Hello, everybody.

Very nice to see you all.

Just a couple of further housekeeping points. One, I’m not going to look at the chat that goes along. But if one of you asks a question, it will be referred to me pretty quickly, and I’ll try and answer it. So ask questions on the chat screen as you go along. And the second thing is there is a real possibility. I might get interrupted by cats.

There are cats roaming around this house at the moment, and they want to be fed the whole time. So if by any chance I disappear for two seconds, it’s because I’m trying to take a cat outside.

So do excuse me.

So, what am I gonna talk about?

Just a little bit about me, background to me. I’m, I’ve been a test publisher for years. I’ve written a book, fairly recently about using psychometrics in coaching, a practical guide. And I write for the psychologist magazine, I’m the director of the European test publishers group, I am an executive coach, and I am, a poet and a novelist. And in fact if you look behind me, you’ll see that there’s actually a novel just finishing on the over there. So that’s all good fun.

What am I going to talk to you about today?

I’m going to talk initially about different views of what personality is.

There is a re reason why I’m gonna talk about that, which I’ll come to. It’s quite important that before we start talking about something, we know what we’re talking about.

And the fact is that there’s huge disagreement about what personality is.

I’ll also put forward a view, which is perhaps not particularly popular, which is that common sense views of personality are extremely valuable, and it’s not just academics and professionals who understand personality.

I’ll talk a little bit about the main types of personality assessment, the pros and cons, the criticisms, and the good things about how we can use them and what we should use them for.

One or two bits there is slightly technical, and if they get too complicated, you must just shout and just say, can you move on?

I’m gonna then look at possible futures of personality assessment.

Now as you can tell, I’m extremely old, and extremely old people, aren’t necessarily that prone to think seriously about new technology.

What I’ve tried to do here is just map out some of the roadmaps that technology is taking us on in terms of ideas of personality.

And ideas of personality assessment. And I was just talking a little while ago about the fact that meta are actually, programming the personalities of celebrities into their AI system. So you can actually use their AI system and get answered in with the personality of either Paris Hilton or snoop dog. I’m not quite sure why you would want to do that, but it appears they think we do want to do that. And I’m gonna have a look at the possible blocks to these futures, the way things are changing. And also some of the positive things that are happening in personality assessment because largely of technology, but also because of wider changes in society.

So this session is special about personality.

Wouldn’t it be a good idea if we knew what personality was?

Some years ago, I was interviewing a health researcher at the school of tropical medicine And she worked very, very majorly with psychologists, and she said, I like working with psychologists, but when the problems with them is they cannot define what they’re talking about.

If you look at personality, for instance, she said they talk about things called, introversion and extroversion, but you find ten psychologists, and they’ll give you slightly different definitions of what they’re talking about. It then it’s not a hard science.

And in her view, until you could identify what you were talking about and define it in an agreed way, she was fairly dismissive of the intellectual endeavor.

That said, there have been a number of quite useful definitions of personality.

Gordon Norport, one of the pioneers in the sixties, said personality research, personality said personality set is an individual’s unique way of perceiving his environment, including himself, he emphasizes looking perceiving.

There’s a very good book by Smith and Smith. And by the way, there is, I have prepared something which you can have. I I think, FastF five, I’ve got it, which is the references from this this session and also further reading areas where there’s more information about some of these points.

Very good, book about occupational testing, which said that personality is the style of doing things, which emphasizes not so much perceiving, but actually your behavior.

Ray Catell, who I knew, who was the author of sixteen p f, and he’s one of the the early pioneers at First Financial Research, linked it to prediction, said that personality is what allows you to predict future behavior.

And if you think about your own of meeting other people during your life, you’ll know that that is one of the ways in which we use it. We think, oh, yeah, that something that that person would do, and that person would like, and that person would react well to, or that was unusual. I didn’t expect them to do that. That’s I couldn’t have predicted that.

The opposite dictionary of psychology, which had just picked up, so that it’s the sum total of the behavioral characteristics that are distinctive of an of an individual, which rather begs the question, as far as I’m concerned, as a lot of dichrombie definitions do.

There is another way of looking at it, which really comes from behaviorism, which is there isn’t such a thing and, personality and assessment, Walter, Mish’s groundbreaking book in the sixties argued this quite strongly And if you look around at, some of the thinkers at the moment, there’s a lot of people who are challenging the idea that personality is something that stays the same forever, that never changes, that is more like a scientific law than it is like the way we actually live our lives, and there’s some very good people around who are really challenging that view.

For me, the bottom line is that personality talk is the major in which human beings negotiate the world. If you think about that, we explain ourselves to ourselves, we explain other people to us, we predict what’s going to happen in social concerns. By recourse to personality language.

Going back to Ray Catel, who was this pioneer who developed the sixteen Care is still being sold and is still a popular personality test. That was exactly how he approached the idea of measuring personality. What does he did? He took all the words that were in the diction read, and by hand precomputer gradually factored them down into sixteen factors which seem to make up personality. He started from words. As a matter of fact, he factored them down to five, but We don’t need to go into that for this session, but it’s something we can talk about if you want to another time.

So personality is critical. It’s a key way, it’s a key compass in which we, which human beings use to negotiate appreciate every sort of social and professional situation and find themselves in.

Why is there all this?

Difference between different views about personality is.

Basically, it’s a clash between accounts which say it’s all because what goes on inside of our genes and nervous system and external environmental concerns.

There’s a clash there, and depending on which side of that fence you sit, you’ll come up with a view about what what personality is. Then there is the clash between changing versus unchanging or long lasting.

