Damn. I spent so much of my time and energy pushing back exactly on this bullshit when I was young. That's part of the curriculum of mandatory courses I had to take during an apprenticeship in Switzerland. Expensive and mandatory courses paid by students' employer, of course. But I didn't know that the "color model" was THAT popular.
In french speaking countries, that's often presented as a package called PNL, aka "Programmation Neuro-linguistique" (https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programmation_neuro-linguistiq...). Based on my experience, that kind of pseudo-science is super popular in corporate environment, and is really difficult to fight against.
At MSFT, they made everyone go through this training, along with a "personality test" to figure out which colors you were. Then everyone got foam blocks that they were told to stack in their window to tell everyone else how to communicate with them.
This was exactly the same color model, although we gave names to the colors, like red was commander, blue was analyst, etc. Of course, everyone wanted to be red.
I'm sure this course was expensive, and hundreds if not thousands of people took it. It was about as useful as you would imagine. I only wish I could find those blocks, as they were fun (and safe) to throw at people.
Of course they didn't mention the original book, because if they would have, I certainly would have remembered the title!
Just to reduce generalization, while I was at Microsoft we never had to do any of these psychology things. From day 1 to the last day all I had to do was work and maybe once complete a compliance and security 1 hour course.
I participated on this kind of training in more than one organization, and I see the issue as trying to give an artificial justification to existing leadership and to the general organization style of the company (generally multi-layered pyramid). They will somehow always conclude that managers have the "right" leadership characteristics, and that people being lead should be fine with their position, because after all this is who they are!
I took this stuff in an introductory college course. I kind of knew it was bs but it was also easy to understand and score an easy mark. Sometimes it just doesn't pay to tell the emperor they have no clothes.
> Sometimes it just doesn't pay to tell the emperor they have no clothes.
Indeed.
I worked a job in which I worked more hours than my coworkers and was (measurably) more productive on a per hour basis than my coworkers. I loved my job, the people in other departments loved it when I worked because things got done that they needed, and I always had a smile on my face.
But I had a "bad attitude" because I objected to similar nonsense.
For some reason in corporate environments, the ideal employee "gets along with others" but also "doesn't waste time." I mean quite literally they want an oxymoron.
Also I find that these things can easily be gamed because they can try to figure out "what" contains the variables that allow for them to make themselves appear to be the ideal candidate; moldable to whatever position they desire.
I think there is an over emphasis on this because upfront seeing that in an interview doesn't tell you much, and if you're skeptical of it, the supervisor already has a skewed view of you. Also from my experience, supervisors want complacency, not "diverse views." The whole diversity phenomenon is completely garbage that does not exist practically. I don't get why it's taught when it's not followed. The nature of the beast is for the top's will to be executed downward, not marginalized upward.
I guess I've been lucky to avoid literally any of this at work. However, one of my classes at university has each student rate other students in their group with arbitrary personality factors that seem like they should be subjective.
For instance, the model (we take quiz to evaluate how well we use it and how to rate each other) relies on things like "is late to meetings" or "does not fully consider everyone's ideas" to judge a student as being an underperformer. The most problematic was that it made us choose whether we are "details" or "overview" in terms of what kind of work we complete, with no room for being able to handle both (you are either the person who types individual sentences at the whim of your 'leader', or you are planning the entirety of the project and doing none of the grunt work). Speaking of 'leader', it also asks us to rate ourselves as leaders (good, mediocre, bad), and to state what kind of person we want to be led by.
I'm expecting our responses to be used to assign us to groups and given roles in each group, but we will see.
I just get annoyed when I'm stuck taking a survey that - by the nature of the questions on it - is almost certainly dubious.
I think a big part of it is that corporate HR types are trying to turn people into interchangeable cogs in the machine. But this ignores the richness of our experience -- even if the color model were both static and true, I'm willing to guess that the expression of those characteristics would vary widely from person to person.
Better to just get to know people individually and talk to them about their desires, capabilities and needs. But I guess that takes too much time in the corporate world, so we classify people by color (and I suspect it also sells a lot of books).
The problem is HR types are absolute conformist authoritarians. They don't have any critical thinking skills whatsoever, otherwise they wouldn't be in that field.
It's the exact kind of thing I expect colleges and universities to push out. People that can only regurgitate information and then get indignant if you as much as question it's validity. Brainwashing really works, and people often pay for the privilege.
> Better to just get to know people individually and talk to them about their desires, capabilities and needs.
That does not scale. You cant do that reasonably with nuance with too many people.
Moreover, someone who is on completely different position will never understand fully what programmer will talk about when talking about desires, capabilities and needs. This sort of thing needs to be discussed with more technical leader/manager. And vice versa, programmers have no idea about what hr people actually need.
This article has better short descriptions of the colors, and elaborates a lot on the traits each color can have, how they disagree, agree, can be combined, etc:
My favorite line in the article is probably that Green is the color of Chesterton's Fence; even though the field of software isn't very Green as a whole, you can still express conflicts and mindsets within that field using this color wheel. I'm definitely some combination of Green and Blue -- I want to see the ecosystem of kubernetes pods running smoothly, changes should have a really good justification, the only thing that matters is what does work, not what should work, etc.
White is also largely about control and order, so I don't think that one fits well (which is fine since it is mapping a different color). The others, yeah, fairly close.
I may have a slightly different view than most players, since I also read the novels for the era I played the game (Invasion through Fifth Dawn). It fits during the Mirari and post-Mirari arcs, Odyssey through Scourge, and in the same era black also wasn't just "death and negativity" (though Phage certainly embodied those aspects).
Oh, my PoV was about MtG in the 90s until say Tempest. It is probably out of date at this point, but I never liked the new stuff that much (after a few times jumping on the latest hype expac got boring, esp as the older cards were more powerful). I read a bit into the lore (IIRC there wasn't much available) and I read one magazine with a story within the Ice Age.
> Based on my experience, that kind of pseudo-science is super popular in corporate environment, and is really difficult to fight against.
Because it has some merit. It's not the complete picture of a human, but it's a shortcut that gets you in the ballpark. Kind of like a fuzzy picture coming into focus.
People can be evaluated on any spectrum: morality, intelligence, friendliness, creativity, etc. They're all useful, but an incomplete representation of the human.
There are tons of systems that try to lump people into categories. The systems that tend to get popular have enough metrics to be roughly useful but few enough to be easily remembered.
We used to lump people into two categories: good and bad, or friend or enemy. Then we figured out that people can change and be on different parts of that spectrum in different contexts. That blurry picture wasn't clear enough to help us succeed.
The danger comes when you start thinking: "Reds are jerks" or "Don't worry about what that Yellow said." and fall into that mental trap that the fuzzy picture is all there is.
Actually, it doesn't necessarily have merit. It just seems like it does, because people will assume that almost any vaguely-worded paragraph that's supposedly about them must be true.
Thanks for sharing the English article. I decided to share the french version because it has way more details (it's a huge phenomenon here), but that's for sure more interesting if people can actually read the content :)
Neuro-Linguistic Programming is related to General Semantics, which was developed by Alfred Korzybski. General Semantics isn't bullshit like NLP is, but it does have some useful insights.
For example, General Semantics says that the map is not the territory, which isn't the most absolutely ground-breaking thing in the world but is helpful to keep in mind, whereas Neuro-Linguistic Programming might as well be "NLP: Language is Magic!" for all of the grandiose claims it makes about controlling people using crafted speech.
> During the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, general semantics entered the idiom of science fiction. Notable examples include the works of A. E. van Vogt, The World of Null-A and its sequels. [48] General semantics appear also in Robert A. Heinlein's work, especially Gulf. [49] Bernard Wolfe drew on general semantics in his 1952 science fiction novel Limbo. [50] Frank Herbert's novels Dune[51] and Whipping Star [52] are also indebted to general semantics. The ideas of general semantics became a sufficiently important part of the shared intellectual toolkit of genre science fiction to merit parody by Damon Knight and others; they have since shown a tendency to reappear in the work of more recent writers such as Samuel R. Delany, Suzette Haden Elgin and Robert Anton Wilson. In 2008, John Wright extended van Vogt's Null-A series with Null-A Continuum. William Burroughs references Korzybski's time binding principle in his essay The Electronic Revolution, and elsewhere.
Early NLP was basically Grinder and Bandler trying to codify hypnosis in grammatical structure. Later NLP was the MLM/PickUp stuff. Too bad the two are conflated. It was an interesting concept until it was commercialized.
Uh.. did you read Science and Sanity?![2] It's absolutely BS. Korzybski thought "is" should be eliminated. When you say "The car is red", there are many things the car 'is' besides red, so this is a lie. (No, really!) Thus a language without 'is' would be better.[1] He saw and wrote of himself as an Aristotle-scale genius. Science and Sanity has a couple of ideas: "map is not the territory"–no wonder this is quoted, it's the one coherent idea in the book–and the structural differential, a very interesting device made of string and bits of metal, for representing levels of abstraction and interrelations of concepts[0].
But the bulk of the thick book is comprised of a chapter on each of many traditional fields–psychology, linguistics, physics, etc, educating about the use of "general semantics" in each field. e.g. there's a maths/calculus/geometry chapter, with a bit purporting to explain the application of "general semantics" to it. These chapters seem meant to show what a polymath and genius Korzybski was - "Gee, how knows so much about so many subjects, there must be something to this". He was evidently staggeringly impressed with himself, well, many people are, but only cranks write about it to such a degree. I think its success lay in its nature as a (very) introductory textbook to a lot of different areas. It's all extremely basic stuff. The less generally educated you are, the more impressive it would seem. It's very weird that it got any kind of reputation though. Not many people are acquainted with Science and Sanity these days, it seems, (understandably) and just assume there must be something to it.
My dad reputedly made references to the "cortico-thalamic pause", and it was probably a joke. I think maybe it was more of a reference to A E Van Vogt's science fiction than General Semantics as such. And possibly there was a (humorous) association with "we now pause for station identification" on the radio.
Looking at Wikipedia, it seems like Van Vogt was significantly involved in Dianetics which later became Scientology, which seems vaguely disturbing (I also learned of Theodore Sturgeon's connections to it relatively recently).
But, I mean, the concept of pausing and reconciling your feelings and analytical mind seems to make sense, kind of.
The line between stuff that appeals to smart people who think laterally and total bullshit gets hazy sometimes. Or between obvious truisms and deep insights. My father was a physicist with an interest in various things including philosophy, and I recall books belonging to him by Chomsky and many others that don't necessarily appeal to me but I can't ask him now exactly what he thought of them and how seriously he took something.
>Based on my experience, that kind of pseudo-science is super popular in corporate environment, and is really difficult to fight against.
While its uses in a corporate environment can be bogus, there are indeed a few discreet types of people, and most anybody that has worked/lived with/watched people in the wild can attest to that.
I don't see many people being "analytic, careful, meticulous" in one day and "let's just go at it / throw caution to the wind" the next.
At best, an "analytic, careful, meticulous" will have some rare breaks when those qualities will break down (e.g. when they fall in love or some addiction or some breaking point in their life/career).
But usually people tend to stick to some modes of behavior -- which might not be the ones in the color groups above, but they do exist and are quite consistent.
>Well, congrats, you have defined what a personality is.
That's still worth it, especially if people think personality can't be defined, or needs tons more subtly to define (whereas I did it at a specific abstraction level) or that people are unpredictable, so there's no "static personality" etc.
Against all of those approaches, I make a statement that personality exists, and there are certain types of people, and that it's still worth it to classify them in a few simplistic inflexible groups personality-wise -- subtlety is not necessary for many purposes.
>The whole point is that the colors thing is BS. Humans are much more complex than that.
Which is neither here nor there. Complexity is only relevant based on the abstraction level on wants to work with, and what they want to use the model for.
Same way that real-world physics are also much more complex than Newtonian model, but for tons of purposes the Newtonian calculations are just fine (and we can even use vastly simplified constants, like PI with just 4-5 digits) in our calculations and still do fine.
