A key concern about using personality tests in the workplace is the potential they create for illegal discrimination against certain groups.
A major criticism of many personality tests is that because they are sometimes based on narrow samples in which white, middle-class males are over-represented, they tend to skew test results toward this identity. That is, they normalize one identity while pathologizing other identities. For example, the sample used to develop the original MMPI consisted primarily of white people from Minnesota. While the MMPI-2 intentionally expanded this sample to address this bias, critics argue that Asian Americans, Hispanics, and under-educated people are still largely underrepresented.
As mentioned above, tests like the MMPI are often useful in identifying mental illness. When they are used to assess potential employees in the workplace, however, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission can interpret them as an attempt by an employer to gain knowledge of a medical condition prior to an offer of employment. This is a form of discrimination and an illegal basis for a hiring decision in the United States. Another danger of using personality tests in the workplace is that they can create false-negative results for instance, honest people being labeled as dishonest , especially in cases when the applicant is stressed.
Privacy issues also arise when applicants are required to reveal private thoughts and feelings in their responses and perceive this as a condition for employment. There are several criticisms specifically regarding the validity of the MBTI as a useful measure of personality.
The MBTI is not yet scientifically proven, and skeptics—including many psychologists—argue that the MBTI has not been validated by double-blind tests in which participants accept reports written for other participants and are asked whether or not the report suits them. Some even demonstrate that profiles can apparently seem to fit any person due to ambiguity of their basic terms.
Critics also argue that people do not fit easily into one of 16 types because they use different styles of thinking at different times. Critics argue that the test results of the MBTI should not be used to label, evaluate, or limit the respondent in any way.
Since all types are valuable, and the MBTI measures preferences rather than aptitude, the MBTI is not considered a proper instrument for purposes of employment selection.
Many professions include highly competent individuals of different types with complementary preferences. Privacy Policy. Skip to main content. Search for:. Assessing Personality. Overview of Personality Assessment Psychologists measure personality through objective tests such as self-reports and projective measures. Learning Objectives Compare various objective vs. Key Takeaways Key Points Psychologists seek to measure personality through a number of methods, the most common of which are objective tests and projective measures.
Key Terms validity : The extent to which a concept, conclusion, or measurement is well-founded and corresponds accurately to the real world. Validity and Reliability of Personality Assessments Personality assessments vary in their levels of validity and reliability. Learning Objectives Evaluate the concepts of validity and reliability in the context of personality assessment.
Key Takeaways Key Points Validity refers to whether or not a test actually measures the construct that it is meant to measure; reliability refers to the degree to which a test produces stable and consistent results.
Objective tests tend to be relatively free from rater bias and are thought to have more validity than projective tests. They devoted their lives to their system, and they kept the faith for a very long time. If they had not, there would be no MBTI today. The mother, Katharine Cook Briggs, was born in When she died, in , the test she inspired was all but forgotten. The daughter, Isabel Briggs Myers, was born in Since Katharine began studying personality differences when Isabel was four, this means that the two women persisted for almost eighty years before the MBTI became the commercial bonanza it is today.
According to Emre, personality testing has become a two-billion-dollar industry. But Briggs and Myers were not in the personality game for the money. They truly believed that they had discovered a way to make work more efficient and human beings less unhappy. Both books describe Briggs and Myers as intellectually driven women in an era when career opportunities for intellectually driven women were slim.
Neither one had any training in psychology or in psychiatry—or, for that matter, in testing—and neither ever worked in a laboratory or an academic institution. A third woman, Mary McCaulley, who came upon the test in , the year Katharine died, was a professor of psychology at the University of Florida.
But, essentially, the MBTI was home-cooked. It arose out of one of the most mundane domestic circumstances—the fact that the members of a family often differ in tiny but stubbornly irreducible ways. One spouse is a planner and the other is spur of the moment. One child has a million friends and another child is a loner. In the home, differences like these are magnified, because people are less self-conscious and because enforced intimacy generates friction.
But at work, too, people have noticeably divergent ways of operating. There is no better way to be—logical or emotional, spontaneous or organized, party bro or brooder. These are not imperfections to be corrected. They are hardwired dispositions to be recognized and accommodated. In the workplace, this means assigning tasks to people based on their personality types, which is one of the things that the MBTI is supposed to help companies do.
Emre says that the office-furniture designer Herman Miller uses a modified version of the MBTI to create chairs and desks for different personalities. We need to get used to it. The results come in the form of a customized report for each taker, which describes their strengths and weaknesses in detail, as well as a graphical summary that can be used to compare applicants to one another. Related: Emotional Intelligence: Definition and Examples.