Where do you emphasize whether personality is about your attitude towards the world, or whether it defines how you act within it, whether personality is different when you’re saying at work or at home with your partner or at a football match, or whether it’s the same all the time, Whether there is such a thing as normal versus abnormal or whether basically personnel is a continuum in which, what we count as abnormal is is just what is socially unacceptable.

And all those things define one way or another why there’s so much disagreement, creative disagreement about what personality is.

Now, I have been accused in the past of saying these sorts of things and then just leaving them up in the air. So I will say what I think it’s all about rather than just leave all those questions all over the place. So what’s my model of personality?

And one of the things I want to do as I do this is to thank, Grant Gemmell of Fastett five who I just noticed is actually one of the people who’s, who who’s observing this. So it’s just as well, I thought I’d thank him. Because in discussions with him, he helped me coalesce what my view about personality was. So thank you, Grant.

Personality is long lasting. There is a sense in which we sort of have a continuum of the way we operate view the world and behave that goes throughout our lives. We are not random acts throughout during the course of our life. We do not change completely every time we meet a new situation.

Personally is long lasting, but Of course, it changes in different situations and over time, often as research shows in fairly predictable ways. There’s a lot of research now into what happens to our personalities as we get older.

In fact, this research was around in the 1970s when companies started recruiting more people who were older in customer service teams because they discovered that older people have a tendency to want to solve problems for people and not leave them behind, not leave people up in the air. They also were very keen on enjoying their work. And at that stage, if you rang up fairly major companies, you would very often be talking to people over sixty who are in their customer support team.

Of course, if we’re talking to our partner and if we’re talking to our bank manager, different aspects of our personality come out. But there is a consistency.

Personal boundary language is the key way that humans navigate the world.

We use it almost as soon as we meet someone. And one of the problems with recruitment is that we quite often use it with minimal evidence to back it up. So we make judgment about people as they walk into the room.

Different aspects of Paris become more or less strong and important as society and culture change.

Leading to different emerging behaviors.

And that’s why we can have these generational typologies like baby boomers, the x generation.

Society emphasizes certain ways of behaving, and these are accentuated with individual personalities.

Personallyality drives the way we behave.

We can learn to flex behavior, and we can learn to flex it skillfully. In other words, how our personality expresses itself is something we can train and change.

And personality is a continuum.

Much thinking about abnormal psychology based on hard boldness between normal and abnormal between illness and normality is based on a wrong physical model. It is based on the physical model of illness.

And that’s quite important because some of you will know who who have used it. There’s a there are a a growing number of tests. Many of them drawing on the work of Hogan, the American ecologist, which start looking at aberrant behavior within the workplace. In other words, I prefer to think about it clinical psychology light.

It’s very important that we understand what we’re talking about there, that we’re not talking about illness. We’re talking about the way personality expresses itself in behavior in difficult situations.

So my model is this, personality drives behaviour.

For want of a better metaphor, personality is the engine that drives the vehicle by which we negotiate the world.

The engine behaves pretty consistently that it grows old wears out occasionally suffers break down occasionally gets a new oil change, occasionally gets a new part added, but it’s a big job to mend or change the engine and it needs specialist knowledge and or experts.

The vehicle that personality drives, which is the behavior we use to negotiate the world, changes all the time depending on the weather, the road service, the characteristics of the journey, but we are in control of the vehicle and can with enemies change how it operates how fast it goes.

How slowly it goes, what its pure consumption is, whether we’re racing someone to get somewhere on time, or whether we’re going a slow meander looking at the country side. So personality is the engine which drives the vehicle behaviour.

So that was the first thing I said I’d talk about, what is actual personality, and I’ve given you a number of different views from people who are far more qualified than I am, and followed it up with a view, which is a very pragmatic view taken not from an academic view, but from a view as a coach, an interviewer, and somebody who actually scrolls quite highly on empathy or most personality tests.

What I want to do now is go on to second part of what I said I’d talk about, which is where are we now?

What sort of ways do we have to measure this thing called personality at the moment? What approaches do we have?

Now, I’ve sent this to to to grant some other people at five thirty five just to make sure this is okay because I’m talking about some of the FASET V’s competitors here as well and different approaches.

What I want to do here is begin to say that all of these tools have some usefulness, but some are better at some things than others, and some things should not be used for certain things.

What I’ve done is I’ve divided in a fairly standard way, personality tools up into four different types, type measures, excessive measures, projected measures, and trait of factor measures. And at the end, I’ve just mentioned three or four other approaches.

I’m gonna go through this, then I’ll start talking about some of the future technologically and societally led to developments in in, personality testing, which are gonna be happening, and in fact are already happening.

The type approach again, makes linguistic sense.

We think in type ways, and we use type words type typical. That sort of thing.

This approach draws on Young’s psychological textbook of nineteen twenty three, which is actually in some ways and more nuanced, but not necessarily easy to read account in which Young, not based on research evidence, but more on an almost philosophical approach said that human beings fall into a number of types.

The most famous version of the type approach to personality assessment and the one most widely used, for instance, but by coaches, is the Myers Briggs type indicator.

And I don’t know if this is true, is probably not far off the truth. It’s generally regarded to be the most widely used test in the world.

There are a number of other versions, of, of type approaches to personality including ones which try and overcome some of the criticisms of it. There’s a company called TeamFocus in Maidenhead, the UK that have done quite a lot of work in trying to apply what you originally wrote much more nuanced and subtly into a type measure.

It may always not only does it draw on young, it draws on ancient psychology on Gallan’s humours, and as I say it’s much criticized.

There are indeed books written about it and if you want a copy of the reading list, there’s some very funny books written about some of the ways in which these assessment were developed.

