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
An absorbing survey of knowledge in the relatively neglected area of experimental (as opposed to clinical, or psychotherapeutic) psychology. A cognitive-science researcher at the University of Arizona who also has taught at Yale, Cummins surveys such disparate fields as psychoneurology; human's development, beginning in infancy, of complex symbolic systems (most notably, language and mathematics); human brains and cognitive systems as compared with those of chimpanzees and other highly intelligent animals; and group psychology. In a particularly interesting chapter on the latter, the author introduces us to ``pluralistic ignorance''; this refers to the concept that one person's passivity in the face of another's real crisis (such as a mugging or serious car accident) is reinforced if others also treat the crisis as a nonproblem or at least as one that doesn't concern them. Cummins's chapters detailing scientific findings on the evolution and nature of human language and thinking conclude with the observation that ``except for language, we are dismally poor symbolic thinkers,'' although we're better ``pattern recognizers and classifiers.'' Cummins draws upon and summarizes well an impressively varied amount of scientific data. Her book's only real shortcoming is a tendency sometimes to be nonspecific in reporting on data; she notes, for instance, that characteristic A occurs more frequently than characteristic B without specifying how much more. On balance, though, her style is admirably clear and succinct. Cummins may not be as colorful a writer as, say, Oliver Sacks, but she holds the reader's attention while covering a great deal more ground. Her fine work makes the sometimes dry and forbidding field of experimental psychology accessible and even quite engrossing to the layperson. (illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: Sept. 15, 1995
ISBN: 0-312-13577-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1995
A fascinating story that is either an account of a young woman with multiple personality disorder or the brilliant work of a troubled imagination. Writing under a pseudonym and identified only as a professor of French, the author has disguised all people, places, and events; thus, accepting her story as factual requires an act of faith. Skeptics of recovered-memory therapy will also question whether her dissociative identity disorder, as the condition is now termed, developed as a result of childhood abuse, and even whether she was abused. She acknowledges that each time some new memory of abuse came up during therapy that she began in her 30s, she doubted both the memory and herself, thinking she must be a pathological liar. Afer five years of therapy, a psychologist diagnosed her as having multiple personality disorder. By her own account, she first dissociated at the age of three, when the trauma of an emergency appendectomy was too great to bear. Each new trauma, Phillips says, from further illnesses to attempted rape by an older brother, led to the birth of a new self. As she puts it: ``Terror cut the strings of my identity; over time, I blossomed into a full-blown multiple the same way a handful of escaped balloons rise and scatter in the air.'' Three years after being diagnosed, Phillips began a suicide note that eventually evolved into this book. During therapy, this troubled young woman also developed hypoglycemia, food sensitivities, and cyclothymia, or alternating periods of euphoria and depression. Eight years into therapy, she says, she began to have a consistent adult self and was able to view ``the Kids,'' the selves warring within her, less as individuals and more as ``force fields.'' At the book's end, she and her therapist are continuing work on her integration and preparing to face issues of womanhood, identity, and her relationship to her mother. Whatever the source of Phillips's disturbance, this memoir is clearly the product of a dazzling mind.
Pub Date: Oct. 11, 1995
ISBN: 0-670-85970-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1995
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