>That can easily happen, depends on the context.
Depends on how often it happens. If it can happen, but 9/10 times it doesn't it still totally worth abstracting someone as "analytic, careful, meticulous" for predictive purposes -- you'll be right 9 times out of 10, which can give a huge advantage over other approaches...
Belbin is same bs mostly. Yes, some people tend to be more comfortable in leadership roles and yes, some people are more creative.
But the belbin model is yet again one failed attempt to quantify these ephemeral observations - and failing at that.
I deal with several roles. My belbin questionnaire mapped pretty well the type of communication that was required in each role between the other person, but did not tell about me as such.
These tools are best used as an entertainment to get people thinking about how they behave, but in that a "which hogwarts house do you belong to" would run the same function. I.e. they are all fiction. Fiction can capture important insights, but it's not science.
(For those not familiar with belbin, part of the routine is collecting feedback from 5-6 of you coworkers)
Not sure I saw the feedback, but as I understand it its based on a lot of data from students at the college.
Though wen I did it the course leader said so you work at the labs which was flattering (the Uk equivalent of bell labs that is)
And not everyone is comfortable with leadership roles I know developer who is better than me who totally went to pieces presenting in front of a small group of his peers.
The book really helps you to understand why 'blues' ask 100 questions, want to problem solve all the time, always ask for more information, and can be cold and distant instead of being emotional creatures. Yellows on the other hand are always day dreaming, coming up with broad ideas, trying to plan social gatherings and always seemingly have their 'head in the clouds' (this is totally me). Reds can seem really aggressive, very dominant, demanding, and short with those around you, and frankly they can't help it, and greens are very amiable. They agree to everything, but are often afraid to speak their mind.
Looks like it is not only Sweden but other places as well. Seems like easily relatable and digestible like those on Sun Signs and Personality and hence a 'good seller', if not a best seller.
Hah, this reminds me of zodiac signs, which every single non-scientist female friend of mine seems to take very seriously (not sure about male friends since this topic seems to never come up). No wonder it sells.
I've seen an analysis of the phenomenon where the four elements correspond to 4 major neurotransmitters, with the traits associated with having a lot of one element being pretty close to having a lot of the corresponding neurotransmitter. Maybe there really is a potentially useful means of categorizing people there.
I am a scientist myself but unfortunately I have neither the time nor interest to test every little hypothesis of mine, especially outside my field of expertise.
Unlike zodiac signs there probably is some reality to catogrising people as say people oriented or analytic in their typical behaviour in the manner of the Idiots book.
Fascinating how it's the same thing "mediums" use to say there's some person speaking to them from beyond the grave, with a message for someone whose name begin with M...
The UK mentalist Derren Brown has a brilliant example passage of this in his 2007 book "Tricks of the Mind". It was all about what you felt like as a child and your relationship to your parents. Very clever. I remember showing it to a friend at university who became extremely emotional and couldn't believe it wasn't tailored to them.
> Looks like it is not only Sweden but other places as well.
As an American it’s a little reassuring to know that despite some economic advantages, the Swedes are also just a bunch of easily impressionable idiots.
I had never heard of this book, or color system before, but it makes me think of my time working in car sales. Our senior sales managers trained us to identify personalities, and they used similar groupings.
There were four 'buckets' and they are very close to this color system. They are dominant driver, complacent, ego driven, and analytical. The idea is to, as quickly as possible, identify the customer's type, and adapt your sales approach to that. You learn to use a communication style for each bucket. Different types of questions to ask, different speed/ energy, different body language.
I was a terrible salesperson, but I watched the managers and top salespeople use this approach with much success. They would match their style of communication with the customer's, in an attempt to earn their favor and make them feel more comfortable. The hypothesis is this increases the likelihood of closing the sale.
I understand these buckets (colors) aren't scientific, and it sounds like some folks in Sweden might have taken it too far or been misled. But the article says
"Erikson has repeatedly claimed that the benefit of his colour approach is that it helps us understand ourselves and others and, as a result, improves our communication and reduces conflicts."
So I'm not sure that the idea of learning different ways people communicate, and in turn, how you yourself can communicate in different ways is a 'fraud'. To be fair, I haven't read the book so I don't know how or what ideas are presented.
I think the 4 buckets/colors can just be a loose 'framework'. As long as you understand it's not the end all - be all of personality. In fact it's not really 'personality' at all. It's just a quick and dirty way of grouping common characteristics of people.
Maybe it's not useful in all situations, but for some applications (like sales), there is certainly value in communicating with people in a way that is compatible with their style. In the case of car sales, it's very tangible value, a larger paycheck :)
I think one issue with the colour approach is, that multiple dimensions of character traits are thrown into one pot (one colour) even though, they might be independent traits. Also, saying, someone is one/two/three colours is quite an all or nothing approach, that does not reflect reality, as character traits are non-binary (see for example the scientifically more grounded “Big Five”).
Over all, when a good salesman closes a deal, with the knowledge of this approach that you have been taught, it does not say, that the approach works. A good salesman uses common sense and experience in talking with people and of course adapts to the customer, but that does not mean, that he uses this special theory. (Maybe, you did perform bad, because you used the theory )
I would say, if we did a study with a control group, one group has been taught the theory, you have been taught, and the control group is not (but maybe, we tell them, take notice of the other person and try to adapt to their character), and if we notice, that the theory trained salesmen actually perform better, then we can say this framework is of any use. We still don’t know, of course, if not a different form of training could outperform this framework.
Until then, it is just anecdotal evidence.
>I was a terrible salesperson, but I watched the managers and top salespeople use this approach with much success. They would match their style of communication with the customer's, in an attempt to earn their favor and make them feel more comfortable. The hypothesis is this increases the likelihood of closing the sale.
Yes. People are less "unique" than they think, and some scientists (or non scientists) can come up with useful pattern matching/abstractions over people types (like in the book), while others study subtlety and small differences at another level, and are sometimes deluded that higher level personality types don't exist.
That doesn't mean that this or that theory of types is fool-proof and always applicable. But it also doesn't have to be, to be scientific (which just needs it to be falsifiable, empirical based on observation, testable, and useful for predictions).
A scientific theory != a law of nature. The former doesn't have to always hold. It could still create very useful models for predicting people behavior with success.
Well said. This is the right way to look at it I think. It’s a loose model, or abstraction. For some applications it provides utility/ value. Others, not so much.
It’s not a universal definition of personality, but more a rough set of patterns of communication style, where in really many different personalities might fall under.
So there is one big distinction in how these systems are used in corporate culture vs sales culture. That is, in the Sales culture the system is trying to describe a personality type based in one context, buying a car, not trying to generalize people across every context.
Someone may be generally very detail oriented yet when they buy a car, they may be very complacent. In fact you could think that a 'more ideal' color system would look like some 4 colored Piet Mondrian painting.
You say that 1) the framework was encouraged at your work place, 2) you were a terrible salesperson, 3) great salespeople were great at sales (implying that they were helped by the framework).
If the framework were even a tiny bit useful, wouldn’t it have made you at least an okay salesman?
Conversely, wouldn’t the great salesmen be great regardless of how valid a framework is?
Well for me, it didn’t work because I wasn’t able to execute it. I understood the concepts I was taught well enough, but don’t really possess the tools needed to make it work. I’m not a people person, I talk very monotone, quite frankly I don’t have the personality for it! (Why I tried to learn sales at all is a whole other story) Haha, that’s why into programming, which is perfectly suited for my personality.
Also, the ‘personality’ piece is a small (but important) part of the larger framework that is car sales. We literally had a physical ‘playbook’ to follow. A very well defined ‘road’ to walk the customer down, and if you skipped any of the steps, it would jeopardize the whole process. Sales really is a solved puzzle, every step & technique is there for a reason, because it is proven to close people down.
So no, a great salesperson won’t be great regardless, they will be great because they follow the rules of sales. Natural charisma & like-ability go a long way, but I saw numerous guys who were terrible when they started, work hard at the system and perfect the process, end up selling 20 cars a month.
How come dividing personality into introverted and extroverted (1 dimension) is generally accepted, but dividing personality into more dimensions (disc has 2, mbti has 4, big five has 5, etc), people tend to feel uneasy (e. g. "I am more than just this")?
All traps aside (confirmation bias, overdoing it), I do believe these categorizations do make sense as a way to learn about behavior, especially for the general public. That people misinterpret the meaning of the results is obviously bad, but it doesn't invalidate the theory.
Categorizations in general are fine, but most people assume too much of them. The best way to think of personality is as the average class of behaviors across most circumstances.
Suppose I show you a video of someone quite talkative, monopolizing the conversation for an hour, gesturing a lot with their hands. Sounds like an extroverted person? What if I told you this was a video of an introvert giving a polished presentation? The circumstances make a big difference in how people act.
The problem is many people misapply a categorization as this behavior all the time, not this class of behaviors most of the time. So skeptical people obviously bristle at this suggestion. Furthermore, the generalizations often don't stop there, and many people usually extrapolate far more ridiculous ideas: "You're an X, so that means you aren't good at Y."
I also agree that these categorizations make sense and that something like Meyers Briggs is a 0th order approximation to something that really exists. The fact that many people declare it pseudoscience annoys me because it at least tries to be useful (although something like the Big 5 linguistic approach is a better model).
Personally, I think the most fruitful way to engage people on the topic of personality is to discuss very specific and narrow traits (like talkativeness or gesticulation). I think you are more likely to get a meaningful conversation. People of course want to know correlations, but those are tricky and you need to be slow to generalize.
I look at MBTI as a hash function. Rather than having someone ask a few dozen questions about myself and me answering them and them putting them together, it's simpler to hash those answers into a 4 letter string. People with some big differences do get the same hash value, but the loss of accuracy seems an acceptable trade-off in casual situations.
Hash functions are repeatable. MBTI types are not--people often receive different results when retaking the test, even in short time periods. It categories are not based on research about significant aspects of personality, and often go against it. The Big Five personality test is a scientifically grounded one that actually works as you describe, and with less loss of accuracy.
MBTI actually has 12 archetypes, hard to compare that with introvert and extrovert.
I often reference being introverted but it's important to understand that it's a scale and everyone is somewhere on that scale. It's not binary. But it does help explain why I get tired from over exposure to strangers, but can go for hours in the company of family and close friends.
And yeah I agree these things should only be used as guides or aides. I still feel my life changed when I first read my MBTI description. It was spooky, like someone had read my mind.
But how does that help me? It mostly doesn't. What has helped me the most daily is knowing my limits, that I have a social battery and letting myself recharge that.
And completely irrelevant to this topic my biggest aide was to understand how my stomach controlled my temper. It sounds so cliché but regular complete meals and sleep has helped me more than any psychologist.
MBTI has 16 archetypes, but they're all combinations of 4 letters / scales / dimensions, where 16personalities added one to that (assertive <-> turbulent).
I do believe it helped me find out about the differences of other people's internal worlds, but the journey did involve avoiding a lot of pitfalls and taking everything with a healthy dose of skepticism.
I skimmed the entire article and am still confused about how this guy managed to persuade the media and “large parts of the Swedish population” that he’s a behavioral scientist. I mean, especially for laypeople, the first question you should ask when someone claims to be an expert in a certain science is “does s/he have a Ph.D.?”. This guy did not disclose his academic background, which no Ph.D. holder would ever hide, and his best claim to authority appears to be “in an interview with Filter I referred to a psychologist who supported my claim [to be a behavioural scientist]”, which is truly bizarre (and false btw). Additionally, this guy debuted as a crime novel author ffs (according to Google-translated version of his Swedish Wikipedia page[1]). What a joke.
(Granted, there’s a small percentage of frauds among Ph.D. holders. Meanwhile, the percentage of frauds among self-proclaimed non-Ph.D. experts is likely close to 100%.)
I find it hard to believe that you are surprised. I find myself awash in woo psychology from all media outlets and individuals I talk to. If what you are selling is what people want to hear, then they are more than happy to not bother to look at it any closer.