The type approach in effect says that there are these four scales extroversion versus introversion, which is the highest, and most influential aspect of your type personality, sensing versus intuition, thinking versus feeling and judging versus perceiving.

And anybody that takes the test scores on those scales.

There is a criticism, and what you get at the end of it and what most people come away with, perhaps this is part of the problem. They come away with four letters, and those letters they are often described themselves as describing their personality.

So for instance, my four letter type is I for introvert, n for intuition. I know I’ve emboldened either, but it’s actually the end that’s used there for obvious reasons to prevent confusion.

I’m an INF feeling, P perceiving, And once at NCI Management College, when I was given the Myers Briggs type indicator when I was about twenty five, twenty six, I was actually paraded around as the only person they’d ever met who had that, type measure and was a director of a company. They thought this was absolutely extraordinary. Whereas everybody else that they had at the college had the type ESTJ extrovert sensing thinking judging, which is typical of people who are in things like sales.

Now it’s really important to say here that that simplicity has been much criticized. You know, does all Marsbury do divide the human race up into sixteen types and so you’re one of those? Well, no, it doesn’t. It doesn’t quite say that. Does it say if you score INFP, that’s what you are? No, it doesn’t. It says this is your default preference, but you have ways of flexing that of, depending on what the situation is, in the way that I described earlier on.

The company that publishes it has developed things called type dynamics how the different, how your different scores influence each other and type development, how your type changes over time in that way again, which I discussed, not changes dramatically, but changes more. Since I used to work for a company, you know, I used to work with, I think, is on the the call today.

I used to work for a company, and at that stage, I had a very, very high introversion score. It was ninety eighth percentile.

Since I’ve worked for myself, which I do now, it has come down slightly. Hasn’t changed. I haven’t suddenly become a raging extrovert or my preference isn’t raging extroversion, but my score on introversion has come down we do change over time.

So while the criticisms of MBTIs, it’s simplistic and seduces people into thinking, I’m INFP, that’s what I am.

One of the worst things that you can find is that some people wonder around with t shirts with their own BTI types on them saying this is what I am. I only get on with people who have got this type. That isn’t what it means. It’s more subtle than that. Nonetheless, it does divide people up in the human race up into types.

There are some big technical problems with, Myers Briggs type intercoding type measures in general.

And I’m not gonna go into this in too much detail. At the risk of sounding like I’m advertising, I do explain it in my book on coaching and and and testing. And, I go into quite a lot of detail there about how this works, but just to give you a, a, a, a flavor, almost everything that happens in the world follows the normal curve of distribution.

You know, at the extremes you get less things in the middle, you get more things. You know, height, weight.

I’m not so sure about income, but I happen to have had arguments about that, but, you know, Basically, most natural, events in the world follow this shape.

But measures don’t, and nobody knows why. Or I’ve never seen a a real account y. So technically underlying it, it does something differently than almost any other natural measure.

Until that’s solved, there will always be technical people who say this we don’t know quite what we’re doing here.

What good publishers and the Myers Briggs company are very careful about this, say, is you can never use a time measure for decision making like recruitment only for developmental activities like coaching type measures are not used to compare people. They’re used to describe people and help them to understand themselves.

In fact, there’s a book called please understand me which is basically a type measure in book form.

And that re is reflected in the fact that often the only assessment coaches and development staff know is the Myers Briggs type indicator or another type measure.

Ipsitive measures are also known by cope and are actually used in recruitment, although I would argue, I shouldn’t be.

What do I mean byitative measures?

They allow you to rank not rate certain qualities.

In other words, you say which of these is the most important, which of these is the least important to you, which is of these is the strongest in you, which of these is the least strong.

Rank them, say which is first and which is last.

We actually use this rating again throughout our life, And almost all of the iterative measures that are available are written very simply in very simple language and engage people very well.

Some of you who know a lot about assessment will have come across these sorts of assessments.

And the most popular that I know is a test called the PPA published by a company called Thomas International.

Now again, this is highly criticized and there are reasons for this.

And I’m now going to just say a little bit about what an iterative test does.

And why it’s Christmas almost.

I’m gonna move on to this.

Typically, in a initiative test, you will get some sort of item like this Rank the following items one to four where one indicates your strongest quality, and it should say four indicates your least strong quality. So I made a mistake there.

You’re not rating them. You’re ranking them. So if you say, well, my strongest quality is the ability to influence. I’ll call it one. I cannot use one for any other of those qualities.

I have to use something different.

Now if I do that, somebody might continually put ability to influence at the top of their ranking, but it will not give us any idea about actually how strongly they feel it’s their strongest quality.

Whereas if you go to a sort of item like that, which is from, a rating scale such as FASF five, and you say for each statement indicate how accurate it described to you using the scale at where one is not accurate till five is completely accurate. Let’s say in meetings, my opinion usually carries the day. I say five. I’m really good at that.

The next one, no one listens to me. I can still use five. I can use four. I can three or two or one.

If there were forty items like this in the test, the total score that I ascribed to myself could be two hundred or forty.

And I could say that certain qualities are very, very strong to me and maybe the strongest score I give, but they would be very, very, very different from somebody else who also gives it a strongest score for me.

Somebody might typically, I’ll give you an example. Typically men score assessment measures at the extremes far more than women do. So in other words, a man might say in meetings, my opinion usually carries the day, which is my ability to influence, and a man might score five or four all the way through, whereas a woman might consider that to be their strongest suit, but score it three all the way through because they just don’t give four or five scores. As a matter of fact, I’ve identified. I’ve never given a five score in a test in my life.

