Personality Tests - Widely Used But Still Controversial
In 2009, personality testing is $500 million industry which has been expanding by about 10% per year. There are currently well over 2,500 personality questionnaires on the market and each year dozens of new companies appear with their own ‘new’ products. Some of these products are broad-spectrum tests designed to classify basic personality types, some are designed to test candidates for suitability for a particular job and some are designed to test for particular traits – for example, honesty and integrity.
There is a historical association with academic and occupational psychology which gives the personality testing industry a degree of credibility that it does not always deserve. Many of the well established companies who provide personality tests do operate to the highest ethical and professional standards. However, it is inevitable that such a growth industry with low barriers to entry and little official regulation has attracted entrants with varying degrees of competence and integrity.
This situation is made more difficult since most of the companies that produce personality tests are very secretive about their methodologies and refuse to make public crucial information about how their tests were developed or how well they work, claiming that this information is ‘proprietary’. The usefulness and accuracy of even the most well established tests, (for example, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator - first published in 1962 and the subject of thousands of research papers), remain highly controversial among psychologists.
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