“Personality tests are about as accurate as your astrology sign or your destined Hogwarts house.”
— Greg Murray (2021), psychologist
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Evidence of What?
Personality profiles are bogus manufactured evidence for two reasons. Despite all cautions they are used to predict events outside of their domain. They’re advertised as “suggestive,” but people take suggestions literally. They can both truly reveal and falsely create.
All tools yield inappropriate results when used incorrectly, but the damage from the incorrect use of ideas is difficult to contain. When you oversimplify a person you create bias, distortion, and false characterization that can have widespread effects. The tendency to oversimplify is irresistible, and this is the attraction and danger of profiling.
Personality profiles are also built on average descriptions which are increasingly inappropriate the farther you go from the average. If you’ve learned to do things that require unusual attention or awareness, then personality profiles will fault you in conventional ways for being unconventional.
In addition, a person has various, different personalities, often radically different. You may be a good neighbor and a cruel parent, a patriotic citizen and a domestic abuser, an honest politician but a dishonest partner. Our personalities are costumes of varying color and depth. A profile only sees you as the person you make yourself out to be. Most psychopaths would know how to score as highly positive as they excel at meeting superficial norms.
Personality profiles are established using a self-assessment questionnaire. Some enlist other people’s opinions of you, but this is rare. As a result these algorithms reflect how you see yourself, how you would like to see yourself, or how you think you’re seen. Each of these can be different, and different again from how others see you, which again depends on whom you ask.
I took the Minnesota Multi-phasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) test for a court custody case to which I was party. This self-assessed psychological profile takes hours to complete and is considered legal evidence for judging one’s personality. The psychologist who proctored the test cautioned me not to attempt to bias the results because the test would expose any efforts to do so.
Of course, the proctor did not explain what was meant by exposing any effort to bias the outcome, but I have since come to understand this is nonsense. While the questions have some redundancy that allows for testing consistency, there is no such thing as truth in a personality profile. The idea that some qualitative algorithm can establish truth is absurd. Everyone’s self-assessment is biased because it’s your own subjective view of yourself. You can fool the algorithm if you’re consistent.
It was interesting that the proctor lacked empathy and, as I later learned when I saw their notes, they also lacked insight. They were the kind of person you would expect to evaluate one’s personality using a formula. Additionally, the legal system is designed for expediency and resolution, not insight or understanding. Forensic psychology, such as provides a legal framework for understanding people, is a contradiction of terms.
About That Tree That Fell in the Forest…
My mother typically used knives as screwdrivers, selected spices to impart colors, misinterpreted effects, and misunderstood actions. Things sort of worked, but not very well. She wasn’t stupid, she was short sighted. She focused on what marginally worked, didn’t understand why, and progressed little in her understanding.
As a psychotherapist, I recognize she might have been traumatized by childhood criticism and struggled with low-self esteem. I have no proof, this is just what I infer. Whatever the reason, she insulated herself in a family environment that acted as an anodyne to her shortcomings. Her perpetual lack of awareness smoothly graded into dementia.
People think quantum mechanics is mysterious and proves the world makes no sense at the subatomic scale. This might be true if people understood what they were talking about, but they don’t. There are some things quantum mechanics asserts that make perfect sense in our daily lives.
One of the most important quantum mechanical insights is that no property of a thing is separate from the properties of the things it interacts with. In short, nothing that’s said about anything has a definite meaning that’s separate from the properties of the thing or person who’s saying it.
For the parent, this means being a “good parent” depends on what you have caused not what you intended. For the Tarot card reader it means that cards reveal little about the person to whom they are dealt without your skill in interpreting the person.
At a philosophical level this means that nothing has meaning without someone to appreciate it. More prosaically, the falling tree does not make a sound if there’s no one to hear, it only makes a vibration. There is no such thing as an intrinsic property as the notion of property relies on the interaction between things. Quantum mechanics says that what you observe depends on how you observe it, and this makes perfect sense.
Separating Fact from Fiction
There are many personality profile tests. My friend Dan advocates the Life Styles Inventory assessment, or LSI. You’ll find little online information about the LSI aside from pages trying to sell it to you. Describing the LSI, the Human Synergistics website (https://www.humansynergistics.com/) says:
“Designed for managers, leaders, students, and those in professional and technical roles, the LSI empowers people to actualize their potential and contribute to the success of their organization. It’s particularly valuable for helping individuals:
- discover new and/or different ways of thinking and behaving
- increase effectiveness in their roles
- reduce and cope better with stress and the effects of pressure and change
- improve interpersonal skills and relationships
- focus on personal strengths, blind spots, and stumbling blocks
- increase their overall satisfaction and well-being
- achieve self-set goals
- think more creatively”
Items 1 through 5 are matters of presentation. These areas reflect what people expect and the LSI can help you meet expectations. This enables you to become a better actor both in the sense of playing a role and effecting a role.
Items 6 through 8—increasing well-being, achieving personal goals, and thinking creatively—portray the LSI as having extended value. These items, which can neither be defined nor established, are added to effect a fallacy of composition, otherwise known as the Illusory Truth Effect. In this fallacy, false items are added to a list of true items in order to foster an accepting mindset.