What you can begin to do is look at the differences between people and start investigating them.

In an initiative measure, you can’t tell how much stronger one person is than another in a particular area.

And that means you can’t compare them.

That’s the criticism of iterative ranking measures.

Whatever the publishers of those measures say, it is very difficult to compare people on an iterative measure whereas on a rating scale, you can always compare them.

I should say that view has been challenged by, by a by more recent by a number of of, experts in the area.

And again, in the document which I produced on this, you can I’ve given a couple of references to where they’ve talked about this sort of issue, but Ipsiting measures, which are extremely popular, should never be used to compare people. They are, however, extremely useful in helping people think about themselves, which is why I’ve used them in coaching.

IPitative measures are very, very criticized.

As I say, because the problem with rating in most ipsystive tests is we don’t know the string of the rating.

The other reason they’re quite often criticized is because a lot of mobility around a measure called the disk a, a model called the disc model, which is the name of the different things it’s measured on, which was developed by a guy called William Walton.

William Martin Martin, in addition to inventing the disk measure, also created wonder woman for comics, and there are films and books about his unconventional life.

He’s Again, in this, document, which I’ve produced, which you can have a look at, there’s some there’s some very interesting books about him, and some of them are are scandalous and scurrilous, some of them are, my silly.

The disc measure is, is is difficult because it’s not quite clear if DIS measures four different scales or if it just measures two different scales because two of them are just the opposite of the other two. So of necessity, scoring high on one would score low on the other.

And if you wanna read more about this, there’s a, there’s a very good paper called Spiercer and Spiercer.

By Johnson Estel written in nineteen eighty eight, which just basically said, Epsitive measures are not worth the paper they’re written on.

But Peter Savel, one of the great psychometricians of the UK, in psychometric testing critical studies, made a strong argument that if you do certain things withitative measures, they can be extremely useful. And the most important thing about them is they are very difficult to fake.

In other words, it’s very difficult to manipulate your scores to give a false impression about what you’re like.

I’m not going to go into this in two detail. These are largely clinical measures, but another approach to clinical assessment is projective tests, and most of you will have seen something like this. If not in your work, then on Fraser, the television series. In fact, in the new series of Fraser, the psychologist Fraser has, Rorshach ink blot wallpaper up in his flat, which I think would drive me mad This is this is used very, much more clinically than it is in occupational or educational testing.

Although I do know that, one of the Scandinavian Airlines used to use, Rorschach for recruitment partly to see how people would react under pressure.

More it’s you have to be very highly trained to interpret the open ended inter palpitations of how somebody reacts to an ink blot. And the publishers have done quite a lot of work recently to make a more standardized way of interpreting results.

All projected motions are not ink blocks. Some of them, you have to complete a a sentence, some you have to do a story, sometimes you have to draw something. And in other words, you’re given a stimulus and you project into it, and what you project says something about your personality.

These are much less widely used in Anglo Sakson, in American and and UK, psychology, Danferences they used in Eastern Europe, where, projective testing techniques are still used quite widely, largely due to the fact that, probably it’s more that psychology is more influenced by psychoanalysis and therapy.

The final one I just want to mention now is is in many ways, the one that I grew up on the one that Fasec five use, which is trait measurement.

A trait is defined in all the tech book as a long lasting personality characteristic as opposed to a state.

A state is what happens if England lose the cricket World Cup final.

As much of what they didn’t even get to it, so you get terribly disappointed for a while and then forget about it and have something to eat.

A person, a trait is a long lasting personality characteristic, and traits are created by factor analysis, which is looking at lots of different aspects, want for better when boiling them down using a statistical package until you get one thing which you can measure. And if you look at, The original trait based tests, which are over seventy or more years old, you can measure over time that there are tests, which measures a sixteen, fifteen, five, three and one trait.

The sixteen personality factor questionnaire, as I said, as it says measures sixteen, factors, but actually you can boil it down to five factors, and facet five measures five factors.

And there are many, many usually, actually, the number of traits that you measure is not because of differences. It depends how close, how micro screened you want to be in looking at somebody’s personality and how complex you want the analysis to be. Any sixteen personality factor or thirty two personality factor test, you could, if you want, analyze down to five factors.

Or you can expand it out.

And there are lots of, of, of, of trait measures, sixteen p f, the Hogan, which measures for want to better work the way in which people react under pressure.

The occupational personality questionnaire, which has an initiative and a trait measure, neo, which was the first five factor questionnaire, but was much more clinically oriented, I think, than than some other facet five, which is a very, which I love because it it’s an operational operationalization of a of a very, very technically, strong model for a specific use.

My, MMPI, the Minnesota Multiphasic personality inventory, which is the major in which clinical psychologists measure aspects in in, in, in the US and CPI, the California psychological inventory, but there are many, many, many more.

Great. The five factor model is the best research most robust model of personality in the world combining science with the ability to be complex or simple. So for instance, a five factor test might measure five factors. And if you want to, you can then go down to facets aspects of those factors, which you can look at separate scores for. You can collapse it up or collapse it down as you want to, and look in more or less complexity at the answers somebody has given.

The most extraordinary, the most useful thing about a trade, test is that you can use them to compare people and to help people understand themselves. Second, use them in coaching, development, recruitment. You can use them much more adaptively than you can with type.

And they’re more defensible than iterative measures.

That said, of course, there are positives and negatives about any model in in in the human sciences and their aspects of trade, in the past, trade tended to talk an indecipherable technical language That is less true now. One of the reasons I even got involved with Vaset five was because it managed to have solved that problem and was talking business language very often to business people.

