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Courtesy of Pottermore.com
Courtesy of Pottermore.com
In one of the most famous scenes in the Harry Potter series, a group of children, newcomers to the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Witchcraft, lined up in front of an old wrinkled wizard's hat. This is the sorting hat. The hat will tell them which house they belong to during their studies at Hogwarts.
The sorting hat has something very attractive. It's wise. He seems to know people better than they know each other.
We humans love this kind of insight. And our desire to better understand and understand ourselves and the people around us has led to the creation of a multi-billion dollar industry built around personality testing.
The most famous of all personality tests is probably the Myers-Briggs type indicator, or MBTI. But there are many others too. These tests categorize people based on personality traits. Are you an introvert or an extrovert? Someone who likes unexpected challenges, or someone who prefers structure and calm? Many of the most successful US companies use personality tests to better understand their workers. Many people use them to understand each other better.
A Hidden brain Her listener, Ally Adler, passed the Myers-Briggs test at the age of 26 and was miserable in her work.
"It really helped me to understand myself as I had not done it yet to be able to work and manage the challenges of my personal and professional life," she says.
At the Potterverse Convention in Baltimore, adults and kids like to talk about their Harry Potter "homes" at Hogwarts – and homes where they think their friends should be.
Tara Boyle / NPR
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Tara Boyle / NPR
At the Potterverse Convention in Baltimore, adults and kids like to talk about their Harry Potter "homes" at Hogwarts – and homes where they think their friends should be.
Tara Boyle / NPR
But other people say that tests like these are deeply flawed. Earpiece Matthew Gale says the Myers-Briggs have completely misled him.
"My experience with Myers-Briggs has done a lot to ruin me emotionally for years," he says.
Although the effectiveness of these tests can be discussed in the infinite, one thing is clear. With few exceptions, most do not stand up to scientific scrutiny. They are generally not peer reviewed and generally do not meet basic standards of validity and reliability. Adam Grant, professor of psychology and management at the University of Pennsylvania, has expressed his concerns to the Myers-Briggs, particularly when companies use the findings to guide their decisions on hiring and firing.
"It's a great way to eliminate diversity," Grant says.
Allen Hammer, the former president of the Myers & Briggs Foundation, does not agree. He thinks the Myers-Briggs is as reliable as the other personality tests. And he says Grant is wrong when it is proven that the Myers-Briggs can not predict the actual results. For example, he says, "when people associated with a roommate type on their psychological type, their roommate change request decreased by 65%".
This week, we will be immersing ourselves in the world of personality testing and discovering new research suggesting that the power of personality assessments may not lie in the precise location of the person you are looking for. arebut the person you have the potential to become.
Additional resources:
"Can superstition create a self-fulfilling prophecy? School results of Chinese dragon children ", by Naci H. Mocan and Han Yu, 2017.
Hidden Brain is hosted by Shankar Vedantam and produced by Jennifer Schmidt, Parth Shah, Rhaina Cohen, Laura Kwerel and Thomas Lu. Our supervising producer is Tara Boyle. You can also follow us on Twitter @hiddenbrainand listen weekly to Hidden Brain stories on your local public radio station.
Editor's note: In the original version of this story, interviewee Adam Grant mixed the definitions of scientific reliability and validity. This error has been corrected in this version of the story.
According to the American Psychological Association, validity is defined as "the degree to which empirical evidence and theoretical reasoning support the adequacy and relevance of conclusions drawn from a form of evaluation". APA defines reliability as "the reliability or consistency of a measurement, that is, the extent to which a test or other measuring instrument is free from random error, producing the same results in several ways. applications of the same sample ".
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