Behaviour

Our ongoing love-hate relationship with personality tests

noreen.rasbach — Fri, 06 Apr 2018 15:13:00 +0000

Our ongoing love-hate relationship with personality tests noreen.rasbach Fri, 04/06/2018 - 11:13

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We love to take personality tests, but is it time to think more about the corporate interests behind them? (photo by Shutterstock)

Kira Lussier

Topic

City & Culture

Behaviour

Graduate Students

The Conversation

Subheadline

The Conversation with Kira Lussier

The public backlash against Cambridge Analytica and Facebook centres on their practices of harvesting psychological data to influence political behaviour. But this is not the first time corporations have used personality tests for their own gains.

Personality tests have long captured the North American imagination, both as objects of fascination and targets of criticism. Even as my own research encourages skepticism towards personality tests, I take all those online quizzes: Which Harry Potter house do you belong to? Are you an introvert or an extrovert? These tests promise to reveal to us truths about ourselves, at the same time as they entertain us.

This preoccupation has turned psychological tests into flashpoints for cultural anxieties about psychology, privacy and corporations. Two issues in the history of corporate psychological testing – the privacy of personal information and its political use – stand out.

Privacy & personality: The longer history

In the 1920s and 1930s, applied psychologists began developing surveys to measure an individual’s attitudes and emotions. They marketed the tests to corporations as tools to analyze the personalities of workers, consumers and voters. By the 1950s, personality tests had become entrenched in corporate hiring practices.

The questions included in these personality tests were often deeply intimate. The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory probed test-takers about their sexual urges (“Do you ever become excited or thrilled?”), medical histories (“Much of the time my head seems to hurt all over”), and political beliefs (“I think Lincoln was greater than Washington.”)

Such personal questions understandably raised alarms when encountered by job candidates: Why did an employer want this personal information? What would they do with it?

Union leaders, public intellectuals and even the United States Congress called corporate personality testing an invasive intrusion into people’s lives. Social critic William Whyte included the appendix “How to Cheat on Personality Tests” in his 1956 management book Organization Man. Whyte urged test-takers to give the most banal answer possible.

Sixty years later, Whyte’s appeal resonates with today’s calls for people to #deleteFacebook – or at least enhance privacy settings to prevent third-party applications from accessing personal information.

Criticisms reach U.S. Congress

When these early criticisms reached the U.S. Congress in the mid-1960s, concerns over privacy and discrimination intermingled. Equal employment opportunity court cases identified personality tests as one potential tool of discrimination, particularly since psychological tests of intelligence were so often used to justify racial hierarchies.

In response, psychologists defended the methodology behind their test construction. When scoring tests, they said they were not concerned with any one response, but the overall pattern of responses, which was always compared to an aggregate group response.

Employers, they argued, wouldn’t know whether you thought Lincoln or Washington was the better president; they would only know what personality profile you ultimately matched.

On March 26, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission said it was investigating Facebook’s privacy practices (photo by Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP)

In 1971, a United States Supreme Court case, Griggs vs. Duke Power Company, ruled that psychological tests that had adverse impact on racial groups were discriminatory, setting stricter standards for the use of psychological tests in hiring.

If this sounds familiar, you wouldn’t be wrong. Companies that harvest data claim that data is aggregated and detached from individuals, and thus does not violate privacy agreements.

Balancing deception and openness

The whole apparatus of psychological testing relies on collecting masses of data. It also relies on some degree of deception.

Psychologists have long used deception in the experimental setup of psychological testing. They claimed that deception was necessary so that subjects could not “game” the tests.

In high-stakes situation – like applying for a job – psychologists and personnel managers alike worried that subjects might not respond honestly. Early psychological tests, like the Minnesota Multiphasic, included “lie scales” that sought to detect dishonesty in responses.

At the same time as psychologists seek to conceal the way the test works to prevent “gaming” the test, psychologists have also feared the public backlash to their tests. Unfortunately, psychologists have not always maintained this delicate balance between deception and openness, especially when selling tests to business and political organizations.

Politics of personality profiling

Another point of concern relates to the political stakes associated with psychological profiling. Some test creators claimed their tools could reveal the hidden motives of workers, to understand their economic productivity and political behaviour.

During the height of the Great Depression, corporations adopted personality tests such as the Humm-Wadsworth Temperament Scale that claimed to screen out workers who displayed emotional “maladjustment” – a trait that management associated with union sympathies. Union supporters criticized psychological tests as just another tool of management, and called industrial psychologists “servants of power.”

Similarly, Cambridge Analytica claims to use the tests to reveal people’s hidden personalities, so that its clients can manipuluate their behaviour in the political sphere.

Understanding this longer history of corporate personality tests is crucial to formulating a response to today’s corporate harvesting of psychological data.

The very construction of psychological tests is about unequal power relations: Experts create tests, using methodologies opaque to subjects, and corporations use these tests to understand, and even manipulate, our behaviour. Maybe it’s time to reconsider the humble, but powerful, psychological test.