So you see, if if you look at a trait based assessment, and you get the report at the end, you might get a profile something like this that this person is, highly aggressive, unusually combined with that highly sleepy.

So this is a sleepy aggressive person. I tend to get but not particularly creative or conventional, pretty certain about themselves, rather romantic, slightly easy going and very idealistic.

I’m just trying to think what that sort of person would be like.

An aggressive, idealistic, sleepy person.

If any of you can think of anybody that that matches, let me know I just made that up. So you but you anyway, you get this this sort of profile almost invariably with, some sort of banding to show how certain you can be about the score and what range the score lives within And then driven by that algorithm of those scores, you will get a more or less illuminating word based or infographic based report.

Are there other ways of measuring personality? Yes, there are.

Those four are the four main ones, and if you know anything about, about, the publishing industry, you’ll know that those four ones are the ones which make the most money and also are most widely used. These are some of the others, personal construct theory, which is a rather complex way, but a rather wonderful way of allowing the person being assessed to decide they’re going to be assessed on.

There’s a very interesting book about it, which allows you to practice and work out how to create, in effect, a custom built assessment on those aspects of a person that are important to them. And if you have the time to learn it and the time to use it, it’s a wonderful system for in effect getting very, very deeply into somebody’s values into what somebody cares about. That said It is rather complex and doesn’t suit a lot of situations.

Behaviorrous approaches tend to ignore personality whatsoever and just look at what people do.

They haven’t got an interest in what’s going on inside somebody, and I suppose I grew up in the publishing era of the of behaviorist approaches within, within assessment. And in my early years, I published behaviorist based assessments for schools until such time as a teacher almost, decided to physically assault me at an exhibition for daring to publish a book in which it said, that children were machines, they operate, and all we’re interested in is the outputs.

I did manage to explain to the person. I didn’t actually agree with that, but I published it because it was an expert that was writing about it. By narrow of behaviorist approaches have fallen out of out of, popularity nowadays, so you you tend to find them less.

In certain countries, handwriting is used to analyze, personality, and it’s argued that in those countries where handwriting is still taught, differences in the way people write means something.

It is particularly used in France from what I know I have my extreme doubts about the validity of that. And as for astrology, I don’t just have doubts. I know that it doesn’t mean anything, but astrology is still used for, by some people to explain people’s personality, and I once got a job I found out afterwards because I was born under the birth sign of Germany they decided that that was a good thing to have, but, I do know people who use it, and I think it’s almost invariably a disaster.

So if you want to choose a test, certainly choose a type measure, but use it for and development, not for recruitment and decision making.

Ipsitivity, the disk measures those things are really useful in creating discussion, particularly with skeptical clients, which they talk very simple language. They, they make their point very easily. But be very careful about the limits of the exited measure you’re using.

Projective measures I I think are only really used in clinical use and only after very, very detailed long training. Otherwise, they become very inaccurate. So you need, but they’re very good. Those who people who use them are very, very expert in using them, but they tend to take a more psychoanalytic viewpoint. Which doesn’t suit a lot of situations.

I use Sorry. I’m just gonna jump in. Yeah. Go on. Yeah. Sorry, there. We’ve just had a question from Alan who’s ask the enneagram.

It’s an assessment tool, but what kind of tool, assessment is it, and also does it have any is there any validity around it? I’ve never actually used it. I believe it, other people might know better than me. I think it comes from, Youngian psychology. I think it comes from that which is why it’s used very, very widely in religious organizations.

I I happen to know because I’ve had some involvement with it. It’s used very widely for instance in the Catholic church and the Protestant church because I think it’s seen as a more taking spiritual issues more into account than some of the other tests. I think it’s, as I said, I’m not an expert in it, but I think it stems from Youngian type measures. Yeah.

With that, because spiritual kind of component, yeah. And it’s one it’s one of the things I love about, about Young’s approach. Is that he does take those things seriously. And for a lot of our clients, they are important issues.

So I think we ignore them at our peril. But as I said, I’ve never used the enneagram, but I do know a couple priest, a one archbishop who who has actually used them, in coaching, and also in helping people decide about their future. Mhmm. Okay.

And then on a similar note, actually, just circling back to the handwriting and astrology, think there are other things.

But is there any validity around those two concepts at all?

I’ve never seen any, research which shows that there’s any validity. I do know one clinical psychologist who developed, an astrological engine, a piece of software to define your future behavior and personality from from your astrological side. I’ve never seen any, and and I don’t believe there is any. I do I have got a couple of French, psychologists friends who do actually use it.

But if you think about it, it would become even less valid nowadays when a lot of people don’t use handwriting at all.

If you think about it, there’s a a whole generation’s coming through that if only I’ve used keyboards or or largely keyboards, Now there is actually a very interesting test called the cognitive processes profile, which uses the way you use a keyboard to assess your personality, or rather have what the time scale of your thinking is and how strategically you think called, as I said, it’s called the cognitive processes profile. If anybody wants to know a little bit more about it, get in touch with me, and I can send you a little bit more information about it. But Frankly, a lot of people, don’t write with their hand in mind, so I can’t actually see how handwriting would would actually predict a lot of things. Cool.

Cool. Yeah. Thank you. Alright.

Fabulous like FASET five. And I suppose I would say this being on here. Are the workhorse of personality testing. You can use one test like Fastetify, but also sixteen PM, which is what I’ve used quite extensively in the past.

I’ve used Hogan and things. I can use it in development in coaching and in selection.

And the issue, the important issue here is to choose the test using criteria. So from my point of view, if you’re going to choose a test to use, The first thing to look at for my point of view is the report.