The thing people really want to hear is that they are not responsible for the consequences of their actions. This is what "personality" tests do. They say that it's not our fault if we behave in a clearly destructive manner because it's our inherent personality and we are powerless to change it. This is clearly nonsense, but the absolution of guilt and pressure to admit our mistakes is so desired that gullible folks are happy to swallow it without a second thought.
I think the only thing a PhD makes you an expert in is "PhD-ing".
Don't get me wrong. I think having a PhD is a signal that you are very intelligent, I respect, work with and love people with PhDs (I disrespect the system). But if you believe this:
> Meanwhile, the percentage of frauds among self-proclaimed non-Ph.D. experts is likely close to 100%
then I would say the percentage of frauds among PhD experts is 99%. No one knows anything. Perhaps non-PhDs are better than PhDs at remembering that. PhD's don't tell you how expert someone is at something. Unless the task at hand is making PDFs. People with PhDs are all great at that.
If you look at the track record of "Psychology PhDs" in the past 100 years, I wouldn't be surprised if this fellow has done better work than more than half of them. Purely by chance, knowing nothing about his book.
I trust experience and open data more than academic credentials.
I would not be surprised if in 50 years we have a much more scientific method of doing science than the current PhD system.
Outside a small percentage of fraudsters, having a Ph.D. in a subject is hard proof that one has devoted thousands of hours into said subject and has treaded a more or less established path, with at least a modicum of quality assurance from field experts. That doesn't automatically make someone an expert (depending on the definition of course), but it does indicate one can have a serious conversation on said subject with said individual. It also depends on the institution of course: I would place high confidence on someone with a Ph.D. from Princeton Physics, and less on someone with a Ph.D. from a no-name school/department.
With alternative scientists (I've seen many even when I was only a Ph.D. candidate -- some like to email an entire department at a time) there's simply no quality assurance whatsoever. You may review their work, but 99% of the time it's nonsense, so you probably don't want to waste time on the next one. And that's when you're qualified to review their work; when you're not, it only makes sense to assume it's nonsense, unless their work is endorsed by multiple field experts (without conflict of interest, which can be a murky issue in certain fields).
So, you're welcome to propose better noise filters, but I maintain that having a Ph.D. or not is the first question to ask when anyone is trying to sell you a scientific theory you're not qualified to evaluate.
I agree that it's a filter for someone that has put in the work to learn the research, which is very helpful.
But my take is if a guy can go and sell 2 million books and the PhDs get in a tizzy because he doesn't have a PhD, and the lay person can't tell the difference, then the problem is these whining "PhD experts" and their pseudoscience, and not the non-PhD who wrote the book.
The layperson can immediately tell whether a phone was made by electrical engineering experts or some crank amateur. If someone is buying some "fraudsters" theory over some PhD's, perhaps it's because neither of them work so it doesn't really matter.
My take on the field of psychology (and many human bio fields) is we just don't have the scientific tools yet to make it a true science. But technology is finally making in roads (ie, wearables), so perhaps there's hope yet.
If you reduce your standard from a Ph.D. to a 4 year degree from an accredited university, how well does the filter work?
If someone is speaking physics and has a B.S. in physics, while it isn't as good a check as a Ph.D., they are fare more likely to know what they are talking about than someone without any degree in physics.
I would also add another standard of career experience at applying knowledge, though I might just limit that to programming and computer science fields.
I’m a physicist so I can say for certain that a typical college graduate majoring in physics but not looking into a Ph.D. isn’t equipped to discuss any advanced topic (say, quantum field theory). They are usually fifty to a hundred years behind frontier research.
That doesn’t necessarily translate to psychology, which I have no idea.
In matters of layman discussion, would you trust their input more than someone with no formal education in physics?
To go with a more practical example, say a news report comes out that some new exercise called joopies are better than burpees. Then say someone with a B.S. in Exercise Science says the article is wrong and says burpees are better than joopies. Without either peer reviewed research nor an expert with a Ph.D. (or other doctorate) to weigh in on the issue, would you think that joopies are better, that burpees are better, or that you don't have enough evidence to decide either are better.
And if you would recommend the third option as a matter of course, would the same hold true if we replace joopies with staring at a clock?
Thus far the discussion has focused on non-Ph.D. posing as field expert and coming up with original research. However, if you’re trying to evaluate some pop science in media (which is likely garbage, so always start with negative points) and have a friend or family member with a B.S. to talk to, they’re often qualified to debunk a large class of bullshit. For instance, if there’s a news report of a perpetual motion machine, and a physics major tells you it’s obviously bullshit because it violates the first and/or second law of thermodynamics, they’re likely correct. In less obvious scenarios, hopefully they would try to track down the source and try to make sense of it, and tell you if the source is garbage (in case they’re qualified to evaluate it), and/or if the source is misrepresented in media. This isn’t always possible and assumes a humble person who don’t brag about things they don’t understand, though; if the person is known to be boastful then you probably won’t place too much trust on them anyway.
The above is probably more useful for hard sciences though. Honestly when it comes to psychology I take theories endorsed by actual field experts with a grain of salt.
>Thus far the discussion has focused on non-Ph.D. posing as field expert and coming up with original research.
I had thought we had already diverged from that when we were discussing noise filtering. In regards to original research in the actual field, I agree the standard must be tougher and personally wouldn't depend upon a single expert or peer reviewed paper to accept something as truth, especially in the social sciences. In physics, I assume any ground breaking results would be quickly redone by independent researchers and a consensus for or against would follow.
Ah, I would say physics is much more amenable to science than psychology presently is. Big data, cheap and endlessly repeatable experiments, etc.
> isn’t equipped to discuss any advanced topic (say, quantum field theory). They are usually fifty to a hundred years behind frontier research.
I don't disagree, but I do wish in the future we have an easier way to visualize all of known information, so one can see what one knows and what one is in the dark about, and "see the frontier".
The purpose of a 4 year degree and a PhD is very different.
Roughly speaking, coming out of a 4 year degree doesn't signal expertise in anything. It means you have learned to "think like an X" to some degree, and have a working knowledge of some of the foundational stuff in an an area.
Coming out of a PhD signals you have achieved expertise in a pretty narrow area of a subfield (and explored the bleeding edge a bit), but also that you have learned how to gain that sort of mastery again, alone, in at least related areas.
As a swede this is a bit embarrassing to me. I have a few friends who's bought into this completely, and of course bought the book. All without even a hint of critical thinking. It is hard to tell your friends they've been conned.
I can understand it to some extent. Here's someone, who claims he is a behavioral expert and scientist, and who offers a seemingly plausible simple method to understand yourself and other people, and how to use that method to efficiently interact and work with others. Who wouldn't want that?
Unfortunately the books are still sold. I've considered printing stickers that warns about the nonsense and sneak it on to copies in book stores. How else can we stop the proliferation of this junk?
Well, some/many Japanese believe that blood type determines a lot about your personality, and Americans believe in Myers-Briggs types, and I'm sure there are local equivalents everywhere else too, so I wouldn't worry about it too much.
I always thought of Myers-Briggs as being about identifying the things you are less comfortable with and learning to address them. It's about identification of tendencies, not blaming a Gremlin.
It has always struck me as odd when somebody insists Myers-Briggs has been "debunked". It asks a lot of questions about what amount to boundaries of your comfort zone. Of course as we age that zone changes, ideally, but sadly not always, by expanding.
Naming various borders of your comfort zone is useful if you want to push them back. If M-B has a failing, it is that its advocates never seem to suggest that being dead center on all axes is an ideal to strive for.
"Debunked" is probably overstating it, but Myers-Briggs has been shown to have fairly significant statistical deficiencies and its predictive claims are largely pseudoscientific. It's not complete garbage, but there are personality trait models like Big Five and HEXACO that are more robust and have more research behind them, but even those are not as strong predictors as pop management literature makes them out to be.
I suppose the issue with centrality is that not only can it indicate that you are both good at being an extrovert and good at being an introvert (when appropriate), but it can also indicate that you are bad at being extroverted and bad at being introverted when arguably called for by context.
I think what MBTI lacks is an appreciation of context - sometimes it's good to be Thinking, sometimes it is good to be Feeling. What individuals need to learn is 1. when each is appropriate and 2. if they're bad at doing one or the other, getting better at it.
If it is useful in expanding your comfort zone, it's useful, full stop. If it's useful in helping to get along with people who are different from you, it's useful, full stop.
If it's not useful to you, that does not mean it is not useful to anybody else.
1. We all have specific preferences in the way we construe our experiences, and these preferences underlie our interests, needs, values, and motivation
2. The MBTI is an accurate measure of #1
There's also an implicit claim that each of the 4 dichotomies are well represented by a binary value.
There are far more claims made about it by Meyers and Briggs, but those 3 are baked into the MBTI test.
People have definitely had their comfort zone expanded by following advice in horoscopes, but that doesn't mean there's nothing to "believe" with regards to horoscopes.
I have never encountered anyone who claimed either of the above. The test results indicate a spectrum on each axis.
Horoscopes are useful to people otherwise inclined to get stuck in a rut. Likewise, the I Ching. You don't need to believe either one for it to be useful. Not believing is an intelligent response, but not everybody is so equipped. Intelligent people get stuck in ruts, too.
Well you are the first proponent of the MBTI I've encountered who has disagreed with those two statements. We clearly have very different experiences.
When I took the MBTI in secondary school, it was stressed that the specific point was to discover which of the 16 types you were, and that knowing which type you were would be helpful in life.
That is sad. Maybe criminally negligent, for the school. I slotted, initially, neatly into "architect", but I saw all the other slots as other ways to be, and to explore being.
As ("even") Heinlein said, specialization is for insects.
I did not say it was useful or useless, just that I do not believe in it (in fact, I don’t disbelieve it either), my comment was more pointing to the assumptions of cultural ontology in the parent comment.
If something as blatant as these colors was legitimately an inherent part of human psychology, how would it be that they were only discovered in the past decades? Wouldn't philosophers have noticed it thousands and thousands of years ago?
The article starts by stating fairly that the book's author is a professor of psychology and neuroscience and UC Berkeley.
The article author's homepage says:
> I'm an independent researcher with background in Economics, Mathematics, and Cognitive Science.
Since I don't have any prior knowledge of the area, I'm sure either of them could convince me of their argument. So I'm inclined to believe the published Berkeley professor over the unaffiliated independent reviewer.
Credentials play no role in this fight. There are plenty of examples of credentialed people fabricating and lying. The author documents the lies pretty soundly.
One way to think of this is as an experiment itself. That is, do your friends have an increase in happiness and life enjoyment having read the book? If so, it may be worth tolerating if only for the placebo effect.
I applied to Volvo when looking for graduate schemes in my final year of university and recall having to complete a personality test there. I'm not sure whether or not that particular test corresponded to the referenced 'method', however it was a series of very arbitrary statements that one had to either agree or disagree with.
None of them seemed particularly useful for determining my aptitude as a software engineer or professionalism more generally. I can still recall this statement, verbatim, which I believe I stated I agreed with:
"I greatly enjoy the saucy and slapstick humour of some television shows"
I'm guessing this was in Göteborg. I also worked on a team in Göteborg and was presented with this nonsense. I ended up telling the HR manager that this "method" is obviously pseudoscience and a waste of my time, and I ended up leaving the team.
You're right. Was an interesting sounding role and it didn't get my application discarded before a Skype interview, but I didn't get very far in the process and wonder how much bearing my love of slapstick had on their decision to pass on me.
I'm probably in the minority and I believe I am giving an unpopular opinion: this is pretty much gatekeeping.
The tone of this article is acerbic. My cynicism says that this is someone who got a piece of paper after much effort and cost and they think that makes them something more than the author. They are upset that this book is being given more attention then work they deem to be more valuable.
