How I failed my Myers Briggs test, and other adventures

I suppose I should consider myself a beneficiary of the Myers Briggs test: according to its judgement I am the ‘Mastermind’. But I already knew that – I mean, hardly a day passes before I emit an Evil Laugh at the thought of my latest plan to conquer the universe. More to the point is the fact that, the one time I took the test – which my manager, in a corporate office, required of his staff – I totally failed it. Why? None of the answers I wanted to give would fit into the limited multi-choice slots required. But I was required to answer in those terms. The result, therefore, was totally meaningless. But of course I couldn’t say so because, you know, this is psychology, and psychology is an advanced science. Apparently.

I was put in mind of this experience recently, when I discovered that academic psychology has finally realised that it might be possible that cognitive tests designed to trip up those with dementia will also trip up somebody with dyslexia. It’s a qualified ‘maybe’ – I mean, psychological tests are flawless, the last word, and can never be… you know… wrong. If someone is judged faulty by a psychologist – well, that person is proven faulty, and nothing they say to the contrary will change it. Still, to me their apparent realisation that one of their arbitrary tests might produce a wrong answer is a slight ray of light in a field which styles itself ‘scientific’ but which, in fact, has far more to do with asserted power and the intellectualised invalidation of its victims.

The likelihood that arbitrary dementia tests will ‘catch out’ someone with dyslexia is actually obvious. And when I say obvious, I mean full-on Captain Obvious arriving on a giant pink elephant with brass band in tow, waving flags reading ‘This Is Obvious’. One of the outcomes of dyslexia is poor short-term memory and problems finding words. They know the answer, but can’t convert the concept into a word that other people will understand. This has similar characteristics to dementia or similar cognitive impairment, but for different reasons. Mix this with the conceit among psychologists that their field has found the final solution to human nature – a truth that gives them alone the power to judge what everybody else is really like – you know, really – and it’s a recipe for injustice.

‘Bwahahaha, the problem is your psychological weakness. Now look at the trophy I got for my intelligence!’ Public domain.

You can picture the scene: a psychologist who’s just met their target a few minutes earlier and knows nothing about them asks a few arbitrary questions. From these the psychologist subjectively decides what the person they’ve just ‘tested’ is ‘really’ like and labels them accordingly, per the DSM manual. And if their target protests – well the Psychologist has Spoken. There is not the slightest shred of actual science in these judgements: the actual word for it is ‘bullying’. But of course ‘psychologists’ are above that, aren’t they, because psychology is such an advanced science.

Except, of course, it isn’t.

What we call ‘psychology’ is, at best, a pseudo-science; a self-perpetuating conceit that started life among a group of late nineteenth century Viennese intellectuals, buoyed on the idea that their observations of the local bourgeoise contained the ‘true’ answer to the human condition. The period idea by which human nature could be reduced to iron-clad ‘laws’ intruded. This attempt to harden psychology into a science, initially, involved these intellectuals inserting their own sexual hangups into the rest of humanity. Pioneering psychologists such as Wilhelm Reich decided that all humans were sexually repressed. All? All. But he could fix it. His method involved getting his female patients to take their clothes off in front of him. (Later, Reich decided that the entire universe was created by human sex energy, which Reich believed he had discovered. He even built ‘accumulators’ to concentrate it. And how could he be wrong? After all, he was a psychologist).

Turning this self-gratifying and very disturbing woo-woo into a ‘science’ didn’t take long. Reich’s colleague, Karl Jung, believed he had found the basic truth of humanity – iron-clad personality ‘archetypes’ into which everybody on Earth could be jammed. And if they didn’t fit – well, the person had to be wrong, not the theory. Worse, at a time when eugenics were on the rise and humanity had to be enumerated, classified and condemned if they failed to fit, Jung’s assertions gained significant traction. This led, among other things, to the entire ‘science’ of judging and classifying character types according to arbitrary questions, pioneered by Isabel Myers and Katherine Briggs in the 1940s. Their test, with its arbitrary classifications and western culture-centric view of humanity remains a ‘gold standard’ corporate tool for measuring employees, sold by psychologists as a device for discovering who people really are. You know, really.

I already outlined my own experiences with that at the beginning of this post. (‘Mastermind? Why yes, pathetic minion, of course I am. Bwahahahahaha!’) But wait, it gets sillier. The corporate manager who’d brought in the Myers-Briggs tests then decided to have a ‘development day’, which included bringing in a ‘psychologist’ who proceeded to ‘test’ everybody with a system by which personalities were reduced to the four ancient Greek ‘elements’. It was just as subjective, just as meaningless – and not voluntary. Participants had to answer an arbitrary list of leading questions, from which the psychologist – who’d met them ten minutes earlier – could inform them what they were really like. You know, really, even if they objected.

It was, of course, trivial to reverse-engineer this intellectual botty-dribble on the fly. It was that shallow.

Somewhat later, the manager decided to re-run the exercise. I ended up doing the test a second time, so I intentionally produced the reverse result. This puzzled the hell out of the visiting psychologist. How could I have suffered a complete personality change in a few months? She kept asking me to confess that I was ‘really’ like the results of the first test – you know, really.

To me all this revealed all that is wrong with psychology as an intellectual discipline. Those who practise it apparently believe that they define reality with their subjective judgements of strangers, all erected atop deeply faulty assumptions about humanity. They neither see nor accept when their system produces wrong answers. But of course, psychology as an intellectual discipline has nothing to do with helping people. As usual it is actually about power and powerlessness – in which the psychologist, by definition, holds all the cards (in this case, probably made by Rorschach). What’s more, the system they’ve developed is self-validating: anybody who objects to their judgement – or worse, plays games with their tests – is classified as suffering from a disorder known as ‘contrarianism’.

Lest any of this seem over the top, don’t forget that it’s not too many years since the APA tried to classify introversion as a disorder. None of it is ‘scientific’. None. It is a self-validating system of subjective judgement that jams people into arbitrary boxes, treats these constructions as real, and demands compliance. And that, my friends, is called bullying.

Of course, as that psychologist who I’d fooled informed me, I would say that, wouldn’t I – it’s what they’d expect from my character type.

Sigh.You can’t win, can you?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2021

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