I grew up in the midst of the IQ craze. There was a strong belief when I was a kid that IQ could predict a lot about a person, and it was important to have that number. Of course, schools had programs for the gifted in those days, so it was important to have some means by which students could be classified. (It's probably a post for another time, but it is criminal to see NCLB used to justify the elimination of programs for the gifted - see here.)
When it became clear that IQ differed among subgroups, the whole concept ran right into the group politic think so popular in the '70s, and still popular today. We couldn't look for reasons that IQ might be different, it became necessary to invalidate the whole concept. That we proceeded to virtually throw out the idea that children have different intellectual endowments, and need to be educated differently, hasn't been seen as the problem it is. (None of this has been helped by the articles about Mensa [look, the housewife and truck driver are chatting about Kant with the nuclear physicist] or Marilyn vos Savant, holder of the "highest IQ ever," which, to her credit, she has admitted is not all there is to intelligence.)
Still, the urge to classify and, thus, explain, is seemingly irresistible. Part of this is a desire to explain why people are the way they are, and how we might make them "better." Thus the testing industry. A really good book that discusses the obsession in our schools and workplaces with personality tests is The Cult of Personality Testing:
How Personality Tests Are Leading Us to Miseducate Our Children,
Mismanage Our Companies, and Misunderstand Ourselves [2005] by Annie Murphy Paul.
I'm not going to review that book here, just recommend it. If you want to see an author take apart the lofty justifications for MMPI or Myers-Briggs, this book will do that. The Wikipedia entry on Myers-Briggs has some solid background.
I'll just tell my personal tale of my encounter with Myers-Briggs. I worked, briefly, for a company that had bought into the full Myers-Briggs method, paying consultants to come in, administer tests, advise managers as to how to deal with their INFPs or whatever. I have no idea how much money was thrown into this endeavor, but it took up a lot of time over the 5-6 months I was there (oddly enough, I just missed the initial testing and never did find out my official letters).
The truly great thing about this kind of theory is that it lends itself to an almost infinite amount of follow-on. While there are only 16 distinct types, there are 256 different ways for two people to interact (an ESTJ has to deal with an ENFP way different than with an INFP, but we have a workbook, a video, all for a great low price). And if you're a manager with eight employees of three distinct types, the opportunities for training are gigantic. When I say great, I mean for the consultant, not the client, and definitely not the employees of the client.
Of course, there are numerous caveats offered with any of these tests, they shouldn't be used for job evaluation, etc. Ah, the naivete. Modern business loves to have pseudo-scientific methods of judging and weighing. That there is little stability in an individual's ratings from one test administration to the next, that they do not offer multi-modal results but a big clump of people in the collective normal curve bulge, none of that matters. What does is that there are letters or numbers which tell you everything you need to know about that person. (For a range of opinions, take a look at this post on the Daily Kos from a couple of years ago and the associated comments.)
But what if giving someone a test is out of the question? Don't worry, science will provide answers to the question, who is this person and what will he or she do? TIME magazine, about four months ago, did a cover story on the ever-popular "power of birth order," in which we find out that the order in which you were born in your family determines your income level, how connected you are to others, how funny you'll be, and so forth.
In my review of the book The Bush Tragedy, I pointed out that, despite Jacob Weisberg's impressive study of the Bush family dynamic and its effect on our 43rd president, very little of what he wrote, no matter how true, offered us any real predictive power - and this is about someone for whom we have a great deal of information.
To take the results of any test, IQ, MMPI, Myers-Briggs, or others, or any other quality, such as birth order, and try to infer behavior or any other attribute is a fool's game. One might as well use astrology or phrenology (that would be cool, watching an interviewer or admissions director feel heads) to determine what a person is all about.
We are complex. We are each the product of genes, family background, events (some of them random), personal choice, geography, and many other factors. I'm not 100% sure what I will do in any given situation from day to day, so how could I presume to know that about someone else based on a simplistic test? We need to deal with people as individuals; if we're in a situation where we cannot, such as evaluation of resumes, we need to apply objective criteria as much as possible.