Is what the report saying using a language which, which fits the situation in which you’re testing. Does it fit that age?

Does it represent its findings in a suitable style? You know, is it to use words? Does it use pictures that use numbers?

And is it personal? Because I share reports with my people who are tested.

Are the questions relevant to the cope sheet. There’s some terrible examples of tests which have been adapted from clinical use to occupational use where people have objected to items, which just don’t seem relevant.

Does the report and the test suggest ways in which you can address what the report finds? Is it action oriented or is it just a description?

The numbers, whether the thing measures what it says it measures and whether it will continue to measure what it says it measures in different circumstances, we’ll we’ll show you that you’re being that there’s an accuracy in the measurement.

Design becomes an important issue and I’ll come on come on to that in a second or two.

But in choosing a test, you should really look and take quite a lot of time thinking about, these sort of issues. And again, just by chance, Gront and I have been working on a white paper for the European test partnership group, which is how do you choose the test, right test for your purpose?

It’s only in in draft form at the moment, but if any of you would like a copy of it in its draft form and will be prepared to comment on it for us, that we can get it right. It goes through a lot of these things in more detail about how you go about choosing a test.

In my view, if you’ve got one test that really suits what you do, you should always have one or two backups.

So I always think of your testing Albery as a toolkit that you need more than just one test, and it worries me when I meet coaches who only know about Myers Briggs.

They could sooner or later, they will find a situation where Myers Briggs doesn’t work or where it’s not appropriate.

And I think that anybody who’s using test should should have at least one or two in their Almiru.

Now over whether time’s getting on, So I’m not gonna do you can have copies of this later on, which is a history about how we got to where we are at the moment.

And I’m now gonna talk a little bit about what the future holds for us.

And I quote here one of my heroes. He’s a screenwriter, called William Goldman, he wrote the princess bride. I think he wrote butch Cassie in the Sandance kid. He’s a very, very famous screenwriter, he wrote a very good book called Adventures in The Screen Trade from which I learned how to write screenplays, which at one stage was what I wanted to do.

And in his book, he says nobody knows anything, not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what’s going to work. The bottom line of it, what he says is nobody can predict the future, and it’s one of the heiresses of modern life that there’s too many people watching around saying, oh, why you know exactly what’s gonna in the future. We don’t. We know the rough road of travel, but there are always things that are gonna change, odd things are gonna happen. So I’m now gonna have a look at four or five ways in which the future will change testing, personality testing, but the proviso is that nobody knows. The other proviso is that technically there are things already happening, but those we can see, and we’ve seen over the last eighteen months, just how quickly the technical adaptability and capacity of technology, digital technology, and artificial intelligence have changed dramatically and change the scene about what we’re looking at.

So what’s gonna happen? Well, one of the thing that’s already happening is that artificial intelligence and certain aspects for the digital world have already changed testing even if we don’t realize it.

Once by the time, reports were generated by computer testing purely by branching trees, you know, if they said this go here, if you say this go there, if they did this go there, and reports looked pretty clunky.

Those computerized reports look pretty clunky. And we’re not very subtle about thinking about how somebody had actually answered.

Already, there were a number of tests on the which use artificial intelligence and data mining in interpreting test responses and producing reports. And that is only gonna get more and more subtle as it goes along.

What that has also done is prevented some mistakes.

The major mistakes that happened in the interpretation of educational tests when I was an educational test publisher were the fact that people were manually scoring them, and they were making mistakes in working out what children’s ages were.

Think about that. It wasn’t how they looked at the results of the things. They made a mistake in working out somebody’s birthday, how old they were, and therefore they compared their results with the wrong age of children in in the cohort.

And therefore they thought children rather very, very clever or very, very slow when they were neither.

So AI and data mining is improving the accuracy within which we can interpret what’s going on in in in test results.

They’re changing the way items are presented Again, once upon a time, and it was a strong crystal of personality tests. A lot of personality tests were were, if if you were a party, would you, one, two, three, four, choose the one, which is most likely or choose the one, which is least likely? They were forced choice.

We’re now, as I will show you, in a little while, beginning to boost tests, which use infographics, moving items, films, website in order to present things to to people and have a look at how they react to it as a way of understanding their personality.

This is the third one is something I’ve talked about quite a bit, which is why don’t why is feedback to live via printed reports?

A lot of people aren’t used to reading a lot of words. And I say this as somebody who grew up as a copywriter and and has written a lot of words in my life.

Why can’t we deliver feedback on somebody’s personality by showing them examples of behavior or examples of different report, showing people films, cartoons, games, things like that, which show much more vividly what their personality is like.

And because of the way we can gather data via digital means via computers, we can now update tests as we go along.

Every time you somebody feels in a test on the computer, the publisher will probably update the data that they have there, and we’ll be able to update changes and look at changes in the way people are responding to a test.

And already, And for some years now, certain computerized tests have not been delivered as they were written. They’ve been created on the fly.

In other words, a series of rules have been written into a database, and when somebody goes in to take the test, the computer system develops test items, questions based on that rule base, which are completely different from the questions given to the person next door to them or down the road or in the next country. So computerized adaptive testing, item generation engines have been around now for quite a long while.

But nobody’s really talked about them an awful amount.

This was a real breakthrough.

And Michael Kazin who is now at Stanford but was at Cambridge a while ago is, the person who broke the idea that you could use social media to predict people’s personalities.

And in two thousand seventeen as part of his PhD, It got a hundred and thirty thousand people to give him access to their Facebook, pages. Gave each of them a five factor personality test and using a gigantic cooking pot of a computer started correlating what he found. And he discovered that there were certain aspects of, Facebook, which is what he used, which were more predictive than certain traditional psychometric tests. Unfortunately, his work was then used by Cambridge Analytica to influence people in the American action, and it became currently controversial.