They aren't just fighting bad information with better information, they seem indignant anyone would listen to this man at all. I'm very glad that, in general, programming and computer science is a place where credentials matter significantly less than contributions. Sure, the programming language you wrote or the library you maintain may not be the best but no one listens to whiny academics demanding everyone bow down to them and disregard your work.
> I'm very glad that, in general, programming and computer science is a place where credentials matter significantly less than contributions. Sure, the programming language you wrote or the library you maintain may not be the best but no one listens to whiny academics demanding everyone bow down to them and disregard your work.
Yes, and that works for all exact sciences. If you can somehow prove a formerly unproven mathematical conjecture, guess what, they will listen to you. You may even get prizes.
But extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Since in psychology very few things can be "proven", studies are the next best things. But you cannot just spout nonsense and expect people who are actually experts in their fields to endorse you.
Provocative title. More accurate, but less surprising would be "A significant portion of a population were fooled by a charlatan offering simple answers to complex questions". That wouldn't be as salacious though.
But I'm very happen with what VoF did. The book has still been a huge annoyance for years though, and I've seen personally workplace accomodations based on its idiocy.
But if I'm allowed to generalize a bit myself, I would say that it's not more people than are swayed daily by political facebook memes or fake internet "news" publications with superficially professional design, regardless of nation.
Critical thinking is hard, and takes a lot of time to process, and we're continuously hit with increasingly more information that it's impossible to deal with. I hope that people smarter than me can create tools and models to make it easier.
"Some professionals recognised talk of colours from the infamous Myers-Briggs test, administered by less-respectable management consultants. It built on the mystical ideas of the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung, active at the start of the 20th century, whose theories are now mostly of historical interest. The theory of Myers-Briggs was not something modern psychologists took seriously. Since the test had been developed quite some time ago it had been the subject of extensive research and the results had revealed serious flaws."
The Myers-Briggs corporate product is an interesting confirmation of 20th Century scientific method. With standard methodologies, reviewed and published by standard peer review processes, Myers-Briggs was shown to be useless before 1990. So science seems to work well. Nonetheless, the last time a company I worked for paid (and spent on employee time) for Myers-Briggs testing was 2017. Science works well, but corporate purchasing of consulting does not have such a good track record.
I am more analytic than most of my friends. If you want to label that as "Blue" or "7" or "J", "Conscientiousness" or "Engineer", that's one way to represent the general classification. And it's useful, especially when used as some kind of mirror for reflection. Whether it's useful in sum across a population to answer specific questions like "Will this specific group of people work well together" is highly suspect. The categories just are not resolute enough, and people are more like clouds than clocks. Categories, while a necessary first step to understanding, ultimately become a trap if that's all you understand people as.
It is hard to figure out from this verbose article, whether it is just professional jealousy or a genuine need to debunk the theory of assigning colours to personality types, as described in the book titled Surrounded by idiots. The crux of the argument is that a professional psychologist, who is also a member Swedish Skeptics Society, is refuting the author's claim of being a 'behavioural scientist', yet he admits that it is a meaningless term and also legal in Sweden.
Erikson e-mailed me (we both shared the same international agent, so we had met briefly once before) and asked whether, given my own profession as a psychologist and my position as a board member of the Swedish Skeptics Society, I would support his claim that he was a ‘behavioural scientist’. I declined to offer such support, despite the fact that from a legal point of view in Sweden, it is possible to call yourself a ‘behavioural scientist’ without any formal qualifications. He has just as much right as my poodle to call himself a behavioural scientist.
He also points out that the theory has no evidence behind it, that it appears to be based on an older theory, also completely unevidenced, and that that older theory draws on discredited Jungian archetypes.
To read this purely as an attack on someone's credentials out of jealousy is to have missed the meat of the criticism.
I stated quite clearly, that it is hard to work out the intention of the article. The professional psychologist in question seems to be spending an awful amount of energy dispelling a theory that has been already discredited. There is an unhealthy fixation on the circulation and sales of the book, throughout the article. It is now a futile exercise to convince the readership if it is drivel and providing the book with even more publicity. They will come to a realization of their own accord and banish the book to the kooky category.
"Despite the use of colours, it turned out that the “Surrounded by …” books were not based on Myers-Brigg. Instead, they built on another personality theory, the so-called DiSC model. The most noteworthy outcome of a search through the academic literature on this model was that, despite the fact that the test had been around for fifty years, there was in principle no research on whether or not it worked."
"According to Sune Gellberg, the owner of IPU, the organisation in Sweden which sell the DiSC test, no qualifications are required to carry out personality tests. “I don’t know what education our consultants have because it doesn’t matter”, he told us, “It is a computer program that does the personality analysis and gives the consultant a report which he can go through with the respondent.”
Not even the representative for the test thinks that knowledge of psychology is important! Personality consultants have no education in test methodology and no knowledge of personality theory. They just feed in numbers to a computer and have no idea what the results mean or what their scientific value is. It is very possible that Erikson believes that the test has scientific grounds and, given his lack of education, it is very likely that he has no idea what it actually says. "
There is no disagreement with Mr. Dan Katz's views; the licensed psychologist and psychotherapist, whose words make up the article. He suitably hammers home his point that the content of the books is nothing more than airport science, as he openly rages against the profession of 'behavioural scientist'. He also mentions the book sales, conferences, TV appearances, bestseller lists and ever increasing circulation of the books etc.
I get it. He feels passionate and sees a charlatan, who is hitching a free ride on the back of his respected profession and getting the rockstar treatment. These compendium of books could have effectively been languishing under the sections of new age, self-help, therapy etc., except they hit home with a certain audience. Now that he has vented his spleen, what more does he hope to achieve, especially under the circumstances that there are no laws or regulation in place to curb any of the activities. Also, by continuing to rage against it, he only brings more welcome publicity for the author and his books.
> he only brings more welcome publicity for the author and his books.
That‘s obviously not true. Spreading the information that the books were written by a person who is falsely claiming his qualifications and that the premises of the book have no scientific confirmation is surely not supporting their acceptance.
>books were written by a person who is falsely claiming his qualifications
You seem to be simultaneously agreeing and disagreeing. I refer you to the points, made in your previous post; there are NO educational and professional qualifications, scientific grounds or any legal regulations required to write these books or conduct personality analysis, none whatsoever!
> there are NO educational and professional qualifications, scientific grounds or any legal regulations required to write these books
If some activity is not legally regulated it still doesn‘t mean that uneducated person doing it should be tolerated as he presents himself as an expert.
The media which didn’t check these facts are also to be blamed and shamed.
I feel you are being unnecessarily obtuse. I have expressed my opinion based entirely on the article, but on each occasion, you completely disregard the presented facts, demonstrate your displeasure and produce a reply within a context that does not exist nor does it reflect my views.
We have arrived at a point, which is mirroring the predicament of the person in question, so I must respectfully decline to enter into any further debate on this particular topic.
No. If the "fact" is that he can't go to jail or pay a fine in Sweden because he falsely presents himself as an expert, it doesn't mean anybody should support him, or doubt the real expert writing about that.
And I still don't understand what's the intention behind your activity here which includes you being rude.
They could have saved people a lot of time by just marking down the dominant color of each person's aura instead of making them complete a questionnaire.
This article is a hack piece, in my opinion. First, formal qualifications do not a scientist make. Second, using phrases like this, with zero real evidence to support them:
>a distinction that even a someone who has studied a four-week course in the area will know is incorrect.
Regardless of the validity of the 'color' theories, this is not journalism. It is opinion presented as fact.
Full disclosure, I have never bought into colors theories, even though they are currently en vogue in my field. But we need scientific study, not more opinion nonsense.
After the test, we were even given blocks to keep at our desks so that people who interact with us knew whether we were 'blue' or 'yellow' and adapt their reactions accordingly.
I guess I should have just said I was an Aquarius or Capricorn or some such and it would have been just as scientifically accurate.
I also did this Insights Discovery with a bunch of colleagues.
Two weeks beforehand we had to do an online multiple choice questionaire with about 20 questions. Based on this everyone received an elaborate report with their personality analyses. Strong points, weak points, etc. Very detailed.
But I've got to say that everyone in our group - mostly rational devs - was positively surprised how accurate these analyses were.
Ha ha, good find, thanks! Sure there is a lot of generalization in these reports, but still I found their description of my personality type quite spot-on and recognizable, and hence useful to me. (And I don't believe in astrology and the whole supernatural shebang :)
PS The whole follow-up with team communication, organization impact etc. was not for me.
This sounds like the stupid pre-employment tests they make you take for lower level jobs. Which by the way, I've taken many. You just lie and pick the answers that don't make you sound like a grumpy introvert.
> the question remains as why so many people bought the book
I tend to think that people like very simple answers to complex questions.
Full spectrum of personality traits back-and-forth? The answer is four colors.
Perhaps the fact of just being able to understand any given answer makes people feel smart. I deduct it this way, since the author defends himself by claiming skeptics "are attempting to make out that his readers are idiots".
To be fair, a some of the supposedly peer reviewed management science we learned in engineering wasn't too far away from this.
Edit: And while I cannot say if it is right or wrong - it isn't like you can put this stuff into a particle accellerator and smash it and verify predictions - useful things can be extracted from it. One of the biggest ones might be that it gives everyone a common terminology to discuss such topics.
I've said before that organizational psychology and management seemed like a huge waste of time when the young me looked at the subjects I was supposed to learn in engineering and yet sometimes feel like the most useful ones now that I look back on it.
I mean: everything useful I nnow about programming from school I learned in the C and microprocessors course. Almost everything else I know aboit programming I learned either before or after my engineering degree.
Is it not the same for the current wave of anti-bias/discrimination/racism training? There is zero evidence that it has any effect. What few brave researchers have risked their careers exploring the effectiveness of the training have found that it does basically nothing. None of that stops companies from paying millions for it and good luck to the employee or executive that even dares suggest that perhaps there's better ways of tackling the problem/issue.
>The Implicit Association Test has been used in online studies to assess implicit racial attitudes in over seven million participants. Although typically used as an assessment measure, results from four pre-registered experiments (N = 940) demonstrated that completing a Race IAT exacerbates the negative implicit attitudes that it seeks to assess. Increases in White participants’ negative automatic racial evaluations of Black people were observed across two different implicit measures (SC-IAT and AMP) but did not generalize to another measure of automatic racial bias (Shooter Bias task). Results highlight an important caveat for the Race IAT, but also for many other forms of psychological assessment: that by measuring, we often perturb the system that we wish to understand.
This might be an aspect of the same problem that DARE had. If you castigate some act but at the same time speak in a way that says that act is common then the effect of making it seem normal will tend to trump the disapproval.
>the effect of making it seem normal will tend to trump the disapproval.
I think it may be more due to the fact that people have a natural disinclination towards people pretending to be moral authorities, especially when their premise is revealed to be based on lies and pseudoscience
There were aspects of DARE that were based on Psuedoscience but lots of major and minor campaigns, from ending dueling to getting people not to steal things from the Petrified Forest National Park, have been derailed by this effect without involving lies or pseudoscience.
The problem is that the people suggesting the better ways are usually... promoting rather unpalatable ideas. Often either that there is no discrimination in the workplace ever and so we should stop talking about it, or that discrimination in the workplace is in fact normal and healthy.
I'd love to see a way of creating healthy, non-discriminatory workplaces, especially in industries that are usually pretty terrible.
>or that discrimination in the workplace is in fact normal and healthy
One thing that bothers me is that discrimination is seen as a four letter word, when it is something we do all the time and celebrate. Only specific forms are considered bad and we need to be more explicit on what and why.
For example, racial discrimination is bad. Discrimination based on what degree one holds is not. Or, given that not everyone has the same level of access to earn a degree, should we be so open in accepting such discrimination?
What about discriminating based on punctuality? It seems an easy one to justify, but there is a significant cultural impact on punctuality.
What about discrimination on factors that people can't control and that have no relation to work, but which are currently legally allowed. For example look at the correlation between height and pay. Should that be allowed and what efforts are we doing to stop it. And does it become more of a concern when we account for average height differences between genders and the gendered outcome that can result as a secondary result (paying short people less, given that women are on average shorter than men, results in paying women less).
