The Dark Side of Psychometric Testing
Psychometric testing has been used since the 19th century, researchers say that the first tests that we identify with today were developed by Francis Galton, who looked into the intelligence of participants by measuring their sensory and motor skills.
You’ve probably come across psychometric testing, at some point or another. Perhaps in the form of an IQ test or one of the numerous free personality tests available online. It is a test or an assessment that evaluates a person’s behaviour or performance, by organising characteristics, attitudes and beliefs into categories. Psychometric tests have become increasingly popular as a strategy for recruitment and retention.
Although, I’ve been a qualified coach for more than a decade and a qualified practitioner of psychometric testing (registered with the British Psychological Society) for even longer. I am not an advocate of psychometric testing and I have never used them in my coaching practice. In fact, I’d go so far as to say I’ve always been extremely uncomfortable with psychometric testing in any aspect of working life.
If I have a coaching client who asks for one, I’d normally say that I’m possibly not the coach for them. I believe that with skilled coaching interventions and a good relationship between coach and coachee, work is done that is far superior to any testing algorithm. In my later career, I made a conscious decision never to put myself forwards for a role which used psychometric testing or any form of ‘assessment centre’ — my profound belief is that a reliance on any kind of predictive system is deeply flawed and will never find the best person for the job.
I found it difficult to articulate the deep sense of uneasiness I felt about these personality assessment practices. I met many people who after testing, found it very difficult to see themselves outside of their test score or predictors (letters or colour coding, whatever the particular outcome was), thus inhibiting any sense of development or creativity outside of their personality categorisation. I also knew from my training, that none of the jobs I’d excelled in through my career, would ever have come about if I’d gone through a personality test for it.
So, when my colleagues were talking about a new documentary — ‘Persona: The Dark Truth Behind Personality Tests’, I couldn’t wait to see it. It reaffirmed the disquiet I’ve been feeling about personality testing, in all its guises, for years.
Undoubtedly, the documentary was made to evoke emotion in you. I cried, I got angry enough to shout at the TV and the end is a tearjerker. However, the underlying message is more horrifying than I imagined. According to the show’s research, it seems that the largest and most well-known psychometric test — the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator — has no scientific underpinning and was developed in the early 1900’s by a housewife and her novelist daughter, based on the fascination of Katharine Briggs with the work of Carl Jung.
Briggs’s vision was to aid people to understand themselves better and she imagined a better world through her tests. However, her entire life’s work and her four-letter scoring processes were all based on her research of her daughter Isabel, her husband and three of her daughter’s friends — that’s it!
She never intended for her tests to be used to screen or filter people for particular roles. However, these have been taken on by the world and used to decide who is worthy or unworthy of a particular role, or job or position — despite the protestations of the Myers-Briggs company that they should never be used for this.
Katharine’s daughter Isabel Briggs Myers, who developed the processing for her mother’s research, held deeply rooted racist, sexist, and classist beliefs. She refused to test anyone with an IQ less than 100, believing them to be incapable of work. Originally there were separate scoring processes for men and women, as women were thought to be incapable of anything other than a ‘feeling’ categorisation.
The Myers-Briggs test and many other tests are found to be wholly ableist, sexist, racist and classist — which is ironic given the illegality of asking about these areas outright when interviewing people directly. The language of most personality tests is not inclusive and is harmful to people, it reinforces the notion that you have to conform to belong and blocks cognitive diversity.
We all want to feel as if we belong — even if it is to a group of people who share the same four letters as us. Refusing to engage with systems that are prejudiced and discriminatory is the only way forward. Why would we choose to use systems that have no scientific basis and are fatally flawed?
We need collectiveness and inclusivity in the workplace and also in our self-development and self-discovery work. We need a human operating system which is grounded in research and is provably inclusive to all. One which aids organisations to ensure they make decisions based on a diverse workforce and which consider all the intersecting areas of life, of every individual in that workforce. The Glassmoon Human Operating System and SeeMe technology does exactly that. It’s time to move on from outdated, prejudicial psychometrics and start using systems which truly see the people who make and will potentially make, our organisations great.
Find out more about what we do at Glassmoon here.
