Psychometrics or Pseudo-metrics?
Recent surveys indicate that 70% of employers now use psychometric testing as a recruitment aid. Whatever the actual figure, psychology has increasingly infiltrated industry over the last century. Personality, intelligence, individual and group behaviour, team structures, cognition and conflict resolution are all areas that have provided psychologists with a lucrative income. But is our money well spent or are psychometrics merely the height of speculation posing as deep learning?
Few commercial users of psychometric tests have any real grasp of the underlying theory. It is difficult to think of any other area in which buyers will part with cash so readily with so little knowledge of the product. The prevailing attitude throughout industry seems to be to trust psychologists to provide tools that can be used without having to engage with the theory. This naïve attitude practically invites exploitation. Unless buyers have basic knowledge of how the products work, how will they know if they are not working? How can they tell which products are based on fact and which on fantasy? Psychologists selling the tests are not necessarily the most reliable source of information. Buyers need independent guidance.
In reality, psychology is not as complex as many psychologists would have us believe. In fact, any psychologist claiming that psychology beyond the comprehension of the layman is trying to imply that they are cleverer than you – a dishonest and egocentric little manoeuvre psychologists themselves call ‘invalidation’. Provided we look at the basics systematically, psychology is no dark art.
Psychologists and indeed most scientists begin by taking their own specialist field as the area of study. Chemists specialise in chemistry, biologists in biology, psychologists in psychology and occupational psychologists in occupational psychology. Once these mental divisions are created, few consider the relevance of ideas from outside their own field. Professionals of every discipline become territorial, arrogant, blinkered and defensive.
To describe this lack of interchange between disciplines George Kelly uses the term “accumulated fragmentalism”. Accumulated fragmentalism is a fundamental error of the modern ‘scientific’ model. In order to represent external reality accurately, any mental model must take account of how all the fragments fit together. The system used here examines a chain of ideas without losing sight of how the links of the chain are connected. These are the links: -
• The External Environment – time, space and energy/matter.
• Sensation – the ways in which our five senses experience objects and events in the external environment.
• Memory – the ways in which we create, store and retrieve information about previous experiences.
• Perception – derived from comparison between sensation and memory or between one memory and another.
• Thinking – comparing, combining and dividing ideas.
• Intention – how we use information about past experiences to formulate and plan current or future activities and behaviour.
• Behaviour – our interactions with the external environment and with one another.
• Personality – regularly used behavioural patterns that determine our identity and how others perceive us.
• Feedback – We observe the effects of our actions and behaviour on the external environment and on other people. We respond to external stimuli and the behaviour of others. We have experiences and we experiment. The results of our observations and experiments are fed back via the senses and stored in memory so we can modify and improve our actions next time. We call it ‘learning’ or ‘education’.
We do not always make observations or conduct experiments in the real world. We can imagine events and anticipate outcomes adding this self-generated knowledge to memory. The difficulty we then face is differentiating between actual events and self-generated ones until, in the words of Immanuel Kant, “with the long practice of attention, we become skilled at separating them.”
The bulleted list above forms an endless loop like a cycle chain. The accumulated fragmentalist approach favoured by many scientists removes individual links from the chain and examines them in isolation. Examining links in isolation ‘dissects the frog’ sacrificing function to explore structure. Below, we examine each of the links in a little more detail whilst maintaining functional connections.
The External Environment
We begin with the external environment because without this, there would be nothing for our senses to detect. The external environment consists of the uneven distribution of energy/matter in space and time. Note that we consider energy and matter together. Many ‘real’ scientists, as some like to describe themselves, adopt a purely materialist view. Einstein’s greatest contribution was not to state that E=mc2 but to recognise that “energy and matter are simply different manifestations of same thing.”
Although uneven, the distribution of energy and matter is not entirely random since patterns are repeated. Science explores these patterns but those who study nature’s patterns in isolation can soon loose the overall picture. We must keep an eye on how the little pictures fit within the big one if we are to avoid accumulated fragentalism. This is what we call the ‘Andromedan’ approach.
Sensation
Our senses detect the presence of energy and matter in space at the present time only. Reference to any other time is impossible without memory. This is not to say that “time does not exist as such” or that “time is merely a figment of the human imagination” as many are seduced into believing. Time exists but we create our own temporal context using memory. The ability to create temporal context necessarily demands a pre-existing biological capacity to create, store and retrieve information about past events. This capacity is a function of our nervous system. Memory is not simply about the past. It necessarily includes plans for the future.
Memory
Without memory life would be meaningless. Every sensation must be compared with memory before we can attribute meaning. This page, for example, is meaningless to those with no knowledge stored in memory of the English language or the alphabet. We must necessarily compare current sensory information with memory in order to make ‘sense’ of our surroundings.
