Are psychometric tests and personality types pseudoscientific just like horoscopes?

As a self-absorbed generation, we want to evaluate and understand ourselves in-depth. And as a society obsessed with productivity, happiness and development we crave to identify ways to improve ourselves constantly. This could be one of the reasons for the existence of several pop-psychometric and pop-personality tests online.

The infamous Myers-Briggs is one among the tests that some people believe in religiously and consider it to be so worthy to explain about them well that they put it as a part of their social media bios. The test categorises the whole human race into 16 buckets based on just 4 dichotomous psychological characteristics (such as introversion/extraversion, sensing/intuition, thinking/feeling and judging/perceiving). No surprise why it has been accused of sub-standard levels of accuracy, reliability, validity and whatnot.

While there exist much more reliable and practical scientifically developed tests used in academia or recruitment, for instance, these are often expensive and executed by a practised professional. An average consumer of personality tests is most like to enter an online psychometric website and take up a quick questionnaire to find their ‘personalities’. Or even engage in much quirkier and funnier tests to find what type of potato they are or which Disney world they would fit the best in.

While these cause no harm when taken for fun, some people do tend to take them too literally. This strikes a parallel to astrology. There are several similarities between a pop-personality test evaluation and a horoscope prediction. Here are a few interesting ones.

1. Vagueness

Everybody is everything at some point in time. Personality test results and horoscope predictions are written vaguely for a purpose. Statements such as “You are kind towards people”, “You are sometimes rude to people you love” etc. could for instance apply to all the 7.5 billion odd people in the world.
The vagueness also increases the saliency of certain attitudes or actions we did. Telling a person that they have been rude to somebody recently or been very kind to somebody recently would make them recall events of rudeness or kindness and thus invoke them to relate to it. These vague statements thus skew our perceptions of ourselves. The truth is that we have tried to force-fit ourselves within the open descriptions.

2. Changes over time

Psychometric tests proved to me that it’s not just humans that are prone to WYSIATI (What you see is all there is) bias. We get different answers for the same questions from the same individual in different moods and affect. Most pop-psychometric classes do not consider environmental stimuli and aren’t deep enough to evaluate personalities. For instance, a person taking the test in a hot and humid room is more probably going to be more irritated and answer accordingly than when in a comfortable room. Environment and experiences change people — Introversion could change over time; Recovery from mental illness could completely change people’s behaviour, attitude, self-evaluation etc. and these are not taken into account of evaluations.
DIY — try to take the same psychometric at different moods and try not to remember the answers you gave previously. Chances are you get a different prediction each time. If you get consistent results, the prediction tells a lot more about your consistency than your personality.

3. Easy explanations

Curiosity towards two impossibilities — to predict the future and to understand ourselves completely — are the weapons of astrology and psychometric tests. By fictitiously classifying millions of humans into one of the finite categories (such as Zodiac signs or personality groups), both attempt to “provide explanations” and hence a false sense of certainty.
Just like how the ‘God Hypothesis’ provides a parsimonious explanation to the creation of the world psychometric analysis and horoscopes provide a false sense of certainty and comfort on the matter still not understood by humankind.

4. Overblown application — The unread disclaimer

Sadly, almost always the disclaimer and the T&C’s that come along with these predictions are ignored. The practitioners themselves warn of the wide non-generalisability. However, as consumers, we do not consume this information responsibly. Businesses in this field also try to exaggerate uses if any for commercial purposes.

5. Looking glass theory

Who we are is affected by who we think others see us as and who we want to be seen as by others. This is especially problematic when these tests are taken at schools, offices etc. The influence of social desirability bias could be very high.

Despite all the listed problems with it, psychometric tests are not the worst thing in the world. If not for anything else, the users seem to enjoy it!