the tests are as fascinating as the tests they devise: Kenneth Clark, who used dolls to show the psychological damage of segregation on black children, fought his own battles with racism; the highly driven Isabel Myers, who borrowed from Carl Jung, brought her own obsessions to the task of developing her now famous test. Paul intersperses history with current uses of, and overreliance on, personality tests to determine everything from child custody and competency to stand trial to school admission and job placement. Paul advises healthy skepticism regarding the efficacy of the tests and advocates for strict confidentiality of their results. A highly accessible and engrossing book. Vanessa Bush
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
Robert Coles, bestselling author of Lives of Moral Leadership; The Call of Service; and The Spiritual Life of Children; James Agee Professor of Social Ethics, Harvard University Here is America's corporate world (and, too, a segment of our university life) as they have come to terms with human variousness -- and, alas, subdued it to the demands of ambition and avarice: individual complexity brushed aside in favor of catchall psychological categorizations. A book at once daringly original minded and thoroughly, importantly instructive.
Mary Pipher, author of Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls; clinical psychologist and adjunct clinical professor at the University of Nebraska Paul's thoughtful book sums up the history of test-makers and their tests. With great clarity, she explores the limits of tests in schools, industry, mental health facilities, and even for personal self-understanding. Her work will provoke a cultural re-examination of America's ever-present, relentless personality testing and typing.
Deborah Blum, author of Love at Goon Park: Harry Harlow and the Science of Affection In this fascinating book, Annie Murphy Paul invites us to look into a familiar mirror -- the one that we have created through personality testing -- and then shows us how the resulting image warps the way we see ourselves. The Cult of Personality is an important story, one that shows us the very human way that psychology develops measurements of "self" and the very human flaws that result. This is a book worth reading for the revelations alone. Still, the author has also made it an engrossing story, full of insight, yes, but also full of detail and drama surrounding the people who created this troubling "cult".
Review
Lauren Slater, author of Opening Skinner's Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the 20th Century; Welcome to My Country; and Prozac Diary In The Cult of Personality, Annie Murphy Paul has overturned some of our long-held assumptions about personality testing and, in doing so, has raised provocative questions and made profound points about psychology and our relationship to it. This is an excellent book.
Book Description
Millions of Americans take personality tests each year: to get a job, to pursue an education, to settle a legal dispute, to better understand themselves and others. But where did these tests come from, and what are they saying about us? In The Cult of Personality, award-winning psychology writer Annie Murphy Paul reveals the surprising and disturbing story behind the tests that claim to capture human nature. Combining cutting-edge research, engaging reporting, and absorbing history, Paul uncovers the way these allegedly neutral instruments are in fact shaped by the agendas of industry and government. She documents the dangers of their intrusive questions, biased assumptions, and limiting labels. And she exposes the flawed theories and faulty methods that render their results unreliable and invalid. Personality tests, she contends, produce descriptions of people that are nothing like human beings as they actually are: complicated, contradictory, changeable across time and place. The widespread use of these tests has deeply troubling consequences. Students are being consigned to narrow categories even as they're still growing and developing. Workers are having their privacy invaded and their rights trampled. Companies are wasting hundreds of millions of dollars, only to make ill-informed decisions about hiring and promotion. Our judicial system is being undermined by inaccurate evidence. Perhaps most distressing, we are all increasingly implicated in a "cult of personality" that celebrates the superficial over the substantive, the static over the dynamic, the standard and average over the distinctive and unique. Compelling and insightful, this book is an eye-opening account of a collision among the needs of business and bureaucracy, the imperatives of a lucrative and largely unregulated testing industry, and the eternal human desire to make sense of ourselves and each other.
Download Description
"Millions of Americans take personality tests each year: to get a job, to pursue an education, to settle a legal dispute, to better understand themselves and others. But where did these tests come from, and what are they saying about us? In The Cult of Personality, award-winning psychology writer Annie Murphy Paul reveals the surprising and disturbing story behind the tests that claim to capture human nature. Combining cutting-edge research, engaging reporting, and absorbing history, Paul uncovers the way these allegedly neutral instruments are in fact shaped by the agendas of industry and government. She documents the dangers of their intrusive questions, biased assumptions, and limiting labels. And she exposes the flawed theories and faulty methods that render their results unreliable and invalid. Personality tests, she contends, produce descriptions of people that are nothing like human beings as they actually are: complicated, contradictory, changeable across time and place. The widespread use of these tests has deeply troubling consequences. Students are being consigned to narrow categories even as they're still growing and developing. Workers are having their privacy invaded and their rights trampled. Companies are wasting hundreds of millions of dollars, only to make ill-informed decisions about hiring and promotion. Our judicial system is being undermined by inaccurate evidence. Perhaps most distressing, we are all increasingly implicated in a ""cult of personality"" that celebrates the superficial over the substantive, the static over the dynamic, the standard and average over the distinctive and unique. Compelling and insightful, this book is an eye-opening account of a collision among the needs of business and bureaucracy, the imperatives of a lucrative and largely unregulated testing industry, and the eternal human desire to make sense of ourselves and each other. "
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