These sort of conversations never seem to happen when it comes to discrimination in the work place, making me think the name of the issue doesn't accurately reflect what the acted upon concern is.
Enforcing culture is highly discriminatory. You have to talk, dress, and act a certain way within cultural boundaries, otherwise you're discriminated against.
Imagine you're in a job interview. You describe the position to a candidate, and the candidate says "Wow, that sounds cool."
You describe the position to a different candidate. That person says "Shxt, that's tight dog."
Does one sound more professional to you? Why? Are you going to make any inferences about that persons capability to be a good employee based on how they speak? Of course you are. Is that right? Probably not.
We seem to be in a period where norms are assumed to be malicious or harmful, where the majority has a moral obligation to minimize the advantages of following norms.
At bottom, though, that's just an attack on all norms.
A more honest framing is that the issue is disagreement over what discrimination means, not that it can't exist or is good. Probably the most contentious issue is representation itself. Can a group of people be overrepresented or underrepresented in an organization without the organization being discriminatory? James Damore made the case that it's probable. And what happened to him shows that it isn't about "unpalatable ideas", it's about avoiding even having the discussion.
Is it unpalatable to ask questions about how much discrimination exists and against whom it is directed? The only “evidence” I’m aware of are implicit association tests and Goldin’s study of blind auditions, neither of which demonstrate discrimination. And asking this question often just gets me downvoted. If we are so certain that there is discrimination and tons of it, why is the real evidence treated as a closely guarded secret while we proudly circulate the debunked evidence? Please note that this is the opposite of “we should not talk about it”.
I think you are getting downvoted because the argument is exasperating. It's argument by ignorance: "I don't know therefore it isn't true." It is very easy to find ample evidence of discrimination documented in published peer-reviewed studies. E.g https://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/w9873.html "The results indicate large racial differences in callback rates to a phone line with a voice mailbox attached and a message recorded by someone of the appropriate race and gender. Job applicants with white names needed to send about 10 resumes to get one callback; those with African-American names needed to send around 15 resumes to get one callback. This would suggest either employer prejudice or employer perception that race signals lower productivity."
The other exasperating thing is at presenting evidence almost never work. The step after someone has presented evidence of discrimination is for the person who doesn't "believe in discrimination" to challenge the result. Either the result doesn't actually prove discrimination or the study is flawed in some way so you can't draw any conclusions.
> I think you are getting downvoted because the argument is exasperating. It's argument by ignorance: "I don't know therefore it isn't true."
That would be unfortunate, because I'm very clearly not saying any such thing. Specifically, asking about the magnitude of discrimination is not asserting that it doesn't exist at all. For what it's worth (hopefully very little), I'm a True Believer in discrimination--it exists, I've experienced it. I'm skeptical about specific truth claims about discrimination (notably claims that it explains a significant part of any gap in the US). I'm also skeptical about social science's ability to accurately study discrimination due to its political homogeneity and track record (more on this below).
> It is very easy to find ample evidence of discrimination documented in published peer-reviewed studies.
Undoubtedly. It's easy to find peer-reviewed studies that support almost any popular conclusion; however, I'm not looking to confirm my own biases (nor anyone else's) but rather to understand what's really going on. Notably, neither the IAT study and Goldin's orchestra study should have passed peer review and yet they did and were held up as exemplary for decades. Between issues like these and the social science replication crisis, I don't put much stock in individual studies.
> The other exasperating thing is at presenting evidence almost never work. The step after someone has presented evidence of discrimination is for the person who doesn't "believe in discrimination" to challenge the result. Either the result doesn't actually prove discrimination or the study is flawed in some way so you can't draw any conclusions.
Discrimination is indeed difficult to prove; the reasonable response isn't to be frustrated that others remain skeptical after being shown problematic evidence, but rather to question why you are compelled by said problematic evidence. Skepticism is the reasonable position here. Note again that skepticism about various discrimination claims isn't the same thing as asserting the opposite of those claims. Note also that skepticism about various discrimination claims doesn't mean that we need to stop investigating discrimination; it merely means we don't have conclusive evidence (and consequently, we probably shouldn't be drafting policy that could hurt people or otherwise propagating myths about the conclusiveness of said evidence).
It's not exclusive to anti-bias "sensitivity training". It's pretty much all the industry of corporate training seminars. "Team-building", bunk "psychology tests"... You know the type. You probably had to endure them. They cost tens of thousands of dollars each, they're completely useless, but still, the managers with more budget than sense buy them, and it's a billion dollar industry.
There is actually lots of good evidence that familiarity with unfamiliar ethnic groups and exposure to different cultural priorities makes people less prone to conflict and bad reactions.
I've worked at a lot of places, and I've yet to see an anti-bias training that was more than awareness-raising. I've never ever heard any suggest more radical ideas (such as restorative justice).
While we might argue that current D&I initiatives are not working at a pace we'd prefer, I do think the literature strongly suggest that the method of informed exposure and consideration for issues other than your own tends to work. What's more, these programs are extremely inexpensive compared to more radical restructuring of companies (or the often pie-in-the-sky suggestions of folks who will die on the hill of "it is a pipeline problem").
Some examples of not-too-old research on how simple conversations and exposure can change attitudes:
P.S., it's worth noting that if you haven't scanned the scientific literature carefully, you're committing the same error as the folks who fell for this goofy color theory scam by putting your own biases and intuition above the scientific method.
And that's not necessarily as bad a thing as it sounds.
Racism, sexism, etc. are hard problems. You're talking about deeply embedded, pervasive messages. Of course they won't be solved by throwing a class at it. But shrugging your shoulders and saying, "Yeah, but we're not gonna do anything" becomes yet another one of those pervasive messages.
So it can't, and won't, fix the immediate problem. But it at least acknowledges the problem, rather than leaving it buried.
That's not to say it can't also be surrounded by cynicism, scamming, and bad faith. Those things are yet more indicators of the real underlying issues: people are willing to accept or ignore the racism, sexism, etc. that happen to other people because it's not important to them. Making the costs of it more visible doesn't reduce those costs, but it does provide a reason for people to start wanting to lower them.
Discrimination training certainly has a function in reminding people of what they are prohibited from doing (legally or by policy), because then they can't claim ignorance of it later. It also has the benefit of reminding people to watch their own behaviour.
The training is largely for legal purposes. If someone needs to be fired for whatever it has to be demonstrated that they were 'trained' on the basis of that issue.
It depends on what you mean. About 25 years ago in Sweden the leading party the Social Democrats instituted a policy championed by feminists that meant that every other elected position should be occupied by a woman. Research has shown that that policy has led to more qualified candidates across the political spectrum.
There is also evidence from Sweden that attitudes towards rape and sexual assault has changed due to government policies. E.g questions such as "Is it ok to have sex with a girl who is too drunk to speak?" are answered differently today than 20 years ago.
Also, I wonder why it only took someone five minutes to ask me for a source, but no one has yet to ask tenpies for a source... Some facts are easier to believe than others?
If affirmative action has such clear evidence that it works, why do not the Swedish government implement it as a general rule for all their employees? Sweden has a very high gender segregation rate, around 85% of people that has a full time employment do so in a gender segregated profession, and government work places tend to rank at the very top as the most gender segregated work places.
If it leads to more qualified employees, which I assume would correlates with their suitability, it would save money and reduce mistakes in key areas like healthcare which then would result in saved lives. A national policy would be a win-win for everyone.
A while back I looked if any municipality had a general hireing policy in order to combat gender segregation. So far I have yet to find one that even mention gender segregation as something to consider when hiring new people. There does not even seem to be one that something as vague as a goal to reduce gender segregation.
An internal policy for the list of candidates on their ballot, stating that every other candidate must be a woman.
This is not the same as the list of who eventually gets elected of course, as the probability of getting elected decreases the further down the list you go. Also the policy appears to apply per ballot, and since there are something like 30 regions with (possibly) independent ballots, there is still some room to stack one way or the other. In the event, last election they got a pretty even split: 48 vs 52.
For ballots for municipal elections, the candidate's order rarely changes due to person voting. Effectively, the order set by the party is the order people are elected in, barring exceptional circumstances (someone being very popular or unpopular).
It wasn't until 2018 that nonconsensual sex was classed as rape in Sweden (1). Which is somewhat surprising that it took that long given the political climate you outline.
>Research has shown...more qualified candidates...
First, can you link a source? Second, what does "more qualified" mean in the context of politicians? They are selected by popularity in the majority; capabilities are downstream from likeability. This, one could argue that "more qualified" could be construed as "excellent hair" or "large breasts." This is not to say that the job of political official does not have constraints or optimums, but the method of job placement is the issue in terms of my question.
The actual term used is "kompetent", and they talk about the general competency of the individual, and assume this correlates with their suitability as politicians. They then show that their measure of competency correlates positively with municipalities having better economy and better perceived service by the citizens. They also get more votes and things like that. The measure is basically if the person makes more than average within their peer group.
Not only does it do nothing, but the purported problem—implicit association tests (IATs) “demonstrating” a high degree of racism in an organization or individual—is artificial: the IATs are themselves fraudulent; there is no evidence whatsoever that they measure racism at all. https://www.thecut.com/2017/01/psychologys-racism-measuring-...
EDIT: Downvoters, what's wrong with this comment? Are downvotes disagreement? If so, do you have anything to substantiate your position? If it's not disagreement, what could I do to improve the quality of my post to make it acceptable?
Exactly! I had 'unconcious bias' training at work, one of the learning outcomes of which was to understand the 'scientific basis' for unconcious bias. After reviewing the material and finding myself somewhat dubious of its claims, I - as a good scientist working in a technical role in a technical company - went off to research for myself. Turns out the supposed scientific basis is deeply flawed. And yet, this training is being rolled out in many companies across the UK: training based on nonsense. What's deeply insulting - and worrying - is that this should be pushed on educated, intelligent people whose jobs in no small part depend on sniffing out bullshit. Do they think we won't find out the truth? Are the management so clueless/compromised that they actually believe in it? IDK.
I think the right way to think about this is that psychology has the imprimatur of legitimate science (and some pscyhological research is indeed legitimate), but a lot of it is more about having an idea you like, conducting a few inadequate studies, and publishing them in a domain journal with little critical review and no reproduction.
Then, the folks who teach these courses see these papers (presumably in their undergraduate psych classes?) and end up believing them, becacuse they don't have the necessary scientific analytic/critical skills to evaluate them.
At my employer, the IAT was originally presented as scientific fact (with citations). Over time, the citations changed from "This is great!" to "This work appears to not be scientifically accurate, but we like the idea" to "we will not be using this, unless you want to try it voluntarily".
I think in general most people in society don't really have the ability to differentiate bullshit science from real science. I've actually left my scientific field permanently because I've seen far too enough examples of fraud and incompetence leading to tenure track positions.
> I think in general most people in society don't really have the ability to differentiate bullshit science from real science.
I would say in many ways they can't, at least not without significant time investment every time they need to make that assessment, which is often.
A domain expert is likely able to identify the smell of bullshit in their field extremely quickly. An expert in an adjacent domain will be able to apply some of their expertise, but not all, and sniff out some problems, but other might elude them. That is, a physicist might be able to note some likely problematic parts of statements to do with biology based somewhat on the science, somewhat on the shared methodology, and somewhat on the shared politics they might experience.
A layperson may have very little experience to draw upon for some scientific statement, and even when they have experience with the underlying principles (a general interest in the area, experience in college), that may not be enough to identify problem areas. That's not a problem we can expect the layperson to be responsible for correcting (at least not beyond a healthy skepticism), unless we expect them all to increase their knowledge in every domain that they might make an assessment about (this happens, but it happens at a societal level, and over the span of many years).
Psychology seems to share relatively little with most hard sciences, so it's particularly hard for both laypeople and scientists in other fields to assess without effort (as evidenced here though the multiple stories of people that put in that actual effort).