But Kaczynski himself has always warned against this, And his argument is that if you observe what people are doing online, you’re actually watching real behavior, not people answering questions about behavior. You’re actually watching people behave, make choices, express themselves project in, ingest in real time, and even better they’re leaving a digital trial.

Just to give you an idea about what he’s talking about.

In two thousand two two thousand twelve, We we produce two point five billion gigabytes each day.

I’ll have to read this out because it’s quite complicated.

It’s not quite complicated, every moment. Printed into a point type, this would make a stack of a four sheets four hundred million kilometers high.

That’s for each day.

That’s three hundred and fifteen megabytes for every person on earth.

By two thousand and twenty five, we’ll produce two hundred times more data.

That paper tower is now eighty thousand million miles high.

So what he’s saying is that what you have done have there is data that we cannot dream of which has been created by real behavior.

Can this be ignored as a way of understanding people’s personality, the engine of their behavior.

And to do this, that new software models have been created, so you can look at Python and R these these new models, which is of doing simplistic statistics, do very complex statistics to do this. The other block side of this is how do people react to it? If we set is do people find this serious?

Do people find this acceptable that and there are privacy and professional aspects of this, which have to be well in mind, which I’ll come back to. I’m gonna move on quickly. Sirius gaming, is a bit like the old thing of using intro exercises where you’ve got gay people’s samples of work, got them to run through it and then mark them, but you do it using a game on the computer. And serious gaming is used all over the place. Now it’s used particularly in medical recruitment and medical training as well.

Arctic and very simplistically, if you look on the left, you can see, a question based idea of how you would measure something and on the right hand side, a task based. And if you really wanted to, you could then move across you could animate that and turn it into a game.

And increasingly, companies are beginning to piece games in which they say there are huge numbers of data points within the game in which we measure what decision somebody makes, how many, how people do something. The real problem with these things is that those companies are very, very reticent about letting you know how those serious games work, how they’re actually measuring what they claim to be measuring.

Robert Henry, who used to publish Myers Briggs’s type integrators written a very good paper, which again I referenced, in which he says ultimately, physiology is going to be the key to psychology.

And physiology is a key to our personality and also how our personality is being affected by our environment.

So the way we speak, the tone of our voice, the language we use when we’re speaking, will tend to measure certain aspects of, for instance, how we’re reacting to stress, and therefore instruments like Alexa could be able to start reflecting back to you.

Oh, by the way, and you sound a bit stressed at the moment. Are you okay or alternatively measuring other things about you. And Robert McHenry says, actually wearables are the biggest shoe and mobile smartphones.

My perception is that this is already happening that people are already experimenting with this and that some of the evidence is that for younger people, This is a much better way of getting feedback on their behavior and personality than meeting someone else, which is interesting.

And the big question for which nobody knows the answer despite what people say, and by the way, the cats are just appearing, is AI and the intelligent machine.

Now we know that this experiments in this started in nineteen forty’s.

And then it’s very good at the the artificial intelligence and machines are very good at recognizing patterns. Like number plates, and that’s why our streets are full of, software and cameras that recognized number plates because the research into that was already going on in the nineteen fourth place.

I’m just gonna search up the door.

Sorry about that.

Those of you who live in the UK, you might have already seen on television that therapy companies are already offering digital therapy and advertising it. In other words, you talk to a machine and machine analyzes what’s going on with you.

And if you read the research into this area, you’ll find that a lot of people developing psychological assessments along these lines are using credit risk assessment and stock market prediction as the model for how they predict behavior among human beings because they say the way you do it is really, really similar, and the statistics are really, really similar.

There’s all sorts of trends going on at the moment. I’ve just mentioned somebody that meta have actually programmed certain. They hate certain personalities into their AI systems so that you can if you want, get AI answering as though it was Paris Hilton or snoop dog. There’s a move away from neural networks to the individual neuron, how that operates.

There’s been some attempts to measure the personality of machines that seem to be acting intelligently by using the rule shack to see if they have a personality.

The two worries are that machines don’t evolve and don’t have sex, which is one of the ways in which personality is passed on and and psychology is passed on. And also that machines have no moral sense, and there’s a move back to read Colberg’s moral psychology and how moral ideas develop.

So there’s a lot going on in this sort of area, but there is no doubt that for instance, matter who employ a large number of psychologists are working on at the moment, and see if this is an opportunity.

The digital positives, so there are new types of data gathering, you can measure new areas.

There’s new types of reporting.

You can continuously update norms.

There’s a sense that this has got high ecological validity.

There’s an emphasis on prediction that’s becoming rather than just description.

And there’s a speed.

On the other hand, if you look at the research done by a number of charities, that certain people of a certain age have a real fear of technology.

And I’ve just suddenly started thinking, okay, a lot of us have to have, professional insurance if we’re using test. Just in case we make the wrong decision or offer somebody the wrong information. Like if a computer tells you to do something, can you sue it?

What professional organization do those computers belong to?

Everybody I know that’s developing these materials has got data scientists in very senior positions, and very few of them have psychologists in very senior positions. That’s not exclusive, but that’s increasing in the case, and there is a worry that psychologists are being factored out.

And the more danger there is held digitally, the more danger of tsunami leaks and thefts, and this becomes a really serious issue.

So what is the direction of travel of future assessment of personality?

How we get the data on which we make judgements is changing? But how we ensure our judgments are valid, reliable, and accurate stays the same, we still need to use statistical methods to say, we are measuring something that we say, and it is accurate.

