Forthright criticism that promoters of tests as well as those who rely on them will find impossible to ignore.
A well-documented and highly readable critique of personality tests, examining their development, flaws, and applications.
Paul, Mind/Body columnist for Shape and a former senior editor of Psychology Today, maintains that personality tests “cannot begin to capture the complex human beings we are.” She looks at how and why various personality test were created and by whom, beginning with the Rorschach inkblot test and including such widely used instruments as the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, or MMPI, the Thematic Apperception Test, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, and the NEO-Personality Inventory. These tests, she asserts, cannot predict human behavior, tend to focus on dysfunction (as opposed to health), and often fail to meet scientific standards of validity and reliability. For example, the author cites one study of the Myers-Briggs that found that more than half of those answering the questionnaire were given a different personality type when they took the same test a short while later. Paul warns that the newest approaches to personality assessment involve biological markers, genetic analysis, and computer technology—tools of science that may be so impressive that we accept their pronouncements without question, forgetting that in another century phrenology was thought to offer a scientific approach to the mind. Originally developed to detect mental illness, personality tests are today a favorite instrument of personnel departments of corporations and government agencies needing to hire, sort, and manage people, and they are widely used by school systems to evaluate children and in courts as evidence in both criminal and civil cases. Consequently, says Paul, crucial decisions about people’s lives are being made on the basis of seriously flawed information. She cites other assessment techniques—structured interviews, behavioral observations, a life-story approach—as alternatives, and recommends the institution of various safeguards and limitations on the use of such testing.
Forthright criticism that promoters of tests as well as those who rely on them will find impossible to ignore.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2004
ISBN: 0-7432-4356-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
IN THE NEWS
Hiccups aside, a mostly valuable compendium of irrational thinking, with a handful of blanket corrective maneuvers.
A waggish, cautionary compilation of pitfalls associated with systematic cognitive errors, from novelist Dobelli.
To be human is to err, routinely and with bias. We exercise deviation from logic, writes the author, as much as, and possibly more than, we display optimal reasoning. In an effort to bring awareness to this sorry state of affairs, he has gathered here—in three-page, anecdotally saturated squibs—nearly 100 examples of muddied thinking. Many will ring familiar to readers (Dobelli’s illustrations are not startlingly original, but observant)—e.g., herd instinct and groupthink, hindsight, overconfidence, the lack of an intuitive grasp of probability or statistical reality. Others, if not new, are smartly encapsulated: social loafing, the hourly rate trap, decision fatigue, carrying on with a lost cause (the sunk-cost fallacy). Most of his points stick home: the deformation of professional thinking, of which Mark Twain said, “If your only tool is a hammer, all your problems will be nails”; multitasking is the illusion of attention with potentially dire results if you are eating a sloppy sandwich while driving on a busy street. In his quest for clarity, Dobelli mostly brings shrewdness, skepticism and wariness to bear, but he can also be opaque—e.g., shaping the details of history “into a consistent story...we speak about ‘understanding,’ but these things cannot be understood in the traditional sense. We simply build the meaning into them afterward.” Well, yes. And if we are to be wary of stories, what are we to make of his many telling anecdotes when he counsels, “Anecdotes are a particularly tricky sort of cherry picking....To rebuff an anecdote is difficult because it is a mini-story, and we know how vulnerable our brains are to those”?
Hiccups aside, a mostly valuable compendium of irrational thinking, with a handful of blanket corrective maneuvers.Pub Date: May 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-221968-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2013
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