Cult of Personality, reviewed by Kim Malo in Web Mystery Magazine, Summer 2005

The Cult of Personality:
How Personality Tests Are Leading Us To Mislabel Our Children,
Mismanage Our Companies, and Misunderstand Ourselves
by Annie Murphy Paul
reviewed by Kim Malo

I really wanted to like The Cult of Personality: How Personality Tests Are Leading Us to Miseducate Our Children, Mismanage Our Companies, and Misunderstand Ourselves. Philosophically I’m already inclined to emphasize individuality over trying to fit people into neatly labeled slots and had concerns about such slotting being meaningful enough to justify making life-altering decisions about people based upon it. So I expected to enjoy watching an expert prove the truth behind what I just knew instinctively. That was when things got frustrating.

More about those frustrations in a minute. I do have to admit that despite them, this was an interesting read. Ms. Paul clearly knows her subject and writes well. The bulk of the book is an accessible-to-layman’s overview of the history of personality testing. Each chapter covers a different type of test, in roughly chronological order of development from the headbumps of 19th century phrenology through Rorschach to modern brain scan searches for biological underpinnings. The chapters follow a fairly standard formula: discuss the creator of the test and its origin, the process of bringing the test into public use, the inevitable fawning support and the inevitable critics, then end with a short mention of where it is used and the fact that that’s obviously a bad thing. Ms. Paul has a real gift for actively engaging the reader by bringing a human element into the discussion with those stories of the people behind the tests. Unfortunately she uses that same gift in a bad way by trying to discredit the tests through holding their creators up to ridicule over such things as their sex life. And it’s a pity she doesn’t apply that same gift for connecting with real life stories to the issues around the use of such tests she promises to tackle in her subtitle. Which brings me to the frustrations.

First, the whole thing is so one-sided as to appear grounded in bias rather than any desire to find objective truth. This is a debriefing exercise, as hinted at by the word cult in the title, not a scholarly debate. Read it and you’ll get the impression that all valid studies and publications are completely against all of these tests, with the validity of all such criticisms accepted at face value. Nobody in favor of the tests has ever been right about anything and, as indicated above, ad hominem attacks are fair game. Ms. Paul may be right in what she says, but it’s tough to believe that the other side is so relentlessly wrong in every possible way. The overall impression is that she’s got to be consciously distorting and suppressing things. That’s not only unprofessional, it weakens her own case by making an even slightly critical reader more inclined to question what she is and is not saying, and why. For example, she makes a point of belittling Isabel Myers, the primary creator of the Myers-Briggs test, as just a housewife, untrained in psychology, test construction, et al. Fair enough, but given Ms Paul’s tendency to highlight anything negative, when she also mentions Isabel attending Swarthmore without saying what she did study there, you can’t help but assume she’s hiding something that would have added to Isabel’s credibility.

The book also combines the worst of being heavily footnoted and having none at all. It’s packed with statistics and pronouncements of fact requiring references to have any credibility. And sure enough, a notes section comprises over 20% of the book at the end. But there are no footnotes in the text linking back to those entries. You either read the two sections in tandem, line by line, or guess what might have a reference and go looking. It’s maddening to read that way, while looked at cynically, it also helps hide the fact that some of the references are unclear about what is being supported and not everything that should be supported by a reference is.

Finally, the book doesn’t effectively address the supposed core point indicated by the subtitle. Yes, each chapter has obligatory comments about this test is used for [insert a common category] and shouldn’t be because it’s not accurate for one reason or another. But the comments are of a rubber stamped sameness and limited in scope, rarely exploring examples of the test’s usage in the real world enough to pinpoint and address the real harm.

The net result is that I found this an interesting read and learned a bit about the types of tests and their background, but didn’t walk away from the book knowing much more than my instincts had already told me about what’s wrong with such tests and how they might be used. All of the criticisms basically came down to a sort of knee jerk “of course there’s harm, because the tests can’t be completely validated.” No other options considered and not much specific about that harm, despite the promises in the subtitle.