The Cult of Personality Testing: How Personality Tests Are Leading Us to Miseducate Our Children, Mismanage Our Companies, and Misunderstand Ourselves

The second of the group’s criticisms concerns the “norms” provided by the Comprehensive System, or the standards of normality against which test takers are judged.

Today it’s administered to an estimated 15 million Americans each year, in spite of the fact that it features invasive questions about test takers’ sex lives and bathroom habits.

High levels of activity in the right hemisphere of the brain, for example, have been linked to optimism and extroversion, while greater activity in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (an area of the brain a few inches behind the

The test’s numerous detractors charge that the Rorschach—originally designed for use with psychiatric patients but now frequently given to normal people—“overpathologizes,”

Two of these critics, psychologist William Grove and lawyer R. Christopher Barden, have argued strenuously that the Rorschach “clearly fails to meet the standards for admissibility” set out in recent Supreme Court decisions.

The Rorschach routinely “overpathologizes” healthy people, Wood and the others maintain, making them seem much more dysfunctional than they really are.

James Wood, a University of Texas psychology professor who would soon emerge as the Rorschach’s leading detractor, and two coauthors published a highly critical article in the respected journal Psychological Science. “Basic issues regarding the reliability and validity of the Comprehensive System have not been resolved,”

What’s Wrong With the Rorschach?, written with M. Teresa Nezworski, Scott Lilienfeld, and Howard Garb and released in 2003.

and is used by 89 of the companies in the Fortune 100.