Psychometric tests – love them or hate them, are they scientific or ‘snake oil’?
Everyone is likely to succumb, at some point, to the lure of the typical magazine quiz as in “Do You Have
Sexy Confidence?”, “Do You Make a Fabulous Impression?”, “How Well Do You Know Yourself?” or
“How addicted are you to your phone?”. Equally, vast numbers of us succumb to the drudgery of
answering pages of personal questions on dating websites, in an attempt to guarantee meeting a perfect
partner.
These are everyday examples of psychometric tests which aim to measure every aspect of every
personal characteristic of human beings in the attempt to classify people, predict their future behaviour
and value as a date or employee.
Charles Darwin started all this by recognising individual differences in animals, that he suggested would
help or hinder the animals survival, given drastic changes in circumstances. Measuring beak length,
however, is much easier than, say, conscientiousness, sociability or intelligence. And although many
pioneers over the last 100+ years have tried to extend the concept to psychological aspects, the topic is
still in early development in terms of its scientific rigour, reliability and usefulness.
However, when there needs to be a quick selection of one person out of many, none of whom are
personally known, for an important purpose, the tendency to use psychometric testing is irresistible. It
must be said, however, that there is still poor agreement across the baord as to what constitutes the
common elements under test, such as intelligence and personality.
Incidentally, this is also true in the mental health field measuring depression, anxiety or other mental ill
health symptoms, as well as education measuring, for example, deficits in language processing or
comprehension.
In business or, to be more precise, in organisational psychology, the modern era started with the MyersBriggs Type Indicator, a personality questionaire devised by a mother and daughter team. Way ahead of
her time, the mother, Katherine Briggs had tried, in vain, to formulate her own general personality
theory for children. So when she was introduced to Jung’s theory of personality types, she was wellplaced to recognise the potential of applying his more developed theory to practice and the
development of the MBTI. Although highly interconnected, the MBTI differs from Jung in one key
element:- MBTI is a closed (‘objective’ – type) test as opposed to Jung’s ‘subjective’, interpretative
approach. They are however, similar, in basing their theory on the conjecture, from observation, that
there are are four basic types, each with a scalar quality.
Neither MBTI, not Jung’s Archetypes are scientifically validated by today’s standards, not have they been
unequivocally shown to be accurate, efficient or useful in terms of recruitment or match-making. In
more recent times, another system has been created. Also based originally on observations and selfreport methods, it has been subjected to considerable empirical study. Called the Big Five, it is based on
the premise that personality in general, from the viewpoint of suitability prediction, can be distilled into
and categorised by five fundamental elements and their constituent traits. Claims to be validated by
research are based on 1) the categorisations are based on ‘natural language’ not made up terms, and
hence are of greater authenticity. 2) they have been to show high levels of consistency across cultures,
and 3)