I'm not sure we'll see improvement on this issue until we have better norms about communicating results. There's a natural inflation that happens when different parties take a finding and explain it, and possibly over-emphasize portions of it. That this happens twice now, once with the PR department associated with the group doing the study and once by the media that goes by what the PR department say, means that the average person gets a very distorted view of what's actually going on.
There's no evidence, and certainly not a plausible model, that supports/explains how reaction times reflect attitudes, and how changes in attitude change reaction times.
It really has nothing to do with science at all. It's just another way to punish the majority for crimes of their ancestors, and to forcibly give power to a minority for simply existing and being a certain race or gender.
Nobody really wants equality. They want supremacy. If they did have equality, they would be treated like everyone else and lose all of their power/special treatment.
They are also tools of our politicians to be a permanent victim class, so the politicians can dole out justice and get votes.
If it were truly scientific we could test out and get certified, then we would only have to attend refresher courses.
I'm serious when I say this is one of the best things about being a contractor or consultant. I can just sign a paper saying that I'm responsible for my behavior.
Understanding the "scientific basis" of something unscientific is a ritual. It's 2+2=5, a test of your willingness to say things that are obviously false when that's asked of you by those above you.
Let me ask you something: Is unconscious bias training the worst example of bullshit you have experienced in your professional life or the thing that has aggravated you the most? Does that tell you anything about your unconscious biases?
The point of the training is for companies to absolve themselves of culpability. If you act like a jerk after unconscious bias training you are on your own and the company hopes that it can't be blamed for it.
> Is unconscious bias training the worst example of bullshit you have experienced in your professional life or the thing that has aggravated you the most?
I can't see the parent making this claim at all; are you sure that your interpretation is in good faith?
I didn't act like a jerk before the training, never mind after :)
I had training called 'cultural awareness' or similar at another company which was basically very similar material, but without the bogus claims that it was rooted in science. It's the latter that I object to - if they are going to enforce behavioural standards just be honest about it, rather than gaslighting people with this arrant nonsense that we're all unknowing bigots through some kind of original sin.
The bullshit I've had to endure during my career includes "You're one of our best paid engineers, so don't share salary information with your colleagues.", "NDA means you can not take a job at a competing company for six months after your resignation." and "It is important that your back is towards me (the manager) so that I can see your monitor and ensure that you are working at all times."
My point is that even if unconscious bias training is 100% bullshit, it is among the most benign forms of business bullshit I've experienced. Thus, I cannot understand why it is so upsetting to so many.
> it is among the most benign forms of business bullshit I've experienced
I'd argue the opposite actually - it's insidious, because any objection is liable to get you labelled a racist etc., and it's dangerous, because it's effectively telling you that no matter how hard you try you cannot escape being a racist (etc.). The latter is pretty much a textbook definition of gaslighting. I don't want my employer gaslighting me.
Maybe it’s worth asking what other types of “bs” training they received at work.
Maybe it’s one among many or maybe it’s the only one. We don’t know.
That said, most training is about absolving the company of responsibility and putting it on you (security training for example).
On the surface it would seem a good idea to train against harassment at work, but I’d be keen to know if it has an effect on behavior or is it the HR consequences that affect behavior more than the training, for example.
If my job required me to go to a unconscious bias training I would treat it the same is if they forced me to go to church. I am sure companies would like it if everyone would treat each other as kin and share the religious experience, and the actually hours itself would unlikely be the worst experience compared to some of the worst days at the office, but I would still resign if they did it. Call it irrationality. I would simply no longer feel that there were any mutual trust and thus I would not feel safe in continuing working there.
I wonder how many companies can survive long term if employees don't trust their employer and the employer don't trust its employees.
I've seen studies[1][2] which indicate that unconscious racial bias training increases racist attitudes among those who are put through it. If that's true, unconscious bias training might be worse than bullshit, it might be actively harmful and counterproductive to its stated goals.
> Yet we’re supposed to believe that we can do even better through different methods, and become even more successful than Apple and Amazon etc.
This is a prime example of why diversity training is needed. People are deeply biased in regards to seeing something successful and then thinking that is the formula to success. It's textbook survivorship bias. Furthermore, it completely misses the material basis for why these companies would have such hiring patterns: there were higher rates of asian and white college-educated men in CS, but, as hiring pools change, so do hiring patterns.
There isn't some innate ability to found software companies in white or asian men.
Yes, aspirants pattern-match from success and make tweaks they deem essential to their goals. That‘s the history of human endeavor. Already you see female software engineering hiring growing in priority in the companies that are struggling with hiring.
Doesn't the existence of women lead teams and initiatives throughout the history of the discipline of computer science suggest that you're deliberately ignoring lots of examples and distorting your filter based on ideological motivations?
No, women are certainly capable of great software engineering the same way that men named Steve are capable of being great football players (Steve Young, Steve Largent). But since it’s clearly possible to build great software without many women, and win Super Bowls without Steve’s, If I’m a football coach I’m not going to start a Steve Initiative where I recruit players named Steve.
... wait. Didn't you just argue against broad pattern matching and then use logic that supported it?
Given your reasoning, why shouldn't someone note the plethora of successful Steve's and say, "Our team needs more Steves! Look at my pattern matching! Steves work!"
I have not been led to the same conclusion (we can balance out workforce racial population) by my unconscious bias training, I have been led to conclusions that I find quite reasonable (watch for these thought patterns that indicate racial bias, such as if the person is X then the person is also Y, also be sure to keep questions to things that are essential to the job role). We might be taking different diversity training.
"here comes Karen, let me discriminate by noticing how I might discriminate so to make her more comfortable because I can't perceive my privilege but now I can alter my behavior just around her"
Isn't there some utility in keeping the workplace productive just by being sensitive, as opposed to quantifying if it "reduces discrimination"
It was a little distressing to me to realize believing in pseudoscience (for anyone not a scientist, doctor, engineer etc) has very little negative affect, and lots of people seem to be much happier begin in a deluded state than rigorously searching for truth.
I don’t think that’s true though it sure seems like it.
Pseudoscience is very seldom harmless. There is often someone making money off of someone else in the background, and in other cases it’s just plain health risks (for example Chiropractors killing a young girl by injecting her with turmeric or a naprapath taking a cancer patients money for snake oil for something that could be spent on proper healthcare).
I gave it as a Christmas gift two years ago. Picked it up because of the funny title, saw that it was backed up by "science" according to the back cover and bought it... just apologized for the crappy gift to my brother in law.
We were all confused by the colors. I had a little bit of all colors. My mom used to be red but is now more of the other colors... it really is pretty useless.
I still enjoy taking "personality tests" but I try not fooling myself into thinking that MBTI, Strengths Finder, or DiSC says much more about myself than a horoscope would. If anything it might tell me a little bit about how I perceive myself, but that's not how it's sold.
Reading the article, the various comments and the linked "Why We Sleep" criticism, I feel really disillusioned.
Honestly, there will always be people who write stuff they have no idea about, or write stuff that are factually wrong.
But where does that leave me, and perhaps many other layman readers? I, as a layman in psychology/neuroscience/<insert field>, do not have the academic qualifications or the time to go through and understand the latest/greatest scientific literature of the respective fields, nor am I equipped with the necessary "instincts" to tell the doubtful or suspicious claims apart. Most of the time, all I want is condensed information which is well, from the scientific literature, yet put in one place in a way that laymen in the fields have access to the subject. And to me atleast, books are the best way. But then I find the books I thought were right and did not doubt, had factual errors, or were written by someone who has a possibility of not knowing what they are saying... This is sad.
So let me ask the community: what heuristics do you employ when trying to decide whether you can trust a book on what it says or not? Especially if it's not your field of expertise?
Number of citations per paragraph is a pretty good indicator in my experience. Typically this is high (close to 1) for good text books in psychology and low (1 per page or less) in bad ones. Citations isn't everything though, many authors misrepresent the content to fit the narrative and in some areas it's not as important. For instance in math, arguments can be made based on very few axioms and you can evaluate the correctness yourself.
In general it helps to have a skeptical mindset, try to figure out the intent of the author by how they treat facts, do they present inconsistent arguments or gloss over relevant fallacies in the claims? Then their intent is probably more about presenting a good argument than correct representation of facts.
Another thing to be watchful for is claims that "make sense" or are "obvious", it's easy to fall in the trap of ignoring conflicting evidence when the theory sounds good.
If it presents psychology as a well-understood and rigorous field, and the author as an authority, it's bunk. Nobody is an expert in psychology, and most of the foundational experiments in the field have been found not to be reproducible.
> So let me ask the community: what heuristics do you employ when trying to decide whether you can trust a book on what it says or not? Especially if it's not your field of expertise?
If one hasn't studied at the university and read the real scientific papers and learned to compared the good ones to the bad ones in one's own field (and everywhere there are enough bad ones too) my impression one has no chance to be good at recognizing the difference.
And even once one learns to recognize the difference in his own area, he's typically has too much confidence to be able to repeat that in other fields.
So it's really hard. The best bet is really learning to discover what the limits of he fields are, who are real experts in the field, then read what they write etc. It's never simple. But if you're just watching a TV where something is presented as a "debate" learn to recognize what's "behind" the two only people who are shown as two "sides": behind a real scientists could be the whole scientific community, effectively all the experts in their field, and behind the guy who "sounds" better in the show can be simply... money from some specific interest group which finances an "actor" who looks good.
What's however certain is that it was always so: there were always people successfully "selling" as the nonsense as their "knowledge." I'm at the moment reading 1979 book:
"The inferior man's reasons for hating knowledge are not hard to discern. He hates it because it is complex -- because it puts an unbearable burden upon his meager capacity for taking in ideas. Thus his search is always for short cuts. All superstitions are such short cuts. Their aim is to make the unintelligible simple, and even obvious. So on what seem to be higher levels. No man who has not had a long and arduous education can understand even the most elementary concepts of modern pathology. But even a hind at the plow can grasp the theory of chiropractic in two lessons. Hence the vast popularity of chiropractic among the submerged -- and of osteopathy, Christian Science and other such quackeries with it. They are idiotic, but they are simple -- and every man prefers what he can understand to what puzzles and dismays him."
In the article we discuss, it's also a "shortcut" the topic of the book: four colors for people, and "everything is simple, even obvious."
The most important part from the article we comment to is therefore:
"Despite the use of colours, it turned out that the “Surrounded by …” books were not based on Myers-Brigg. Instead, they built on another personality theory, the so-called DiSC model. The most noteworthy outcome of a search through the academic literature on this model was that, despite the fact that the test had been around for fifty years, there was in principle no research on whether or not it worked."
From the books about pseudo-scientific claims presented in media as "real" science I also recommend "The War On Science" by
Shawn Otto:
>If one hasn't studied at the university and read the real scientific papers and learned to compared the good ones to the bad ones in one's own field (and everywhere there are enough bad ones too) my impression one has no chance to be good at recognizing the difference.
True. Reading more papers seems to be more and more important.
>So it's really hard. The best bet is really learning to discover what the limits of he fields are, who are real experts in the field, then read what they write etc. It's never simple. But if you're just watching a TV where something is presented as a "debate" learn to recognize what's "behind" the two only people who are shown as two "sides": behind a real scientists could be the whole scientific community, effectively all the experts in their field, and behind the guy who "sounds" better in the show can be simply... money from some specific interest group which finances an "actor" who looks good.
I see. So basically try to look beyond the curtains even if it's a different field.
And thanks for the recommendations! Both War of Science and Merchants of Doubt look interesting!
>In short, there are definitely enough people who earn money by "selling" falsehoods. It was never an accident.
So people selling falsehoods is not limited to present era eh. I see!
When I started my current work (Swedish software company) a few years ago, all new employees performed the “DISC” analysis (bought from a consultant firm). It was a fairly long questionnaire with situational questions and it was advised not to think too much about each question before answering. Stupid as it sounds.
