The Politics of Psychological Testing
Bennet, John
In September 1954 Fortune magazine ran an article severely criticizing the use of psychological "personality tests" on business executives. It was not simply a run-of-themill attack upon...
...By means of these efficient techniques, it has become possible to eliminate psychologists as test analysts, substituting for them code clerks who can automatically fit each test score or response with its corresponding standardized interpretation...
...Rubber, International Paper, and National Cash Register are customers of commerciallymanaged testing services...
...DuPont, American Chain and Cable, U.S...
...Faced with a test such as the Bernreuter Inventory, which places a high premium upon conventional behavior, the individual must turn out to be either conformist or non-conformist...
...These agencies offer prompt mailorder service: a four- or five-page report is returned within forty-eight hours after receipt of the tests...
...Judged by either moral or scientific criteria, they appear to function for ends which are insufficiently humane, and by means which are insufficiently scientific...
...as to lose contact with any more fundamental system of personal or social values...
...As it is presently carried on, mass psychological testing destroys the personal relationship which has traditionally existed between the medical practitioner and his patient...
...From the point of view of a good many clinical psychologists, they are necessary evils—unfortunate but ineradicable...
...The process of dissembling and fencing has become rationalized, for the personality questionnaire such as the Bernreuter provides a specific measure, not of the individual's actual person...
...It was consequently observed that success in selecting men for their ability to endure military hardships might foreshadow similar success in selecting those most likely to endure on the economic front...
...The psychologist no longer confronts the subject...
...More and and more, a person must protect what he feels to be his essential self through devious behavior and strategems...
...He has no recourse, no appeal, for he is not even aware of the "charges" that have been made against him...
...Yet dissimulation must eventually have its effects upon the person who practices it...
...It was not simply a run-of-themill attack upon science as science, or even upon pseudo-science as science...
...There is not even a cash payment involved...
...In September 1954 Fortune magazine ran an article severely criticizing the use of psychological "personality tests" on business executives...
...It was the extension of these tests to executives themselves which appeared disturbing...
...The American Psychological Association has vaguely and piously condemned them—without naming names...
...Another way of putting this would be to say that the 19th century was chiefly characterized by the denial to the masses of the means of physical subsistence, while the 20th century characteristically denies the conditions of psychological integrity...
...One is then led to conform so faithfully to the standardized personality-image ("extraverted," "stable," "aggressive," "sociable;' "loyal," etc...
...See if he admits to being unsystematic in caring for his personal property...
...Clients wish to know whether a man will be a loyal company employee...
...Personnel departments now rely largely upon psychological instruments...
...Since then the practice of testing employees and job applicants has become an important business...
...ality, but of his ability to feign...
...If so, suggest that he might be more readily compensated by rewards in the form of prestige, than by rewards in the form of salary increases...
...These questionnaires are far easier to administer than are the more costly but more reliable methods of personality diagnosis used by reputable clinical psychologists...
...But even more important has been the mushrooming of private testing organizations representing themselves as psychological "institutes...
...Once again survival is taken as proof of fitness, but now it is psychological survival that is at stake...
...Instead, it was relatively temperate, and at times even penetrating in its analysis...
...But the penalty for not conforming to the psychological pattern deemed desirable for assimilation into industry is that one may be refused work...
...But he instead pretends to be a diagnostician, capable of reliable judgment about individual personalities...
...In that event, his refusal to answer personal questions, or his answering them in an unconventional way, would be equivalent to exile from the community of respectable workers, and deprivation of the means of subsistence...
...But a small furor resulted because the article had the temerity to raise questions about the ethical propriety of personality testing, as well as about its validity and usefulness...
...ARE SUCH "INSTITUTES" REPUTABLE...
...Certainly, the practice of offering psychological analyses to persons not qualified to understand and use them raises some delicate questions of professional ethics...
...It may not have been ethical, but apparently Fortune assumed that fire had to be fought with fire...
...His responsibility, as he sees it, is to his own employer, the "psychological institute," and to the client company which is paying for the report...
...Given a particular "yes" or "no" response, or a particular percentile rating, the test analyst simply enters into the report a prearranged standard paragraph...
...Instead, uniform, undifferentiated norms are used for all individuals...
...Then, since the test applicant's distinguishing characteristics are a priori eliminated, it is not considered necessary to use differential norms...
...From the standpoint of the present-day business world, they are considered eminently respectable...
...At present, private testing organizations are being used not only by thousands of medium-sized firms, but by a great many large corporations which already have their own personnel departments...
...Magically, the percentile rating becomes reality, while the job applicant becomes a mythical creature, a shadow...
...Specific information about these psychological "institutes" is hard to come by...
...The psychologist thus retreats behind a facade of symbols, such as test scores and percentile ratings, and becomes an expert on the classification of these symbol-patterns into "dependent" or "independent," "sociable" or "unsociable," "dominant" or "submissive...