Sensations are experienced but because memories are created, memories are not always accurate. We create memories by combining information about space and time, space and matter or time and matter. (Note that we must always include energy in the term ‘matter’). This means we create three types of memory. Tulving calls them episodic, procedural and semantic.
• Episodic memory combines information about space and time and is sometimes called spatio-temporal memory.
• Procedural memory combines information about time and matter since it stores information on when (time) to do what (matter).
• Semantic memory combines information about matter and space storing information about why what (matter) goes where (space).
Time space and matter provide the when, where and what. Episodic, procedural and semantic memories provide the who, how and why. These three types of memory form the foundations of Freud’s three aspects of personality – id, superego and ego respectively.
Episodic memories and id are self-centred, personal and based on unity (one). They focus on feelings. Procedural memories and superego emphasise behaviour. They are group orientated and based on plurality (some). Semantic memories and ego focus on thinking, logic and reason. These emphasise universality, necessity and totality (all). Psychologists rejecting Freud’s view that there are three aspects to the personality as “merely Freud’s opinion” have failed to understand Freud. Memory and personality are inextricably linked. Some personality theories ignore this link and in so doing, they loose touch with reality and step into the realms of speculation.
Perception
Perception begins when we make comparisons between sensation and memory or between one memory and another. Perceptions are often inaccurate because information is stored in memory is often inaccurate. Unlike electronic memory, organic memory is prone to error. Information is sometimes recorded inaccurately or misinterpreted. It can be retrieved incorrectly, mixed up or wholly or partially lost. Furthermore, since it is our perceptions we add to memory rather than an accurate recording of events, any errors that already exist in memory are compounded and perpetuated.
Thinking
Comparing, combining and separating ideas are the three basic processes of thinking. All are impossible without memory. Understanding the memory/personality link is central to understanding all human activity. Some psychologists have not fully grasped this idea.
At the fundamental level, all thinking consists of comparing, combining and dividing of ideas. We can apply any of these three processes to any topic we choose. Analysis, be it chemical, political or psychological, is essentially about division. Creativity is about combining and/or dividing ideas in novel ways. Comparison always precedes combination or division. Human beings are capable of comparing, combining and separating ideas in more ways than any other creature on earth.
Intention
We compare possible courses of action combining and separating ideas stored in memory to create intentions. Whether conscious or unconscious, intention precedes all actions and behaviour. This must be the case because without intent, all our behaviour would be entirely random. The reverse of this argument is that any behaviour that is not random must follow some form of pattern or template that can only be held in memory. We use memory of past experiences to formulate and plan all intentional activities and behaviour.
Behaviour
Behaviour is the interaction between each individual and the external environment. It includes interaction with other people either individually or in groups. All behaviour is guided by intention since without intent no neural impulse is generated so nothing happens. All behaviour is motivated by what the individual wants and individual priorities change from time to time and from one situation to another.
The only accurate way of finding out other what people want is to ask them. Any attempt to explore motivation in isolation is therefore misguided. In the present paranoid climate, partially created by psychologists, people will often look for a hidden intention when asked what they want. Some may initially give the answer they think the questioner wants to hear rather than an honest answer. Game on!
In inventing countless theories of motivation, psychologists extend and perpetuate these mind games. They then charge you to untangle the web of distrust and confusion they are partially responsible for creating. All theories of motivation can be replaced with a single word – ask. It seems the ‘Emperor of Motivation’ has no clothes. He is not wearing robes made of a rich, complex beautiful fabric visible only to psychologists. He is as naked as the day he was born.
People behave in the ways they choose for their own reasons (conscious or unconscious), in accordance with their own feelings, moderated by the social pressures they feel at the time. The only hope of understanding what motivates any individual at the present time is to ask them. We can now discard all theories of motivation.
All we really need to know about psychology is this. The way we feel affects the way we think. What we think directs our behaviour. How we behave and the way others behave towards us affects the way we feel. This feeling – thinking – behaviour cycle was described by Galen almost 2000 years ago. It seems the smartest animal on Earth can sometimes be awfully slow to learn.
Personality
Personality is another area of psychology often taken out of context. It is an area where speculation soars to incredible heights. Whilst it is accepted that reading the mind of another person or accessing their thoughts and memories is impossible, 70% of employers seem prepared to believe that psychologists can reveal hidden personality traits and measure them. The behavioural consistent patterns we call personality is entirely dependent upon memory, which we accept is unreadable. Why then, are we prepared to believe that psychologists can ‘read’ personality?
Personality is based on qualitative differences whilst measurement is based on quantitative differences. What is the quantitative difference between an egg and a tree? Of course, it is plain for all to see that this question is meaningless. Why then are we prepared to believe that psychologists can use quantitative methods to measure qualitative personality differences with psychometric tests? Maybe the time has come to send these pseudo-scientists packing.
