The Decline of the Psych Personality Test

As seen in the Boston Globe

The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, or MMPI, is taken by as many as 15 million people a year and used to screen applicants for jobs from police officer to nuclear technician to priest. Eighty-nine companies in the Fortune 100 use the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator to determine how and with whom their employees work best. The Rorschach test, the granddaddy of them all, is used diagnostically by eight out of 10 psychologists and routinely submitted as evidence in child custody cases, criminal sentencing, and emotional damage lawsuits. Online dating sites even use personality tests to help match prospective couples.

Clearly, there's something about the elusive notion of personality, and the possibility of capturing it, that draws us to these tests. But an increasingly vocal group of critics is fighting this testing tsunami, arguing that many of the tests themselves have not been tested and that their unscientific conclusions may do far more harm than good. Last year, in "What's Wrong with the Rorschach? Science Confronts the Controversial Inkblot Test" (California), four psychologists dismissed the Rorschach test as having no more validity than "tea-leaf reading and tarot cards." In "The Cult of Personality: How Personality Tests Are Leading Us to Miseducate Our Children, Mismanage Our Companies, and Misunderstand Ourselves" (Free Press), due out later this month, Annie Murphy Paul, a former senior editor of Psychology Today, charges that personality tests "are often invalid, unreliable, and unfair" and that their prevalence has grave consequences, not least the distortion of the very idea of human nature to fit their arbitrary dictates.

Part of a much larger article, reviewing the situation for each of the major tests. Bottom line: bad science used far more often and in situations that even the original authors did not envision, nevermind intend