Personality tests, those pseudo-psychology you believe in.

Many friends around me like personality tests. From time to time, the website will also launch something like "Test your love constitution" and "See if you have the Dover system". Maybe everyone won't take these little things seriously, just for fun and fun.

However, some well-known exams that are required to take even for job hunting are actually "pseudoscience" without scientific basis. Then, we need to be clear about what "pseudoscience" is, in the simplest terms, the assumption that scientific argumentation methods cannot be falsified, or there are still not enough repeated studies to support the explanation of the results.

When it comes to argumentation methods, the most important one is evaluation tools. For evaluation tools, when developing a psychological measurement tool, psychological researchers need to consider the validity and reliability of this tool. Many times, we will compare other existing certified and effective tools, and take the actual behavior results as a reference to see if the tools are effective enough. In other words, is this measuring tool really measuring what it is designed to measure? Take the medical example, whether the tool for measuring cancer really reflects whether the patient has cancer cells, if not, it can't be said that it is measuring cancer cells. Reliability depends on whether this measuring tool is reliable. If the same situation happens and the same person gets different results every time, then it is low reliability. Let's give another example of medicine. Is it credible to say that there are cancer cells for a while and no cancer cells for a while?

At present, psychology is measured by scientific means, and many pseudo-psychological tests also have measuring tools, but the validity is very problematic, which is not much different from fortune-telling constellations, because it is untenable in theory and has no validity, but it seems that the conclusion may be the same every time you do the test. This is easy to do, giving people the illusion that the test is accurate.

Too many of these pseudosciences are said by interested people (1) to be effective but not recognized by psychologists, (2) but they can be used as auxiliary means. Everyone should be vigilant. If you believe those unscientific ones, it's easy to follow each other's routine. This became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

First of all, when it comes to natural genes, it seems to be a very big and general statement. Talent includes many things, such as IQ, music, sports, playing chess and so on. At present, according to my limited understanding of genes, in terms of IQ intelligence (this concept actually contains a lot), various studies have found that genes have only about 50% influence, which is of course the foundation. With a good foundation, you may save some trouble the day after tomorrow. As for others, more research is about musical talent. 20 14, some research documents said that some genes were related to it (Tan, McPherson, Peretz, Berkovic,&; Wilson, 20 14).20 15 gene and IQ research Daniel Robert Plomin also put forward an important viewpoint discovery (Plomin &; Deary, 20 15), those who are interested in reading English literature can find and read it by themselves according to the list of references at the end of the following article. So, can those genetic tests accurately collect saliva? In fact, it is not pseudoscience to detect genes by saliva extraction. It is also very scientific to analyze genes according to the results of gene research that have been repeatedly confirmed in the past (not necessarily conclusive). Many genetic research institutions in the market should operate in this way. Of course, many personal abilities are not determined by one or two genes, but the result of many interactions. The key is that the genetic field is constantly breaking through. The two documents I came into contact with were 20 15 years ago. There may be many breakthroughs in these four years. In addition, the academic community generally believes that the most critical thing is the interaction between genes and the environment, not just the genes themselves.

Some people may think that psychology also studies color, don't they? This is one of the categories of applied psychology. Applied psychology focuses on the influence of color on personality and emotional feelings, rather than personality chromatics or something. The idea of classifying personalities according to colors was actually very popular in the 1960s. Of course, almost no one mentioned it after the 1970s and 1980s, because it was proved that there was no scientific basis, and the validity of the measurement was questionable. If people's personality is divided by color, how can this red man and that blue man be so simple and reluctant?

Just like the "four-fluid theory of body fluid" in ancient Greece, it is said that it may be the oldest personality division in the history of psychology introduction, and it is also the basis of medicine in that era. When you see western medicine, if the doctor tells you to use this as an auxiliary means to test you, will you continue to consult this doctor? If this kind of personality chromatics or four-fluid theory can be used as an auxiliary means of psychological testing, I would like to see some studies that use them as an auxiliary means.

Enneagram is from the perspective of orthodox psychology. . . Pure fabrication. . . There is no evidence-based research recognized by psychologists. Claudio Naranjo, the originator of the supporters, was a psychiatrist (although he looked a bit like a patient), but his teacher was indeed a mystic George Gurdjieff. Mystic? Yes, it is a mystic. In other words, it's not much different from jumping into the sky. People play with their bodies and minds. . . Om ......