An inventory may draw your attention to your performance, but it is not a valid measure of existential issues. One’s performance in these categories may suggest something, but is there any truth to it? Don’t mistake the pertinence of the question with the truth of any answer.
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LSI Graphs
LSI graphs present 12 scores in a bullseye arrangement of 6 concentric circles. The third circle from the center is drawn with a heavier line and indicates the median response for some “average” population. Who is this “average”?
The 12 segments are collected into the 4 categories of security needs, people orientation, satisfaction needs, and task orientation. These categories are said to reflect your interpersonal styles of constructive, passive, or aggressive engagement.
The validity of these interpretations rest on the Human Synergistics company’s success in selling them to you. The validity of the system depends on the conformity of the people to whom it applies as this population defines their average scores. In this regard, the LSI seems suited to business use for a population low to middle level management.
The Human Synergistics website contrasts a composite of three successful corporate executives,
and that of three failed executives. It would be interesting to see how these graphs would change when based on the scores of other executives, rather than average employees.
Presenting the profiles of those who succeeded in contrast to those who failed is another example of the Illusory Truth Effect because we don’t know the meaning of “success” and “failure,” whether their success or failure was fairly judged, or whether there was bias in choosing these individuals. This is the same evidence based fallacy that undermines psychology as a whole. Evidence alone means nothing.
I’m an independent physicist, author, psychotherapist, and creative. The following graph shows my LSI score. It is uniformly high in the areas of satisfaction needs and task orientation, and very low in the areas of security needs and people orientation.
Are All Ideas Good Ideas?
I appreciate how the LSI breaks the interactive domain into discussion topics. What I don’t appreciate is that they’ve assigned the wrong values to these topics. Let me focus only on perfectionism which was my second to highest score. Regarding perfectionism, the proprietary LSI Interpretation Guide, which is not publicly available, quotes Brené Brown.
“Perfectionism hampers success. In fact, it’s often the path to depression, anxiety, addiction, and life paralysis.”
— Brené Brown (2022, p.56)
There is a difference between being perfect and being right. I am not a perfectionist by nature but physics forces me to be perfectionistic in my work. Whenever your work has important consequences it’s important to know if you’re right or not.
In certain situations one must be especially cautious and work especially hard at being right. It’s the consequences that set the scale for your certitude, not the esprit de corp. You only learn what can be judged.
What’s important is knowing what’s needed and when, not being perfect or imperfect. Compulsive perfectionism is a problem, but so is a compulsive lack of it. Brené Brown’s failure to distinguish areas of importance undercuts greater understanding. I find Brené Brown to be compulsively superficial.
Do Planets Have Personalities?
As an undergraduate I spent 6 months working for astrophysicist Charlie Townes on calculations of the light reflected from the planet Jupiter. Knowing Jupiter’s spectrum can reveal both the composition of the atmosphere and how the atmosphere’s temperature varies with altitude. It’s a complicated calculation that results in various graphs of the amount of light absorbed and reflected at different frequencies. We compared these graphs with telescopic observations.
I completed my calculations and my results were published in the proceedings of an astronomical colloquium. However, my results could not be quoted further because, among my pages of calculations, Charlie found a minus sign where I should have written a plus sign. I don’t think this had much effect on the overall result, but you can’t be sure until you fix it.
This lesson taught me there are times when one must be obsessive. Small things can make a big difference. You had best know what these are, and do your utmost to get them right. This is not obsessive perfectionism, it’s accuracy where it’s important. This does not hamper success, it makes success.
“Now I’ve tried some things that don’t work. Well, OK. … You can be wrong. Don’t worry about it too much. Try hard to be right, but don’t be unwilling to take some chances. And look hard for things that might be there, that you think have a reasonable chance of being there. Look, and a failure or two won’t hurt you.”
— Charlie Townes (Stoller 2019, p.249)
Once you see that the LSI does not distinguish between being perfect and being accurate, you see that it also does not distinguish between success and failure. It does not distinguish between Charlie Townes—who invented the laser, the atomic clock, discovered inter-stellar organic molecules, was involved in discovering the Big Bang, was on the boards of numerous corporations, and who gave me a start in physics—and the depressed and anxious person who lives an addicted and paralyzed life according to Brené Brown.
What the LSI provides, what all personality profiles provide, are important questions and bullshit answers. The fault lies in the algorithm, the baseline, and its interpretation. The same could be said of ideas in general: it’s the questions they raise that are important, not the answers you take from them.
As I tell my therapy clients, they pay me for bullshit or what might appear to be. Every answer suggests a question, and answers are always invented at some level. It’s the questions that deserve your attention. Rather than examining your personality profile…
“You’re much better off examining your identity and making gradual changes in your beliefs and your relationships in order to become the person you want to be, instead of becoming preoccupied with your personality.”
— Greg Murray (2021)
References
Brown, Brené (2022). The Gifts of Imperfection, Hazelden Publishing.
Murray, Greg (2021 Jun 15). The Personality Fallacy: Examining Identity as the Catalyst of Change. Adaptive Edge Coaching. https://adaptiveedgecoaching.com/the-personality-fallacy-examining-identity-as-the-catalyst-of-change/
Stoller, Lincoln (2019). The Learning Project, Mind Strength Books. https://www.mindstrengthbalance.com/learn/
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