In reviewing innovation, we should not be seduced away from this latter check by good design or big brands, and that’s particularly true of gamification of serious gains.

They look great but you still need to ask, how are you measuring personality using this?

And a lot of the people involved are not psych companies, though they employ psychologists, and one has to ask who is actually creating this, and what is their understanding of human personality?

What are their preconceptions and do they understand the models and the disagreements about it that have happened. And the growth of very simplistic Disk based Epsitive measures by people who make them look nice using technology is a real worry at the moment because they are being marketed as recruitment materials.

So the direction of travel is that we’re being driven by technological innovation developments in psychology and changes in wider society.

And the specifics I’ve mentioned those four or five different areas aren’t separate. They’re all gonna mix up together, the Kaczynski, model, for instance, I can imagine we’ll generate websites in which you will be able to look at your own personality as analyzed from a social media activity before too much longer.

And that was my presentation, and I think I’ve finished almost on time. Something can tell me.

We’ll allow we’ll allow that, Ian. Thank you so much. A brilliant, the insightful sessions, they thank you. You are a font of knowledge.

If anyone has any questions, then, feel free to unmute yourself or pop it in the chat box, and I can read it out for you.

Take a few moments.

But, no, thank you. Thank you, Ian, again, for taking the time to share your expertise with us this afternoon.

I do, do ask for that list of, other things which, link in because I had to skate over quite a lot of stuff, and it’s worth looking at some of the, issues. Secondly, I’m sure if you haven’t got it, if I’d be happy to give you my email address, and I’m happy for you to have it. If you want to talk it on on my my Zoom account or my on my Facebook because I’m quite happy to talk over these in much more detail. Some of them are can be quite complex.

Some of them are quite simple, actually. I know have been over complicated but I’m really happy to look at this because I think it’s it’s, as I say, personality is one of the ways in which human beings negotiate with each other, one of the ways in which we negotiate the complex things that happen in society. And I think it’s what’s gonna happen in this personality assessment area is incredibly important.

Yeah. Definitely. Thank you. That’s a really kind view to offer. Thank you, Ian.

Hello. Just to and just to thank you from me, as well, Ian, I know that this, we ask a lot of you and ask a lot of you personally, but you are, really well respected, I think, within, you know, the whole testing public publication and particularly in the ETPG in the work that you’re doing there, and you referenced that a couple of times. And I think it’s such a great body of work as we, As we come to terms with a shift in the way that testing and assessment is actually going forward, but also the way that data is represented But just recently, I think what alarms me more, and it’s probably another conversation is, something that we need to consider in in our work that we’re doing together in the ATPG is the over application or the the generous nature of some practitioners and the way that they are high personality, to everything and a hammer that they use, and and the way that they address personality particularly, Obsitive and typologies, where there’s maybe not enough education around the value of a five factor model.

Now I’m very biased in a trade based model, obviously, but I think it is a huge consideration. It doesn’t measure the whole person. Is it being used wisely?

How will we monitor as test providers, the sensible application of personality for the right moment not over relying on it for areas that it it can actually do some damage.

And in in that way, we may be undermining the whole nature of personality testing, by dumbing down the, it’s fun, it’s quick, and it’s simple, that’s colorful.

For actually what it’s meaningful should be impactful insightful and enduring.

And the way that businesses then, and individual coaches and, developers choose the right tool for a longer term impact.

That’s pretty range.

No. I think that’s right. I I and and I’m I’m biased. I’ve used almost all of those assessments, actually, and I I grew up but the first test I published was the sixteen PF, a a trade based personality test.

I agree with you. The paper we’re writing, and I’ve sent you a draft of it, grant, One of the things I say there is, one, before you do anything, decide why you’re using a test, and if you can do it another way, do it another way, only use the test when you have to, and then use it with, you know, and then it can be incredibly insightful. It can be really helpful. And as a coach, you know, I’ve used assessments and, Sometimes it just makes somebody realize something, but you should always you should always think about why you’re doing it, whether it’s the best way to do it.

The other thing I’d say I know you’ve got a you feel this, and I I feel it the same. Sometimes some tests are described as being too complicated or too complex. Why does it have to be too complicated or too complex. I don’t think they have to be. I think they can be subtle, and that’s something different. So the reports from a really good test, and I would include FASF5 in in this, are subtle. They’re not complicated.

And dumbing down to trying to say that you can understand the whole of a human being from thirty two adjectives is nonsense. Human beings are are more subtle and interesting than that, I think.

I’d absolutely agree. I think, you know, when you look at a typical five factor model with thirteen sub factors with a ten point scale is literally ten trillion combinations of personality that we take into account. If you’ve done that down just to sixteen combinations or four colors, I I have no issue with simplicity and with pragmatic content and how you navigate people to the educate really meaningful and impactful insights.

I do have an issue is that they’re not measuring the breadth the majesty of personality. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. Therefore, we, you know, is the individual in that coaching or development or the conversation getting a true and accurate representation of who they are.

And as we make difference, sense of the world through difference, are we able to meaningfully compare ourselves in in order not to not to assess or categorize, but to help us understand how we create, an appreciation for difference. And if anything in the world, just at the moment, with everything that’s going on, just that one small appreciation of difference I think we’ll go a long way more globally. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. I agree. I agree.

Right. I’ll be quiet now. I’ll go I’ll just forget.

Fabulous. Right. So do we have any other questions from anyone before we wrap this up.

Well, thank you so much again, Ian. Have a lovely evening afternoon wherever you all are in the world. And we’ll hopefully see you again soon.