Personality Test Today – Be Sure To Study
Personality tests have been around for a while, and are widely used by businesses, schools and even religious groups. A few friends of mine and I recently had a conversation about these tests and whether or not they are worth anything.
Some argue that many personality tests cater strongly to the Forer Effect, that tendency of people to view positive, yet vague, assessments of themselves as highly accurate. This effect is often used by charlatans, astrologers and others of questionable scruples as their way to entice new victims.
The premise is simple: say something flattering about a person and they will believe you to be smart. If you take it a step further and say the flattery is derived from a test or other diagnostic tool, they’ll believe that the tool is not only accurate, but useful for determining what that person would do, how they should act, etc.
Further confounding this is the evidence. Many, if not most or even all, personality tests (even the widely used ones) have little reliability or predictive value. Basically that means that if you take the test more than once, you’ll get a different result, and if you use it to try to predict your behavior, you won’t get it right.
So why take these tests at all? Why take a useless, or at best questionable test, if there is little reason to believe it is worth anything?
Well for one, because they are fun. We all like to hear nice things about ourselves, and the promise of a test telling us what how great and special we are caters to our ego’s. But it also allows us a moment of introspection. Many of us spend the majority of our days in pursuit of something, we have little time to turn our attention towards less immediate tasks. A little time spent thinking might do us some good.
So here is a basic personality test you can take that might allow you that moment of introspection. It may prove useful, or it may be worthless.
But no matter how it turns out, it is fun to think about.
(Photo courtesy Thomas Hawk’s Flickr page through Creative Commons license. Thanks, Thomas Hawk!)