Personality tests: hogwash?

Another non-humble opinion

(The following comment was sent to me by email-- Jon)

I've only had a little time at work but what I've found so far is kind
of hilarious. One of the things your friend mentions, the DiSC
profile, was written by one William Moulton Marston, who achieved fame
for, among other things, inventing (part of) the lie detector test,
which no less a body than the National Academy of Sciences has called
out as a complete hoax; and creating Wonder Woman. Most of his
publication record seems to be either short articles in Encyclopedia
Britannica, or feel-good malarkey about How To Live a Full Life
published in the Rotarian (I imagine it is a magazine for the Rotary
Club??). He had no long-term academic post as far as I can tell. I'm
sure he would have been a charming guy to drink beer with but I
wouldn't trust him to tell me who I am. It turns out to be hard to
see what people have done with it since, as "disc" makes a lousy
search term. If you're curious, with your fancy library access you
might try seeing who's cited W. M. Marston; that'll be a superset of
anyone who's done something useful with the inventory, and a smaller
set of hits than you get from "disc."

The MBTI I've already looked up info on many times and the deal with
that is that whatever else it may be, it inaccurately portrays itself
as typing people into bimodally-distributed clumps, when people are
actually normally or uniformly distributed along those scales (I
forget which). So its whole concept of "Y'see, here are two different
kinds of people..." (to the fourth dimension) is kind of wrong, and if
that's wrong the whole idea is wrong. Also, people who study
personality for a living hate it and make fun of it. (Although, to be
fair, a lot of other psychologists also hate and make fun of the
people who study personality for a living.) Despite this, the MBTI
*feels* compelling to a lot of people. I like to tell people it's the
zodiac for nerds, as that also feels compelling and is kind of dumb.

I don't know about the other tests. My gut feeling is that the
problem is, personality psychology never studies the things laypeople
want to know about; it studies the things that are more amenable to
study. For instance, rather than starting with dimensions that "feel"
natural, often they develop inventories by asking a crapton of
questions that seem like they should capture individual differences in
personality, and then using math to let the data tell *them* what
dimensions people can vary on and are they correlated and which
questions suck and blah blah blah. But laypeople don't care about
that, they just want something that's transparently relevant to them;
and non-psychologists are happy to provide. So people wind up with
this impression of psychology that is based on things written by
people who are in business schools (and may or may not have ever
learned a thing about psychometrics), or by kooks like Marston, or by
clever liars who just wanna make a buck. (I'm pretty sure the
personality test that weeded me out of Epic came from that third
category.)

So in sum, based on my cursory and incomplete review, I don't think
he's being overly cynical, though I don't think it's necessarily that
it can't be done, it just isn't.

Erin