Kira Lussier is a PhD candidate in history of science at the University of Toronto.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Daily planning app from U of T entrepreneur helps children with behavioural and learning challenges

ullahnor — Tue, 21 Mar 2017 20:19:48 +0000

Daily planning app from U of T entrepreneur helps children with behavioural and learning challenges

ullahnor Tue, 03/21/2017 - 16:19

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Pierre Séguin (left) and his son, Leo (right), show off Brili, a daily planning app for kids

Dan Haves

Author legacy

Dan Haves

Topic

Breaking Research

Medicine

Children

Faculty of Information

App

Behaviour

Learning

For children with behavioural and learning challenges, getting ready for the day can be a struggle. Waking up, getting dressed, eating breakfast and heading out the door on time is never a guarantee.

Pierre Séguin, whose son faced some of these challenges, knew all too well how difficult it could be for kids to organize their day, even with the help of their parents and caregivers. His solution?

He took some of the features of project management software he was using every day at work in the tech industry and used them to create Brili, a mobile-based daily planner that makes a game out of routine tasks. Brili is part of the Faculty of Medicine's Health Innovation Hub and the Faculty of Information's Semaphore Research Cluster. Séguin is an expert-in-residence with Semaphore.

Learn more about Entrepreneurship@UofT Week March 27-31

He spoke with U of T's Dan Haves about how Brili works and the future of this software.

Where did you get the idea for Brili?

My son had various behavioral challenges when he was very young and daily routines were awful for our family. We spoke to many experts as we tried to help him. They advised us to give our son structure and consistency, and use lists, pictures and timers to help him remember steps in the routine.

I was a software product manager working with teams that used big LCD dashboard screens to show a project’s status and keep multimillion-dollar technology jobs on track. So I thought, ‘Why can’t we create something like this for kids?’ Daily routines are just little projects that happen every day, and our son needed a dashboard of his own. That realization unleashed a flurry of ideas to gamify routines.

What are some of the challenges that Brili helps children overcome?

Brili is especially helpful to kids who have trouble with executive function (EF). EF is the role our brain plays in impulse control, keeping us focused, aware of time passing, remembering what we’re supposed to be doing and other functions many people take for granted. ADHD, autism and other learning challenges directly impact EF.

Brili gives kids gentle and consistent prompts to start regular routines like getting ready for school or bedtime, and helps them stay on task with audible reminders and visual cues.

For example, parents can program Brili to give their kids reminders to do things like get dressed or brush their teeth during the morning routine before school. The app also factors in the time available to complete each item on the list. The prompts can also help parents check in with their kids to ensure they get help when they need it.

What’s next for Brili?

We’re building new features into Brili that will make it helpful in a classroom environment so kids can benefit from the program at school.

We started Brili to give every child and parent access to fun, stress-free daily routines so families can just enjoy being families. As mobile technology becomes more accessible, it’s exciting to see our goal become reality. Next, we want to help people of all ages in more contexts to manage and use their time better.

Lining up for government services is so last century, says Rotman researcher

lavende4 — Tue, 19 Jul 2016 15:11:11 +0000

Lining up for government services is so last century, says Rotman researcher

lavende4 Tue, 07/19/2016 - 11:11

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Ontario Premier William Davis in 1973, the year renewable licence plates were introduced: 43 years later, most car owners still go in person to renew their plates (Reg Innell/Getty Images)

Topic

Breaking Research

Rotman School of Management

licence plates

Ontario

Behaviour

As tedious as waiting in a government services line-up can be, most people still do it, despite having the option of getting their business done online.

In Ontario, only about 10 per cent of vehicle owners renew their annual licence plate sticker via the Internet. Maintaining the overhead to serve everyone else in person costs Canada’s most populous province nearly $36 million a year.

But using study methods drawn from behavioural science, a team of researchers led by Rotman School of Management's Nina Mažar, found that simple, no-cost adjustments to messaging on the envelope and form vehicle owners receive in the mail before their renewal date resulted in a significant number switching to completing the process online. The most successful modification led to a 42 per cent increase in online renewals as well as more owners getting them done on time.

“It was very exciting. We demonstrated the government that applying insights from the behavioural science even in the most mundane places can help increase the likelihood of people going online and thereby lead to big savings that it can then use for more pressing issues,” said Mažar, an associate professor of marketing at Rotman.

The researchers used “choice architecture” (the design of choices with the goal of influencing decisions) to design several different changes to the licence plate sticker renewal form and envelope sent out to more than 626,000 vehicle owners in late 2013 and early 2014. Each new version included changes to the envelope that highlighted the ease of online renewal. Two of those conditions also changed the text on the back of the renewal form. One emphasized the downsides of not renewing online. The other detailed the benefits of renewing online.

The form that highlighted the upsides of online renewal was most successful. Online renewals rose from 10.3 per cent to 14.7 per cent. The change also led to a five percentage point increase in on-time renewals. It was made a permanent part of Ontario’s renewal form in 2015.

Calling the low uptake in online services a missed opportunity, researchers noted their relatively short, limited experiment resulted in a $28,000 government savings, which could lead to savings of more than $600,000 a year.

Mažar calls the results the tip of the iceberg in terms of potential improvements to public processes using behavioural science insights.

The project was a first-of-its-kind collaboration between members of the Behavioural Economics in Action at Rotman centre (BEAR), which Mažar co-directs, and the Ontario government’s Behavioural Insights Unit (BIU). BEAR designs solutions to social and economic problems by using behavioural science approaches to achieve behavioural change. Together with the Ontario BIU it has also done work on increasing the rates of organ donor registrations and efficiency in tax collection.

The paper was published in a recent issue of Behavioral Science & Policy, the journal of the Behavioral Science & Policy Association.