The Counter-deception Blog

This INTJ agrees—from the same scientific tailor-shop as N-Rays, polygraphs, and dousing.

from the September 28, 2004 edition - http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0928/p15s01-bogn.html

Palm reading dressed as science

Millions take personality tests every year, but are they valid?
By Peter I. Rose

A recent radio ad for E-Harmony promotes a personality profile based on 29 dimensions that all but guarantees finding a perfect mate. But don't sign up until you read Annie Paul's well-researched, highly informative, and rather scary portrait of the dominance of personality measures in almost every nook and cranny of American life.
Her thesis is best summarized in her lengthy subtitle: "How Personality Tests are Leading Us to Miseducate Our Children, Mismanage Our Companies, and Misunderstand Ourselves." Yet "The Cult of Personality," by the former senior editor of Psychology Today, is neither a bombastic jeremiad nor a reckless exposé of these hucksters; it is more a wise, insightful, and witty dissection of what has become a major industry. In eight chapters packed with information, she offers a fascinating story of the principal gurus of a hydra-headed movement of social and self awareness. They're proto-scientists, pseudo-scientists, and real scientists who sought first to probe the human psyche to discern the proclivities of "criminal minds" and mental patients and then to describe variations among "normal" people.