More than two decades ago, researchers constructed the HEXACO Personality Inventory to assess the various dimensions of an individual's personality and how they apply their own theoretical interpretations to various situations. In the revised version, you can choose from three assessment length options: the full length questions , half length questions and the HEXACO 60 60 questions.
It measures and tests the five main traits outlined in the five-factor personality model: neuroticism, openness to experience, agreeableness, conscientiousness and extraversion, with each of those five traits breaking down into further subcategories.
For example, the neuroticism trait includes vulnerability to stress, anxiety, depression, impulsiveness and self-consciousness. Many of the traits it measures are important in the workplace, which has led to an increase in its use as an employment screening tool. The Eysenck Personality Inventory assesses an individual's personality based on two key dimensions: neuroticism vs. Based on the categories, Dominance, Influence, Steadiness and Compliance DISC , this test breaks into 28 statements each with four options for the test-taker to rate how they identify with the statement, ultimately resulting in one of 12 different personality types.
With Best Careers for Each. Understanding your own character traits can be a powerful tool when deciding your career path. Additionally, this self-awareness could give you an advantage when being assessed by potential employers. Taking a personality test could help you to:. Having insight into your personality type will shine a light on strengths you can highlight on your resume while also surfacing skills you could potentially improve. When considering potential training or college majors or possible career shifts, a personality test can be helpful in guiding your vocational development.
Personality assessments may come up during the interview process. When the test was given an additional 2 years later 4 years after starting on the job , the results suggested high risk for alcohol-related difficulties. Another method for assessment of personality is projective testing. This kind of test relies on one of the defense mechanisms proposed by Freud—projection—as a way to assess unconscious processes. During this type of testing, a series of ambiguous cards is shown to the person being tested, who then is encouraged to project his feelings, impulses, and desires onto the cards—by telling a story, interpreting an image, or completing a sentence.
Many projective tests have undergone standardization procedures for example, Exner, and can be used to access whether someone has unusual thoughts or a high level of anxiety, or is likely to become volatile. It is a series of symmetrical inkblot cards that are presented to a client by a psychologist. The Rorschach has been standardized using the Exner system and is effective in measuring depression, psychosis, and anxiety. A person taking the TAT is shown 8—12 ambiguous pictures and is asked to tell a story about each picture.
The stories give insight into their social world, revealing hopes, fears, interests, and goals. The TAT has been used in clinical settings to evaluate psychological disorders; more recently, it has been used in counseling settings to help clients gain a better understanding of themselves and achieve personal growth.
Despite these shortcomings, the TAT has been one of the most widely used projective tests. There are three forms of this test for use with different age groups: the school form, the college form, and the adult form. The tests include 40 incomplete sentences that people are asked to complete as quickly as possible Figure 3.
The average time for completing the test is approximately 20 minutes, as responses are only 1—2 words in length. This test is similar to a word association test, and like other types of projective tests, it is presumed that responses will reveal desires, fears, and struggles. Figure 3. These incomplete sentences resemble the types of questions on the RISB. How would you complete these sentences? For many decades, these traditional projective tests have been used in cross-cultural personality assessments.
For example, when the TAT was used with African-American test takers, the result was often shorter story length and low levels of cultural identification Duzant, Watch this CrashCourse video to better understand how personality is measured:. It has only 10 questions. Simply decide much each pair of words or phrases fits you.
It was created by University of Texas psychologist Sam Gosling as a very brief measure of five personality characteristics: Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Emotional Stability, and Openness to Experience. There are several different self-report inventories that have been developed to measure the Big Five traits, most with 50 or more questions. Looking at the TIPI, you might have the impression that creating a personality inventory is pretty easy.
And, even then, the tests continue to be studied, criticized, and revised. In this exercise, we will look more closely at some of the work that goes into creating a personality inventory or questionnaire. To help you keep your eyes on the process of test construction, we want you to think about a personality dimension that is not as obvious as self-esteem or extraversion.
We are going to assess blirtatiousness. His wife is kind and friendly, and she is first to arrive when help is needed, but she hides her feelings and opinions. It is not easy to know what she wants or where she stands. Consider your own closest friends. Where do they fall on the continuum between my friends? Who is open and easy to read, and who is private and guarded? Back in the early s, social psychologist William Swann and his colleagues became interested in the impact of self-disclosure—the process of communicating information about ourselves to other people—on personal relationships.
Early in their research, the psychologists realized that the story was not going to be simple. Enthusiastic self-disclosure blirting is sometimes good for relationships and sometimes bad, and the same is true about reluctance to self-disclose brooding. To do this, we are going to re-create Dr.
The first step in constructing a test or scale to measure some personal characteristic is to be clear about what it is you are measuring. In their papers, Dr. A person is effusive if they excitedly show and express emotion.
One thing to notice about this definition is that it focuses on behavior more than inner feelings.
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