Anyway, we got our profiles and at the follow up session we went through the colors and everything else about the model. Some of my colleagues were skeptical, some more enthusiastic (“this explains so much”). I was somewhere in the middle. For sure I recognize some of the behaviors with my profile, on the other side I questioned the validity mainly due to the way the foundation to the profile what conducted (the questionnaire). I also read the book but got the feeling that it was more of entertainment than the session and profiling we did (in the book it’s a lot of “real life” examples etc).
In work life we mostly used the “tool” to describe persons outside our organization. “The customers’ project manager in this project is very red”, would be something a sales rep could say at a hand of. They probably mean “He’s kind of a jerk but they pay so deal with it”. Although it was a pretty long time since I heard anyone use it. I also think that the article describes why the model is not sufficient even for describing people loosely.
Lastly I think that the article headline is kind of over exaggerating. I mean, yes many read the book and might have use it to talk about themselves and/or other people. Some organizations went to far and tax money was wasted. But mostly it was consumed as most other books and people got entertained. I haven’t encountered anyone who preached the message and method, more like a conversation starter. The people who swallow the message fully is probably already converted to the next personality model fraud. Or too busy reading other truths on Facebook.
I'm Swedish and yes, it was almost insufferable when this book was the hotness during the past two years, but this is hardly "one of the biggest scientific bluffs of our time". It's not even the worst one that got mainstream in Sweden. Electromagnetic hypersensitivity[1] is far more stupid and God knows how much money has been wasted on shielding people from electromagnetic fields by local governments. Hell, just the fact that this has been debated and taken seriously by politicians and government officials is astounding to me. It's a sad reflection on the state of physics literacy in my country.
So, stupid? Yes. One of the worst pseudo-scientific scandals ever to have swept over Sweden? Not even remotely close.
I think it is less "physics literacy" and more a complete lack of teaching and using critical thinking / reasoning. For whatever reason, the West in general (and maybe the world) seems to be spending less and less time on critical thinking and more time on picking a side and then running with it. I have no idea if this is true or just a feeling I have, but if I was a betting man and it is, I would blame media and short attention spans.
Issue is and always will be that people are quick to cide with anything that promotes their narrative/World view as it is easier to be right than it is to be wrong and change your narrative/World view for many people.
But in the realms of books, science does seem to be more accountable than religious books and yet both have their effects and sway upon people. Just that one is more open to being questioned and the other is not.
Sad truth is, if you wrap bad science under another banner, you can get away with it more easily and less open to being questioned in a way that is accepted in debate.
I enrolled in a management training course through work and the first thing they had us do was take a personality test and then they sent us a grading on the "personality color wheel" and it ruined the whole course for me. I'm digging deep to pull out useful nuggets of truth but any time it goes back to Myers-Briggs stuff my brain shuts down.
Not to be the devils advocate here, but does the fact that there isnt any scientific proof proof it doesnt work? Not everything has to be tested and verified in a lab, right?
Perhaps I am justifying myself though: I've had the DiSC traing THREE times now. Is it all just a lie? I was kinda hoping this article would show actual proof it doesnt work.
Tests like DiSC and Meyers-Briggs are hard to disprove because they make contradictory, non-falsifiable claims. This is part of what makes them appealing: there's something identifiable for everyone in most of the profiles, and stuff that doesn't fit is easy to dismiss. It's the same strategy that enables horoscopes and psychics. Don't feel bad for believing it--it's designed to be believable, rather than correct. If you want a more in-depth breakdown of this and the other problems that make the test false but also hard to falsify, this [1] is a pretty good analysis.
What you will guarantee is that if you ever agree to take one of these tests, you'll only ever be seen through that lens. It becomes self-fulfilling, and people see what they want to see. The people setting and commissioning the tests are somehow always a miraculous and perfect blend of all of the colours.
Even Myers-Briggs is considered to be very problematic.
I think the only personality elements fairly well backed by Science are the 'big 5': Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Neuroticism, Agreeableness, Openness to Experience.
It's fundamentally scary that any advanced nation would be taken in by any of this.
One feature of these personality taxonomies is that inevitably in the set of different categories designed to be of equal human value or worth, one or two categories are always discernably worse than the others.
The only scientific personality scale, Big5, was not designed that way. It is pretty easy to figure out that workers with high conscientiousness and low neuroticism are preferable. Which makes sense, we didn't evolve to be corporate drones so not all personalities are equally fit for the role.
There is also something hilarious about the name of the book, in this context. It could only be better if it was "The Idiot's Guide To If You're Reading This You're An Idiot"
That seems like an exaggregation. Certainly there must be larger "scientific bluffs"? Examples of articles in peer reviewed journals, relying on manipulated data or something.
People really yearn for systems like this, whether it's some weird color coding, myers-briggs, astrology... this definitely won't be the last one to go mainstream
I think all of these "personality tests" are total BS -- while it's great to think you can tl;dr a person, in reality we're far more complicated than that. When you make assumptions about a person's "personality color" or Meyers-Briggs profile, you disempower them from making their own decisions.
As adults mature, we all learn to be comfortable with a range of communication styles. This kind of pop psychology may be comforting and in some ways holds some element of truth, but the entire idea that a "personality" is fixed in any way dismisses the potential for growth that makes us all so human.
> Unfortunately, the theory behind this book, and the various follow-ups, is no more than pseudoscientific nonsense. And Erikson appears to lack even basic knowledge of psychology or behavioural science.
This seems to happen often. Are there any non-pseudoscientific psychology theories? AFAIK only IQ and (possibly) the "Big Five" personality traits.
Short list of (likely) "failed" (pop-)psychological theories:
- stereotype threat [1]
- implicit bias - specifically refers to unconscious prejudice that exist independently of any explicit / conscious bias; however, measurements of implicit bias do not predict biased behavior [2] and therefore implicit bias training is likely completely useless [3] (this is not to say that explicit bias doesn't exist or that bigots don't try to conceal their bigotry)
- power posing, the idea that putting your body in a "power" position (a pose that projects confidence) alters your hormonal levels - even the original author no longer believes [4] that this effect is real (although I personally still think that "power poses" can have an effect on other people and how they perceive you)
- growth mindset, the belief that you can learn and improve (which I personally think is probably better than the reverse), doesn't actually result [5] in better educational outcomes (but can result in millions of dollars wasted [6]). The original researcher since came up with [7] a convenient concept of "false" growth mindset - "saying you have growth mindset when you don't really have it" - but critics rightfully counter with (from the Wikipedia link above):
> "If your effect is so fragile that it can only be reproduced [under strictly controlled conditions], then why do you think it can be reproduced by schoolteachers?"
and
> to claim that your performance in a cognitive task is entirely dictated by how hard you try and is nothing to do with raw candle-power flies in the face of more than 100 years of intelligence research".
- Stanford Prison Experiment [8] (where participants were knowingly acting out their roles and which was never successfully replicated)
- Milgram Experiment (which, although somewhat replicated, was recently criticized [9] that few participants actually believed the experiment was real - a potential issue with any replication attempts as well)
Hope I didn't mess up any links. This is based only on my completely amateur research of online sources, I'm more than happy to be pointed in the opposite direction!
Myers-Briggs is just about as unscientific as it gets. Neither Myers nor Myers-Briggs (her daughter) had any formal education in psychology or any serious experience. Their personality types are based on Jung's ideas that are over a 100 years old and have been long since discredited. There are no studies that confirm that MBTI type is predictive of anything. There are studies that seem to confirm that the dichotomies used in MBTI might not actually exist. Et cetera.
Thanks for the clarification. I actually had the Big Five in mind - somehow I confused that and MB. Even there, I don't really have any idea if Big Five is "true" (stable and/or predictive) or not, I'm really just listening to Jordan Peterson here.
Before you invest in the Big Five, you'll want to check on how much it can change your posterior odds, and compare that to results of investing time and money into other approaches.
You’re looking too narrowly: psychology is much bigger than social psych, and a lot of the sensory or perceptual stuff has held up astonishingly well.
In addition the things NPMaxwell listed, consider these theories/ideas: Weber/Fechner’s law, parallel vs. serial visual search, categorical perception, attentional selection, semantic priming, the coarticulation of phonemes, spatial frequency channels, and properties of sensory receptors, to name a few.
Are there any non-pseudoscientific psychology theories? That's a good question. Here's an off-the-top-of-my-head list: Rescorla-Wagner, Pavlovian learning, Habituation, failure to thrive, opponent processes, dominance hierarchies, learned helplessness, one-trial learning of disgust, avoidance theory of phobia, short-term vs. long-term memory, chunking, the hypergeometric forgetting curve, public inhibition of non-dominant behaviors.
A challenge for Psychology in the U.S. is that Statistics is usually included in the curriculum in Spring of Senior year -- an after-thought. I've been off-and-on poking at creating a course that would put statistics immediately after Intro Psych.
The likes of the author of the article will surely claim that there are, but that's what another "expert" few years/decades from now will be writing review on.
We’ve known about the Purkinje Effect, which causes reds to appear darker in dim light, for over 200 years, and molecular and circuit mechanisms are now pretty well understood.
I’d bet a kidney we still believe it in another 20 years.
The fact that many theories are disproven is not evidence of pseudoscience. Popper suggested exactly the opposite: pseudoscience is when you cannot disprove theories.
As Josh Billings is usually quoted these days, "It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so."
We are so sure of things that are not true that we don't bother to check.
there is something about psychology that really invites all types of pseudoscience. In all honesty I cant tell whether what I've learned in introductory courses makes more or less sense than what is described as fraud in the article
> The invocation of a personality Gremlin is one example of careless thinking.
Am I supposed to accept this because it already makes sense, because Katz or Sumpter wrote it, because other people believe it, or because of research to back it up? I sympathize with all the so called foolish Swedes.
You're supposed to follow the argument in the article. The idea of invoking these colours as an explanatory tool is circular reasoning. You're taking a bunch of traits, call them blue, and then use that colour as an explanation for why you have the traits, when in fact you have just restated some behaviour using slightly different words.
it's like saying "the weather is bad because it rains". That's not an explanation for why the weather is bad, it's just the definition of what bad weather is.
When people are led to believe they have this or that trait because of some sort of colour schema they tend to believe that this classification is an explanation for their behaviour and has some sort of control or ontological meaning, which it has not. In reality, the behaviour is complex, dynamic, context-dependent and escapes easy classification. Which really should be obvious to anyone with a critical mind because human psychology is slightly more complicated than a test which has fewer colors than the power rangers.
The paragraph preceding your quote has the citation for their characterization of the concept of personality:
Perugni, M., Costantini, G., Hughes, S., de Houwer, J. (2016). A functional perspective on personality. International Journal of Psychology, Vol. 51, №1, 33–39.
I hold the opposite view. I think this type of segmentation of people is (1)beneficial and (2)mostly harmless.
(1) The sole reason for the feeling of "being surrounded by idiots" is lack of understanding of the other. If someone has different opinions/behaviors/moral values than I do, the easiest thing I could do is just label them "Idiot". Real understanding and empathy are just too hard. Actually, this also true when looking at one's own behaviour. We are mostly quick to judge and be angry at ourselves.
Having a system such as this (even if it is pseudo-scientific) gives one pause in judgement. For example: John isn't an idiot or an asshole, he's just a Green. The implicit idea here is that John doesn't do it on purpose, he's part of a group. So I should be more accepting of him and I should learn to deal with Greens' quirks better. This neutral judgement (instead of the negative one) automatically side-steps the anger, elicits more empathy and accepts partial responsibility for the interactions. It also gives a feeling of increased understanding of "how the world works" which feels good (even if it's false). This also works when introspectively looking at one's own behaviour: Us Blues have a hard time doing X. I should be easier with myself.
The actual underpinned theory is irrelevant (as so far as the aforementioned benefits are considered). It works just as well with "John's just a Gemini/INTP/Type 8". It's just the ability to attribute something to the person's actions I dislike other than stupidity or incompetence.
