The Cult Of Personality Testing

How Personality Tests Are Leading Us To Miseducate Our Children, Mismanage Our Companies, And Misunderstand Ourselves.

More then 10 million people take personality tests every year: to direct their placement in school, to decide on a career, to determine if they'll be hired, to join the armed forces. Most of us are completely in the dark about the wide use of these tests - and about the almost daily impact they have on our individual lives.

But there's something even more frightening about this picture: personality tests don't work. Often unbeknownst to us, our bosses, school administrators, government bureaucrats, lawyers, judges, doctors, and countless others are making decisions about our lives based on information that is at best inaccurate; at worst, this information exposes our private lives and pigeonholes us, often for the rest of our lives.

Now available in paperback, 'The Cult Of Personality Testing' is the first book to document the disturbing consequences of personality tests: Our children are being labeled early on with certain personality traits; these labels can stick for a long time, and teachers and administrators use this material to make crucial and long-term decisions about individual kids' educational experiences. Business and government make ill-informed decisions about hiring and firing, and are wasting hundreds of millions of dollars every year doing so. Lawyers make far-fetched claims about our characters, prejudicing juries and judges against us unfairly. Minority groups are being systematically discriminated against. Our privacy, safety, and security, and especially that of our children, is at risk.

But there are also ground breaking things happening in the world of personality testing, with scholarly advances and cutting edge technologies that will alter the ways we perceive people, ourselves included. The time is right for this vigorous expose of these tests, and Annie Paul has been researching and writing about them for years. She delves into the fascinating history of the personality test as well its current widespread use, in schools, workrooms, courtrooms, and the military. 'The Cult Of Personality Testing' uncovers the lucrative and often hidden business of personality testing, and also explores our culture's fixation on personality, from celebrities to our co-workers.

Captivating, insightful, frightening, and sometimes shocking, 'The Cult Of Personality Testing' offers an exhilarating trip into the human mind and heart.