Personality Profiling Does Not Work | Sinnu Savola | Negotiator 81

Summary

Psychologist Sinnu Savola states plainly that DISC and Myers-Briggs are not used in professional psychology, and explains why: their scientific basis is weak, they force respondents into artificial either/or choices between items that are not opposites, and they push very different people into the same category. Personality traits, she says, always lie on a continuum, and around 80 per cent of people carry so much of both introversion and extroversion that what emerges depends on the context. Big Five is statistically far sounder, but even there she warns that a test only works if the sample it was built on represents the population it is used on. The episode’s most useful turn is her insistence that psychometric properties — IQ included — are convenient statistically but poor guides at the level of one individual, and that organisations would get more from the environmental and leadership factors that are known to bring out someone’s potential. Miettinen counters with his own recruitment method: a valuation exercise, control questions and a deliberate pressure test, which he demonstrates on Savola live. She turns it around, and the closing exchange is about how feedback is given and taken.

Chapters

• 00:00 — The megalomaniac problems of DISC and Myers-Briggs
• 00:43 — Guest: psychologist Sinnu Savola
• 01:08 — Occupational health psychology and an early-stage startup
• 01:31 — The Jungian four-field as a starting point
• 02:16 — Jung himself considered his model crude
• 02:59 — An individualistic and Western way of seeing personality
• 03:18 — Individuation, anima and animus as more interesting
• 03:48 — The DISC model and Surrounded by Idiots
• 04:38 — Psychologists use neither DISC nor Myers-Briggs
• 05:39 — Forced choices separate people artificially
• 06:04 — Reading versus washing rugs as an example
• 06:42 — The model forces different people into the same category
• 07:06 — Traits always lie on a continuum
• 07:24 — Why type models feel intuitively right
• 08:06 — Myers-Briggs does not even measure Jungian traits
• 08:44 — Big Five and the five factors
• 09:16 — Conscientiousness, neuroticism, openness and agreeableness
• 09:29 — The scales are valid and reliable
• 10:04 — People still experience themselves as introverts or extroverts
• 10:34 — Workplace Big Five and the NEO-PI-3
• 10:59 — The representativeness of the sample decides whether a test works
• 11:46 — Personality is strongly context-dependent
• 12:16 — Does personality change with age
• 12:53 — Crises can change personality quickly
• 13:09 — Environmental factors determine the best potential
• 14:04 — Psychometrics do not predict performance at work
• 15:04 — Who wants a neurotic bookkeeper
• 15:53 — Routines kill you, or lead to success
• 16:14 — Chain analysis as a tool of behaviour change
• 16:56 — Emotional arousal and the amygdala hijack
• 18:05 — Freud and repression in a critical light
• 18:52 — Can a psychological test be gamed
• 19:48 — Control questions and the consistency of answers
• 21:29 — The army’s block test and psychological profiling
• 22:18 — Hard IQ versus flimsier personality
• 23:09 — General intelligence and its components
• 23:50 — IQ works statistically but not at the individual level
• 24:35 — What an IQ requirement in recruitment is really after
• 25:57 — Competence is a great deal more than that
• 26:00 — A valuation exercise as a recruitment tool
• 26:31 — Control questions and the reaction to pressure
• 27:00 — Ten divided by four per cent
• 28:00 — The reaction reveals more than the answer
• 29:30 — Recruiting without outside help
• 30:15 — A methodical and fair process
• 31:00 — Contextualising psychological testing
• 31:44 — Interim analysts as a continuous recruitment channel
• 32:35 — Categories attract because uncertainty is uncomfortable
• 33:00 — Regulating emotions in recruitment
• 33:20 — How feedback is given and received
• 34:33 — Closing words and thanks

Watch

The recording lives on the Neuvottelija channel: Persoonallisuusprofilointi ei toimi | Sinnu Savola | Neuvottelija 81. A Finnish edition of this episode is published at www.neuvottelija.fi.