(2) People love this stuff. Personality segmentation models are abundant and people love taking assessment quizzes. Astrology, Enneagram, Big-5, Myer&Briggs and many others. I'd venture off saying that most people don't take these things too seriously. Even the theories themselves recognize that human's personality can't really fit nicely in n boxes, so all of them have "extensions": You can be several colors, Astrology has "horizons", Ennegram has "wings", Big5 gives a running score to each trait, etc. Proponents of a system can easily utter something like "Mary's not a typical Aries, though". So while there are some people that might take it too far, I feel it's mostly used benignly.
The fact that the theory behind some of these systems are anywhere between questionable to down right ludicrous is a pickle, though. But sometimes system benefit people even when the people don't understand the mechanism in which they do, or hold a wrong one. Therfor truth seeking shouldn't, in and of it self, be enough of a reason to tear down such a system. This idea was explored in an article posted here a few days ago:
At a previous employer we did a similar training program called True Colors, to understand how to communicate differently based on personality types. It broke down personality styles as follows:
Green - Intellectual; prefers less communication generally
Blue - Emotional; likes small talk and connecting with people
Orange - Spontaneous, life of the party, hates structure/rules
Gold - Analytical, needs order, boundaries and structure, makes lists for everything
Generally you have one dominant color, and some mix of the other three as less important factors in your personality. Most software engineers tend to be Green, HR people are Blue, CEO's are Orange (outgoing, rally people around them) etc.
I actually found it to be tremendously enlightening; I can usually bucket people I know into one of the four colors pretty easily. For example my wife is a Gold; she loves literally creating lists and checking off things when she's done, and she can't stand things being out of order.
oh this gem of a book, I remember I saw it at some managers desk, where there was no attempt to hide it or anything. I often wonder wtf he was thinking.
These types of things may not be science, but they are so popular and will always be popular because they are useful heuristics to make sense of the chaos of dealing with humans.
Managers like them as they try to make sense of how their reports behave and work together, people they know but not really. Sounds like some people like them as a way to make sense of issues with their personal relationships. People outside yourself make decisions that are frequently confusing, and people like this sort of categorization to make sense of them.
People liking something doesn't mean they are actually useful, though. Some folks like fake medicine because they feel like they are doing something useful - even when we can prove that no, "memory water" isn't curing your cold. People like horoscopes for your same reasons - because people are confusing and some sort of categorization is a way to make sense to them.
It doesn't actually mean it is useful or even accurate in any way - it just means you are doing something. You could probably put the energy into managing the environment or better communication or coming to terms with "Other people are complicated".
People have been exploring why astrology etc. are popular for as long as they have existed. We don’t have to redo it all from scratch and have the whole argument from first principles every time some some new popular pseudoscience comes along. We can just declare it bunk and move on.
IDK i don't see this stuff as all that different from doing like a k-means clustering or factor analysis on a data set, it's just an attempt to do it on human personality, which we know has variance and correlations. We don't freak out at market segmentation analysis that involves labels like "early adopters" and "laggards" which are imperfect but informative.
I think people just find the entire idea of labeling humans in this way offensive, and latch onto some of the claims that it's "science" as an avenue of attack.
Edit: And I think it's slightly better than just categorizing people based on their birthday like you do in Astrology, as you are using at least responses to a personality test in most instances.
Personalities doesn't cluster so k-means would not give anything interesting. Big 5 is pretty close to a factor analysis on a questionnaire data set though, so that's a reasonable though. Four colours is not based on anything like that though.
I'd say that astrology is better than DISC in that it's obviously bunk, the problem with the colours is that while some people claim to enjoy it as a pastime or conversation starter, some seem to take it further and base actual decisions on it. People reading horoscopes in a magazine wouldn't typically actually follow the advice therein.
If predictive power doesn't matter why do we need any of these systems at all? We could just randomly assign people with numbers from 1-10 and be done with it. You are type 7. I am type 3. Now you can go ahead and assign whatever properties you like to these types and be happy.
> will always be popular because they are useful heuristics to make sense of the chaos
If these heuristics do not allow making useful predictions they are not useful. If any heuristic for splitting people into types was useful we could have stayed with zodiac signs or something. But yes, these will always be popular because people want simple solutions to complex problems and prefer simple solutions even when they don't actually work.
Has anyone stopped to look and see if any of his advice worked though? Pragmatic psuedoscience is more valuable than true science that can’t find a repeatable answer.
As someone with more than a fair bit of experience with DISC, I wanted to provide some pushback on the article a bit:
> Erikson has repeatedly claimed that the benefit of his colour approach is that it helps us understand ourselves and others and, as a result, improves our communication and reduces conflicts. This is his argument as to why companies and organisations should adopt his approach. Since there is no scientific support for the four colours, there is naturally no support for this claim either.
Bullshit. Just because there was no study published on it in Nature doesn't mean it doesn't have value or you should dismiss it completely! If I went around proclaiming the importance of Agile, you shouldn't just dismiss me because "there is no academic support". And to more of a point, it seems unfair to single this guy out of the sea of pop-psychology and business management books.
> It is difficult to imagine a more unpleasant and unfair way of dealing with a problem than simply attributing it to the fact that the person in the centre of a conflict “is blue”.
This seems to be a gross mis-characterization of the expected outcomes of the behavioral training. The outcome of them (at least the ones I've gone through) is to reframe work conflicts away from "this guy is stupid and should be fired" to "we have completely different ways of talking through problems". In that regards it's been super freaking helpful. I don't need an academic consensus that I feel warm and fuzzy afterwards.
>The claim that MBTI gives you new information would be a bold scientific claim and would require bold scientific evidence. I don’t know to what degree the MBTI people make this claim, but I don’t think it’s necessary for me to enjoy the test and consider it useful. All it needs to do is condense the information you put into it in a way that makes it more relevant and digestible.
>Five Factor and MBTI are trying to do fundamentally different things. Five Factor is trying to give us a mathematized, objectively correct version of personality useful for research purposes. MBTI is trying to separate people into little bins that put continuous personality space into discrete and easy-to-think-about terms suitable for human processing, and even very poorly drawn bins will do a pretty good job, just like European countries.
100%, DISC is just a construct, but it can still be a super useful and effective one. Even if it's a placebo, I don't need someone running up and knocking it out of my hand and telling me they did me a favor.
I have a problem with the article author's implication that someone without credentials (read: university degree) isn't a scientist, or at least is a lesser scientist.
A scientist is someone who employs the scientific method. That's it.
Thomas Erikson does not seem to qualify from what I can tell (he's just winging it), but he absolutely does not need to have a doctorate (or even a bachelors) in order to be a "behavioral scientist" - he just needs to be using the scientific method when testing the claims he makes in his book or elsewhere.
No, your poodle does not have just as much right to call themselves a scientist, as a poodle is literally incapable of ever using the scientific method. You don't need an extensive "scientific background" in order for your first book to be perfectly scientific.
To be a scientist is not enough to use the scientific method in isolation. Because modern science is much bigger than anyone can understand as an individual, it is an imperative requirement that you also articulate your findings to the scientific community as a way to prove/disprove your personal conclusions. In other words, the requirement for proper use of the scientific method in a modern society can only been accomplished through the scientific community. Now, you could in theory do this without a PhD, but your chances are minimal of even being able to start the discussion, so if you're really willing to do science the first meta-step is to prove yourself going through a PhD program.
Using the scientific method in isolation is enough to be a scientist. If I:
1. form a falsifiable hypothesis based on observation
2. come up with (reproducible) experiments in an attempt to confirm and (more importantly) falsify my hypothesis
3. accurately measure and analyze my experimental results
4. modify or throw out hypotheses where necessary
5. rinse repeat
I am a scientist. If I then make prescriptive statements / claims to people based on this science, it is of course imperative that I share my scientific methodology with whoever I am making these claims to. But I can do science on a desert island all alone.
but your chances are minimal of even being able to start the discussion,
Could you expand on this a bit? I'm not sure I understand the point you are making here. Furthermore, getting a PhD does not "prove" you can do proper science, even in scientific disciplines, as has been made clear by the reproducibility crisis in academia.
What you're saying is correct in theory, but in practice this process happens through the scientific debate, which is done (if we like it or not) through scientific publications and conferences. If you don't have a PhD you'll have a lot of trouble to participate on these scientific forums, because the community requires a minimum of proof that you're a serious researcher. This minimum requirement is nowadays a PhD in the area.
I am the professor who translated the article from Swedish. I agree that anyone can be a scientist. But, as you Erikson neither has qualifications, nor does he show understanding and nor does he use the scientific method. So very poor all round.
Oh, I agree. Erikson does not appear to be a scientist at all. But I think the criticism should be along the lines of "he was not using the scientific method or citing sources which used such in the writing of this book", not personal attacks of "he doesn't have a degree in behavioral science".
To illustrate my point, this article[0] paints a very dim view of the science used in the book "Why We Sleep". The author of the book is a professor of neuroscience and psychology at UC Berkeley. Being in academia (even a professor at a prestigious school!) doesn't mean the book he wrote is de facto "scientific".
Part of the scientific method is to perform studies. The studies must be self-contained, based on facts, traceable and get published. In many disciplines because of complexity this requires people to include data into the argument. (Psychology is one of these disciplines) Bonus points for peer-review, Science is a team discipline after all, even if done outside of Academia.
According to the article almost none of the points hold true:
- "no scientific articles have been published about the test."
Apparently the book did not contain measurements of data or data based on that, so it wasn't written according to the scientific method. Not even close...
I have no problem with the idea that Thomas Erikson is not himself a scientist, I stated that fairly clearly in my original comment ("Thomas Erikson does not seem to qualify"). I have no problem with the author thinking Thomas Erikson should not be calling himself a behavioral scientist. It is also clear to me as it is to you that the scientific method was not employed in the writing of this book. My issue is with statements like:
> Despite a lack of any qualification, Erikson describes himself as a behavioural scientist.
and
> despite the fact that from a legal point of view in Sweden, it is possible to call yourself a ‘behavioural scientist’ without any formal qualifications
Again, it seems clear to me that the author believes that formal qualifications make you more of a scientist. This is simply untrue. Doing good science requires no qualifications, only good method. In fact, there are so many conflicts of interest in modern academia with regards to performing honest science (and resulting scandals) that something coming out of a university should probably be looked at with a more skeptical eye than science which does not.
I realize now that my last sentence in my original comment may have been confusing, but I was not trying to assert that this book in particular is scientific - merely that it is possible to write a scientific book without a formal higher education background.
The question is how such a person is able to do research. If you weren't independently wealthy, how would you go about getting funding for a study of human subjects and have it covered by the oversight that it should entail, if you didn't already receive training to a satisfactory degree in an institution of higher learning? Not saying it's impossible, but it would be remarkable on its own.
Of course, once you have already become a popular writer, people start to assume that you are the real deal, without looking into it in detail. So you can fake it 'till you make it. But you'd have to fake it.
Having a masters degree in X is a "formal qualification" but does not give you any more ability to perform more research after doing that degree than anyone else, in the terms (money) you are talking about.
Their poodle appears to have the same amount of inclination to use the scientific method, and the same level of experience in doing so.
One claiming to be a behavioural scientist should be able to demoinstrate a history of such, even if it's an unconventional history. There is none here.
> · Blue: analytic, careful, meticulous
> · Green: patient, considerate, nice
> · Yellow: extroverted, creative, verbal
Damn. I spent so much of my time and energy pushing back exactly on this bullshit when I was young. That's part of the curriculum of mandatory courses I had to take during an apprenticeship in Switzerland. Expensive and mandatory courses paid by students' employer, of course. But I didn't know that the "color model" was THAT popular.
In french speaking countries, that's often presented as a package called PNL, aka "Programmation Neuro-linguistique" (https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programmation_neuro-linguistiq...). Based on my experience, that kind of pseudo-science is super popular in corporate environment, and is really difficult to fight against.