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by disgruntledphd2 4678 days ago
I'm a psychologist, and I game personality tests for fun.

The MMPI is harder than the Myers Briggs, but not that difficult. Additionally its really only optimal for clinical samples, at which it is very good.

However, everyone in the field knows that these tests can be gamed, the only open question is how many people game them consistently.

You can probably estimate the proportion of social desirability exhibited in job interviews by comparing to non-job situations (such as a sample matched on all relevant covariates (whatever they are) from the general population.

Nonetheless, believing in personality tests as an accurate indicator of personality is as misguided as believing that Facebook represents the social graph of all its daily active users accurately, i.e., somewhat misguided.

And I am aware of lie scale, and they are trivial if you actually read the question. Protip: If a question says always or never, its probably designed to trip you up.

I do agree that personality tests are more accurate than this thread makes them out to be, but they are certainly not as useful as your comment implies.

1 comments

Wow, I have to defer to you then :)

Is there anything you've got offhand that I can read further about this? I didn't know you could actually game them.

All self-report data is inherently flawed, which is why you can't rely on one kind of data while trying to learn something about personality.
Find the scoring manuals, do loads of personality tests, rinse, repeat. Its not particularly difficult.

Despite this, I have ran many surveys back when I worked in academia. You can detect some of this stuff with Guttman errors, but these are not often used, and as long as you are consistent, its very difficult to spot.