Recent surveys indicate that 70% of employers now use psychometric testing as a recruitment aid. Whatever the actual figure, psychology has increasingly infiltrated industry over the last century. Personality, intelligence, individual and group behaviour, team structures, cognition and conflict resolution are all areas that have provided psychologists with a lucrative income. But is our money well spent or are psychometrics merely the height of speculation posing as deep learning?
Few commercial users of psychometric tests have any real grasp of the underlying theory. It is difficult to think of any other area in which buyers will part with cash so readily with so little knowledge of the product. The prevailing attitude throughout industry seems to be to trust psychologists to provide tools that can be used without having to engage with the theory. This naïve attitude practically invites exploitation. Unless buyers have basic knowledge of how the products work, how will they know if they are not working? How can they tell which products are based on fact and which on fantasy? Psychologists selling the tests are not necessarily the most reliable source of information. Buyers need independent guidance.
In reality, psychology is not as complex as many psychologists would have us believe. In fact, any psychologist claiming that psychology beyond the comprehension of the layman is trying to imply that they are cleverer than you – a dishonest and egocentric little manoeuvre psychologists themselves call ‘invalidation’. Provided we look at the basics systematically, psychology is no dark art.
Psychologists and indeed most scientists begin by taking their own specialist field as the area of study. Chemists specialise in chemistry, biologists in biology, psychologists in psychology and occupational psychologists in occupational psychology. Once these mental divisions are created, few consider the relevance of ideas from outside their own field. Professionals of every discipline become territorial, arrogant, blinkered and defensive.
To describe this lack of interchange between disciplines George Kelly uses the term “accumulated fragmentalism”. Accumulated fragmentalism is a fundamental error of the modern ‘scientific’ model. In order to represent external reality accurately, any mental model must take account of how all the fragments fit together. The system used here examines a chain of ideas without losing sight of how the links of the chain are connected. These are the links: -
• The External Environment – time, space and energy/matter.
• Sensation – the ways in which our five senses experience objects and events in the external environment.
• Memory – the ways in which we create, store and retrieve information about previous experiences.
• Perception – derived from comparison between sensation and memory or between one memory and another.
• Thinking – comparing, combining and dividing ideas.
• Intention – how we use information about past experiences to formulate and plan current or future activities and behaviour.
• Behaviour – our interactions with the external environment and with one another.
• Personality – regularly used behavioural patterns that determine our identity and how others perceive us.
• Feedback – We observe the effects of our actions and behaviour on the external environment and on other people. We respond to external stimuli and the behaviour of others. We have experiences and we experiment. The results of our observations and experiments are fed back via the senses and stored in memory so we can modify and improve our actions next time. We call it ‘learning’ or ‘education’.
We do not always make observations or conduct experiments in the real world. We can imagine events and anticipate outcomes adding this self-generated knowledge to memory. The difficulty we then face is differentiating between actual events and self-generated ones until, in the words of Immanuel Kant, “with the long practice of attention, we become skilled at separating them.”
The bulleted list above forms an endless loop like a cycle chain. The accumulated fragmentalist approach favoured by many scientists removes individual links from the chain and examines them in isolation. Examining links in isolation ‘dissects the frog’ sacrificing function to explore structure. Below, we examine each of the links in a little more detail whilst maintaining functional connections.
The External Environment
We begin with the external environment because without this, there would be nothing for our senses to detect. The external environment consists of the uneven distribution of energy/matter in space and time. Note that we consider energy and matter together. Many ‘real’ scientists, as some like to describe themselves, adopt a purely materialist view. Einstein’s greatest contribution was not to state that E=mc2 but to recognise that “energy and matter are simply different manifestations of same thing.”
Although uneven, the distribution of energy and matter is not entirely random since patterns are repeated. Science explores these patterns but those who study nature’s patterns in isolation can soon loose the overall picture. We must keep an eye on how the little pictures fit within the big one if we are to avoid accumulated fragentalism. This is what we call the ‘Andromedan’ approach.
Sensation
Our senses detect the presence of energy and matter in space at the present time only. Reference to any other time is impossible without memory. This is not to say that “time does not exist as such” or that “time is merely a figment of the human imagination” as many are seduced into believing. Time exists but we create our own temporal context using memory. The ability to create temporal context necessarily demands a pre-existing biological capacity to create, store and retrieve information about past events. This capacity is a function of our nervous system. Memory is not simply about the past. It necessarily includes plans for the future.
Memory
Without memory life would be meaningless. Every sensation must be compared with memory before we can attribute meaning. This page, for example, is meaningless to those with no knowledge stored in memory of the English language or the alphabet. We must necessarily compare current sensory information with memory in order to make ‘sense’ of our surroundings.