Later, helen palmer, Don Richard Rizzo and Lars Hudson all involved in psychology. . . It's dragging, but it's not firmly rooted. Everything is in vain!

There are some psychological orthodoxy about the origin of the disc, but this is based on the research results published by William Marston in 1928 (Marston, 1928), and then the prototype of the disc appeared in Wallace, Clarke and Dry( 1956). But John Gail started privatization in the 1970s, and then he made a fortune. . . Unfortunately, unlike the theories of Big Five Personality and HEXACO, which are commonly used in psychology at present, which are constantly verified and applied in various studies of relevance and causality, the private ones can only continue to make money, and there is a lack of research that is of much use to them. However, this CD-ROM is based on the classification of behavior, which is directly related to personality or character, and it feels a bit like scratching the ball. At present, many academic personality studies focus on personality traits, which is relatively stable.

MBTI .。 . Yes . It is regarded as pseudoscience by psychology. Many people say that the results of the Big Five personality test commonly used in academic circles are not as good as MBTI. Actually this is a serious misunderstanding. Because MBTI is really unscientific, some scholars even come to the conclusion that the effectiveness and reliability of MBTI are no different from tarot cards looking at constellations and so on. It was criticized by the US military as early as the last century, but it was revived later, mainly for commercial promotion. Its problem is that its polarization should have obvious results in the measurement results, but everyone is actually normally distributed. Because of this, the measurement of the two poles needs to be truly relative, and the result is not the case.

Why pseudoscience? This is the fundamental problem of MBTI, which is actually the personality prototype of a character in Greek mythology written by carl jung. Later, it was carried forward by two unprofessional mothers and daughters and became a board game. Now it may only be used by people who study management, and psychologists have long found this classification very problematic. Take one of them as an example: extroversion and introversion. Actually, most people are in the middle. If you are a little extroverted, you will be E, but you are not that extroverted. Then everyone took their own labels and sat in the right position, hypnotizing themselves into an e, but barely happy! What type nine personality, MBTI, is not "not recognized" by mainstream psychology, but has always been "not recognized".

The problem with 16PF is that these 16 factors have not been successfully repeated by others through empirical research in the Cattell era. If repetition does not exist, it is hard to say that it is scientific. But at that time, because psychologists tried to see if there really was a 16 factor, they accidentally found that only five factors came and went, which was the big five personality later. If you are interested, you can look at Digman (1990), a historical summary of the personality development of senior five, and you will find that studying this 16PF is of great help to everyone.

MMPI, this is normal. . . It will be used in the diagnosis of psychiatry and clinical psychology, including the overall personality and mental/psycho-pathological manifestations of the subjects. It is very long, even if it is a short version, it is still very long (I personally always think that the seriousness and authenticity of the answer will be reduced when it is long).

In addition, it is the big five personality mentioned above, or Hasek who appeared later. These are actually the characteristics that personality psychology calls, that is, some relatively stable characteristics. The common point is that people will not be divided into three or six categories, because these theories firmly believe that any performance of us is only a point in the performance dimension.

But many people still like to be framed by some classification models, and they feel uncomfortable without a label or something. . .

Digman, J. M. (1990). Personality structure: the emergence of five-factor model. Psychological school year evaluation, 4 1( 1), 4 17-440. doi: 10. 1 146/annurev . PS . 4 1.020 190.00222 1

Maston, Washington (1928). Normal people's emotions. London, UK: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., Ltd.

Merenda private limited. Clark, West Virginia (1965). Self-description and personality measurement. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 2 1( 1), 52-56. doi: 10. 1002/ 1097-4679( 19650 1)2 1

Plomin, R. J. Dear I. J. (20 15). Genetic and intellectual differences: five special findings. Molecular psychiatry, 20( 1), 98- 108. doi: 10. 1038/MP . 20 14. 105

Tan, Y.T., mcpherson, G.E., peretz, I., berkovich, S.F., & Wilson, S. J. (20 14). The genetic basis of musical ability. Frontiers of psychology, 5658. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg . 20 14.00658

Wallace, S.R., Clark, W.V. Fuck, R. J. (1956) Taking activity vector analysis as the selector of life insurance salesman. Personnel Psychology, 9 (3), 337-345. doi: 10. 1 1 1 1/j . 1744-6570. 1956 . TB 0 1072 . x