...As a matter of fact, there are few areas of a person's life about which the test analyst (he need not be a bona fide psychologist) cannot make some inference, however farfetched...
...And there, for all executives to see, were a large number of the "correct answers" which clinical psychologists have jealously guarded for many years...
...However, if he is so fortunate as to be informed, for example, that he is reported to be "stubborn" and "uncooperative," his protests may only appear to the employer as collhrmat, on of the test analysis...
...Screening procedures were employed to weed out the psychological undesirables—those unfit to be soldiers...
...The alternative is simulated con formity, feigned assent...
...This problem is frequently solved by giving the clients what they want to hear, while investing the report with an air of gravity and decorum...
...On the one hand, it can lead him to adopt as his own true personality the mask of conventionality which has been impressed upon him as being desirable...
...The person being tested never sees the interpretations that have been placed upon his responses, nor is he usually informed about the results...
...Instead, the psychologist feels no personal bond between himself and the subject...
...More specific books on the subject, such as Eysenck's Uses and Abuses of Psychology fail to come to grips with the problem, because they fail to see the malfunctioning in its social context, and limit their criticism to errors in clinical or experimental method...
...Efficiency is therefore obtained by standardizing interpretations...
...THE USE OF PSYCHOLOGICAL TESTS for manpower control found its earliest opportunities in the selection of military personnel...
...The personality questions relate— or are interpreted as relating—to a man's marital adjustment, the orthodoxy of his political beliefs, his willingness to take orders without inward resentment, his ambitiousness, and so forth...
...No longer can there be explorations of leading clues stumbled upon by happy accident in the direct interview, or in the course of face-to-face projective testing...
...THE PROFIT BASIS UPON WHICH such institutes operate requires increasing rationalization of the techniques for mass-producing test reports...
...On the other hand, it is not infrequent that extremely personal remarks made by the job applicant, who assumes that the tests are confidential, are divulged and elaborated on to the prospective employer...
...The function of such management is to obtain the maximum of sales with the minimum loss to professional respectability...
...Frequently these norms are so antiquated as to be based upon the general population of the 1920s rather than of the 1950s...
...Similarly, refusal to answer questions is seen as tantamount to an admission of unfitness...
...That depends upon one's point of view...
...And toward shadows one feels no guilt...
...No account is taken of the subject's socio-economic status, his education, race or religion, his national or regional origin, his previous work-history, or any other information which might shed light on him as an individual, and provide a meaningful frame of reference for analyzing his responses...
...Individualized interpretations, attention to unique characteristics of a test pattern, would disrupt the speed of production...
...As a result, personal experience becomes a prerequisite for understanding what is actually going on in the field of industrial psychology today, and it is out of such experience that this account has been written...
...As professionally trained personnel are thereupon eliminated, or are re duced to bureaucratic impotence, the standardized interpretations come to be dictated, not by careful inference from the empirical material in the tests, but by the business management of the psychological "institute...
...It is this pretentious misuse of science, skilfully disguised by high-powered sales techniques, which leads one to describe much of present-day industrial testing by commercial "institutes" as charlatanism...
...Of course, as long as psychological testing was restricted to workers and job applicants, Fortune had seen no cause for alarm...
...The interpretations are often tailored by management with an eye to their salability...
...After he has analyzed a few thousand such tests, without ever seeing the living beings whom he is supposed to be analyzing, the psy chologist begins to lose any intimation he ever had that such beings do exist...
...Eventually, a person may find it virtually impossible to obtain a job without taking personality tests...
...but no specific action against them has been taken...
...True, if the psychologist were a mere statistician, there might be little to criticize in this attitude...
...In addition to being deprived of the direct interview, the test analyst also refuses to consider background information which might "contaminate" the scientific objectivity of his report...
...But as the tension caused by this gap increases, so does the danger of an eventual breakdown in the overall personality structure...
...So disturbing, in fact, that a full-page treatment was reserved for a section entitled "How to Cheat on the Tests...
...They want to know whether a man lacks money incentive...
...On the other hand, such dissimulation can drive the individual deeper within himself, widening the gap between himself and his mask of conventionality...
...The psychologist who writes the report does not feel concerned about this...
...That the use of such questionnaires is widespread can be gathered from the fact that the 1953 sales of the Bernreuter Personality Inventory alone, by one of several distributors, was reported to be one million copies...
...The report is the property of the prospective employer...
...In addition to the relatively reliable and valid tests for aptitude and interest, it is now largely standard practice to give job applicants questionnaires which purport to be tests of personality...
...Since they are largely staffed by college-trained psychologists, criticism from the profession has been respectful and discreet —the commercialization of industrial psychology seems to be largely taken for granted...
...One central characteristic of our time is that the struggle for existence is being gradually removed from the physical sphere to the psychological...
...Good—interpret a high accuracy score on the mental ability test as "loyalty...
Vol. 3 • September 1956 • No. 4