Sensations are experienced but because memories are created, memories are not always accurate. We create memories by combining information about space and time, space and matter or time and matter. (Note that we must always include energy in the term ‘matter’). This means we create three types of memory. Tulving calls them episodic, procedural and semantic.
• Episodic memory combines information about space and time and is sometimes called spatio-temporal memory.
• Procedural memory combines information about time and matter since it stores information on when (time) to do what (matter).
• Semantic memory combines information about matter and space storing information about why what (matter) goes where (space).
Time space and matter provide the when, where and what. Episodic, procedural and semantic memories provide the who, how and why. These three types of memory form the foundations of Freud’s three aspects of personality – id, superego and ego respectively.
Episodic memories and id are self-centred, personal and based on unity (one). They focus on feelings. Procedural memories and superego emphasise behaviour. They are group orientated and based on plurality (some). Semantic memories and ego focus on thinking, logic and reason. These emphasise universality, necessity and totality (all). Psychologists rejecting Freud’s view that there are three aspects to the personality as “merely Freud’s opinion” have failed to understand Freud. Memory and personality are inextricably linked. Some personality theories ignore this link and in so doing, they loose touch with reality and step into the realms of speculation.
Perception
Perception begins when we make comparisons between sensation and memory or between one memory and another. Perceptions are often inaccurate because information is stored in memory is often inaccurate. Unlike electronic memory, organic memory is prone to error. Information is sometimes recorded inaccurately or misinterpreted. It can be retrieved incorrectly, mixed up or wholly or partially lost. Furthermore, since it is our perceptions we add to memory rather than an accurate recording of events, any errors that already exist in memory are compounded and perpetuated.
Thinking
Comparing, combining and separating ideas are the three basic processes of thinking. All are impossible without memory. Understanding the memory/personality link is central to understanding all human activity. Some psychologists have not fully grasped this idea.
At the fundamental level, all thinking consists of comparing, combining and dividing of ideas. We can apply any of these three processes to any topic we choose. Analysis, be it chemical, political or psychological, is essentially about division. Creativity is about combining and/or dividing ideas in novel ways. Comparison always precedes combination or division. Human beings are capable of comparing, combining and separating ideas in more ways than any other creature on earth.
Intention
We compare possible courses of action combining and separating ideas stored in memory to create intentions. Whether conscious or unconscious, intention precedes all actions and behaviour. This must be the case because without intent, all our behaviour would be entirely random. The reverse of this argument is that any behaviour that is not random must follow some form of pattern or template that can only be held in memory. We use memory of past experiences to formulate and plan all intentional activities and behaviour.
Behaviour
Behaviour is the interaction between each individual and the external environment. It includes interaction with other people either individually or in groups. All behaviour is guided by intention since without intent no neural impulse is generated so nothing happens. All behaviour is motivated by what the individual wants and individual priorities change from time to time and from one situation to another.
The only accurate way of finding out other what people want is to ask them. Any attempt to explore motivation in isolation is therefore misguided. In the present paranoid climate, partially created by psychologists, people will often look for a hidden intention when asked what they want. Some may initially give the answer they think the questioner wants to hear rather than an honest answer. Game on!
In inventing countless theories of motivation, psychologists extend and perpetuate these mind games. They then charge you to untangle the web of distrust and confusion they are partially responsible for creating. All theories of motivation can be replaced with a single word – ask. It seems the ‘Emperor of Motivation’ has no clothes. He is not wearing robes made of a rich, complex beautiful fabric visible only to psychologists. He is as naked as the day he was born.
People behave in the ways they choose for their own reasons (conscious or unconscious), in accordance with their own feelings, moderated by the social pressures they feel at the time. The only hope of understanding what motivates any individual at the present time is to ask them. We can now discard all theories of motivation.
All we really need to know about psychology is this. The way we feel affects the way we think. What we think directs our behaviour. How we behave and the way others behave towards us affects the way we feel. This feeling – thinking – behaviour cycle was described by Galen almost 2000 years ago. It seems the smartest animal on Earth can sometimes be awfully slow to learn.
Personality
Personality is another area of psychology often taken out of context. It is an area where speculation soars to incredible heights. Whilst it is accepted that reading the mind of another person or accessing their thoughts and memories is impossible, 70% of employers seem prepared to believe that psychologists can reveal hidden personality traits and measure them. The behavioural consistent patterns we call personality is entirely dependent upon memory, which we accept is unreadable. Why then, are we prepared to believe that psychologists can ‘read’ personality?
Personality is based on qualitative differences whilst measurement is based on quantitative differences. What is the quantitative difference between an egg and a tree? Of course, it is plain for all to see that this question is meaningless. Why then are we prepared to believe that psychologists can use quantitative methods to measure qualitative personality differences with psychometric tests? Maybe the time has come to send these pseudo-scientists packing.