When it became clear that IQ differed among subgroups, the whole concept ran right into the group politic think so popular in the '70s, and still popular today. We couldn't look for reasons that IQ might be different, it became necessary to invalidate the whole concept. That we proceeded to virtually throw out the idea that children have different intellectual endowments, and need to be educated differently, hasn't been seen as the problem it is. (None of this has been helped by the articles about Mensa [look, the housewife and truck driver are chatting about Kant with the nuclear physicist] or Marilyn vos Savant, holder of the "highest IQ ever," which, to her credit, she has admitted is not all there is to intelligence.)
Still, the urge to classify and, thus, explain, is seemingly irresistible. Part of this is a desire to explain why people are the way they are, and how we might make them "better." Thus the testing industry. A really good book that discusses the obsession in our schools and workplaces with personality tests is The Cult of Personality Testing:
How Personality Tests Are Leading Us to Miseducate Our Children,
Mismanage Our Companies, and Misunderstand Ourselves [2005] by Annie Murphy Paul.
I'm not going to review that book here, just recommend it. If you want to see an author take apart the lofty justifications for MMPI or Myers-Briggs, this book will do that. The Wikipedia entry on Myers-Briggs has some solid background.
I'll just tell my personal tale of my encounter with Myers-Briggs. I worked, briefly, for a company that had bought into the full Myers-Briggs method, paying consultants to come in, administer tests, advise managers as to how to deal with their INFPs or whatever. I have no idea how much money was thrown into this endeavor, but it took up a lot of time over the 5-6 months I was there (oddly enough, I just missed the initial testing and never did find out my official letters).
The truly great thing about this kind of theory is that it lends itself to an almost infinite amount of follow-on. While there are only 16 distinct types, there are 256 different ways for two people to interact (an ESTJ has to deal with an ENFP way different than with an INFP, but we have a workbook, a video, all for a great low price). And if you're a manager with eight employees of three distinct types, the opportunities for training are gigantic. When I say great, I mean for the consultant, not the client, and definitely not the employees of the client.
Of course, there are numerous caveats offered with any of these tests, they shouldn't be used for job evaluation, etc. Ah, the naivete. Modern business loves to have pseudo-scientific methods of judging and weighing. That there is little stability in an individual's ratings from one test administration to the next, that they do not offer multi-modal results but a big clump of people in the collective normal curve bulge, none of that matters. What does is that there are letters or numbers which tell you everything you need to know about that person. (For a range of opinions, take a look at this post on the Daily Kos from a couple of years ago and the associated comments.)
But what if giving someone a test is out of the question? Don't worry, science will provide answers to the question, who is this person and what will he or she do? TIME magazine, about four months ago, did a cover story on the ever-popular "power of birth order," in which we find out that the order in which you were born in your family determines your income level, how connected you are to others, how funny you'll be, and so forth.
In my review of the book The Bush Tragedy, I pointed out that, despite Jacob Weisberg's impressive study of the Bush family dynamic and its effect on our 43rd president, very little of what he wrote, no matter how true, offered us any real predictive power - and this is about someone for whom we have a great deal of information.
To take the results of any test, IQ, MMPI, Myers-Briggs, or others, or any other quality, such as birth order, and try to infer behavior or any other attribute is a fool's game. One might as well use astrology or phrenology (that would be cool, watching an interviewer or admissions director feel heads) to determine what a person is all about.
We are complex. We are each the product of genes, family background, events (some of them random), personal choice, geography, and many other factors. I'm not 100% sure what I will do in any given situation from day to day, so how could I presume to know that about someone else based on a simplistic test? We need to deal with people as individuals; if we're in a situation where we cannot, such as evaluation of resumes, we need to apply objective criteria as much as possible.
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