Responding to the question: How was type represented (and misrepresented) in the HBOMAX show PERSONA?
A psychometrician’s reaction to the Movie Persona . . .
It is an interesting movie! I will watch it again to ensure I catch it all. I do have a response based upon a first look:
There are often individuals and organizations, in an attempt to do good and/or make money, that do end up making mistakes. This is the case with most people who engage in occupational selection using some form of personality assessment as the central hiring criteria. Most of us would agree with this point made in the movie. I, on the other hand use elements of my personality assessments (PTI, leadersbeacon.com) to accommodate individuals based upon mental processes (type) in order to improve employment satisfaction. Putting a person in a work environment that will work best to promote satisfaction. No picking individuals based upon type. Making the environment meet their needs. Employing comparisons of individuals, using personality assessment scores, to pick or choose is an error. It denies response style based upon individual differences (True in my assessments more than MBTI). We never know how well an individual will do a job. We can only help them do well at the job.
As the principal scientist and psychometric developer of Form M and Q (not the IRT of form M), along with my own Type assessments I have a lot to say about the comments made in the movie of racism and sexism in personality assessments. Forgive me if I get into too much theoretical psychometrics. Great effort went into developing Form M and Q to minimize normative error and the isms that were alleged in the movie. Were college samples overused? They were used, but effort was made to ensure that other samples that differed, based upon age, race, and gender were not meaningfully different from those college samples. Could things have been done better to improve this… yes. They can always be done better. Was there any systematic racial or sexist bias introduced into the MBTI? Not at all! And it would not have made it past my observation. In the development of Form Q I did express the need to do all scoring based upon sex, because that need was showing up in the literature at that time. It was felt that one scoring routine would be more acceptable to users. I use norms developed by sex and type in my own assessments and did not use college students as the dominant source of data. Even though no assessment is perfect, the introduction of bias happens at the hand of the user, not with type assessments. Type is not racist or sexist in and of itself. Further, I see no current measure of type as systematically racist or sexist.
In my own research (Majors & Larson, 2001) I did discover that all assessments developed on large single normative samples risk not being valid for some groups. The Big Five is a good example. The very way the stats fall on a normative curve tell us that the folks near the Mean are best represented. We call the ones at the ends names like, outliers. I prefer to call them outlaws. Perhaps the rebellion in me. But, there is no example of this occurring in any systematic way for race or sex. I am speaking more to psychometric qualities of the assessments that I worked on and/or produced. Is the work of Jung or Myers given to systematic bias. I think not! All people perceive and then make judgments/decisions based on what has been perceived. This is type, and folks who do not perceive or make judgments we call dead.
Therefore, is type biased. No. Are the assessments I am discussing biased? No. I do agree with some aspects of the movie, but I also see blind statements intended to generate a negative reaction and cancel a tool intended only to be of help and service to the growth of the individuals.
