Myers-Briggs tests have a persistent hold on many of us. Employers administer them to new recruits. Singles put their results in dating profiles, next to their astrological signs. And, to my dismay, the test was even featured recently in a Fast Company article about remote work and personality types. Why, you might ask, was I More
Perhaps the best known personality test is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. This episode takes a deep dive into the skeptical side of this topic with Dan McAdams, a professor of psychology at Northwestern University. More
COVID-19 has taught us something important about intelligence. It’s not just that we can get by without IQ-test proxies like the SAT and ACT that go by a number of different names to avoid being called IQ tests. (Research by Douglas K. Detterman, professor of psychology at Case Western Reserve University, and More
Communities touting the best-ranked schools are often the most in-demand among families. But this competitive environment can come at a psychological cost to those attending them. Emerging research is finding that students in “high-achieving schools” — public and private schools with high standardized test scores, varied extracurricular and academic offerings More
My first experience taking the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (M.B.T.I.) was at a job where it was mandatory. The company’s chief executive announced that all employees would take the test as part of a quarterly staff retreat. The assessment concluded that I was an I.N.T.J. (Introversion, Intuition, Thinking, Judgment.) At the retreat, we More
Some mental health patients report more symptoms than they actually experience and this is often attributed to malingering, when people intentionally inflate their symptoms for some benefit. The assumption that such patients are malingering tends to overshadow alternative explanations, even though research indicates that there are actually multiple pathways that could lead to overreporting. Researcher Harald Merckelbach of Maastricht University and colleagues review the available data and detail some of these alternative explanations in Current Directions in Psychological Science. More
