If you want to read an account of the lives of the researchers and entrepreneurs who developed the most popular personality tests of the last 150 years, this is the book for you. Annie Murphy Paul devotes most of her energies to detailing the personalities behind the tests, starting with promoters of phrenology in the nineteenth century, then moving on to the Rorshach inkblot test in the second chapter, followed by the MMPI, the Thematic Apperception Test, the Myers-Briggs Type Inventory (MBTI), and so on.

The Cult of Personality worries about the overuse and potential misuses of psychometric questionnaires, yet ends up doing a very poor job of demonstrating these dangers and the failure of personality testing. At the same time, Paul does manage to raise some legitimate concerns that employers enamored of such tests would do well to consider. Certainly, personality tests are now used by an enormous number of institutions for a remarkable variety of purposes, including career counseling and educational guidance, determining parental fitness in custody battles, determining competency to stand trial, school admission, and job placement.

In his 1956 book, The Organization Man, William Whyte warned about the stifling uniformity that personality tests imposed on American executives. Paul shares those concerns, and piles on many others. She says that those getting false positives in workplace testing may be turned away from jobs and other opportunities before having a chance to prove themselves; heavy use of testing “may reduce employers’ incentives to provide a constructive workplace”; and the intrusiveness of some of the questions carry the message that the potential employee can have no secrets from the employer. Furthermore, she says that recent scandals should suggest to employers that they are testing the wrong people.

Paul does us a favor by highlighting the absurdities in phrenology that are shared to varying degrees by later tests. Personality tests from phrenology to the NEO Personality Inventory appeal strongly to so many of us because they appear to make sense of a complex psychological reality, and often provide some form of validation. The weakness of the book—and it’s a major weakness—comes from the author’s failure to show clearly how research undermines all of the tests she attacks so vigorously and often derisively. She includes plenty of references at the end of the book, but leaves it to the reader to try to connect cited publications with particular claims.

Paul is not averse to contradicting herself. On p.131 she attributes part of the allure of the MBTI to its “comforting stability.” Not two pages later, she cites a study finding that less than a half of people taking that test were given the same type when they retook the test. Another kind of inconsistency turns up in the final chapter, where Paul comes out in support of the “Life Story Approach”, yet fails to provide evidence for its superiority over all the tests she has criticized. Even for executives wondering about the validity of personality testing, I cannot recommend this book. As other reviewers have noted, a better source would be Stephen Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man.