New Personality Self-Portrait Text: Why you think, work, love

Personality inventories have always been a popular topic with people, as they hold within them the power to reveal to us something about our innate selves which we didn’t know before, and the possibility of helping us understand ourselves better, and in turn, making us happier people. As psychological knowledge advanced, in the United States personality inventories became a much-appreciated subject of books, articles and researches as most of these sought to exaggerate the impact of individualism while downplaying the effects of social and economic factors on upbringing and social behavior.

Personality tests have often been criticized personality tests and placed them on the continuum of astrology, fortune-telling and horoscopes, calling their content equally generic and simplistic in nature so that people find at least something in the tests which has a relation to their life or self, and they ignore the rest of the contents of the tests which do not have such a relation. Another critical view is that these tests overly simplify personality, which inherently is a complex phenomenon, and that these tests often lack scientific descriptors.

The conventional tests all contain a series of random questions and individual scores are tabulated based on the polarity of responses generated by these questions. While these tests maintain that no one person can fit completely and wholly into one category, yet the presentation of the personality types themselves is at best, rigid and highly categorical. However, John M. Oldham, a physician, psychiatrist, researcher, academic administrator and writer has developed a personality test which counters these criticisms and emerges as one of the more reliable assessment tests out of the various options available.

Oldham’s personality test also has an inventory of questions and just like other tests before it, it assigns points on answers and reveals personality types based on points. But it is better than other popular inventories because the personality types are not the conventional ones, derived from popular consensus, rather, they are based on psychiatric medical categories of personality disorders in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

Then, Oldham has identified “the common, utterly human, nonpatholocial versions of the extreme, disordered constellations” from this manual. He has followed this approach because according to him, personality disorders are the “extremes of normal human patterns”, basically, what personality comprises of. Hence, the book is based on the premise of defining the normal personality styles, the extreme versions of which translate into personality disorders.

Critics of Oldham’s book, which is a popularization, have said that while the test works fine, the examples Oldham has used can be distracting and misleading. The situations and reactions that have been attributed to these fictitious characters have the risk of not being taken seriously by people as their characterization lacks any cultural, socio-economic, environmental or ethical element, which is what makes characters believable. Another drawback of the test is that the validity is completely dependent on the responses of the individual, and there are no correction scales, which are present in other standardized personality instruments.

One of the strong points of this test is that the descriptors are short, yet clear in their meaning, and in all, manage to provide comprehensive coverage of all types of personalities. By giving a personality style-disorder continuum, Oldham has recognized that personalities are not just groups of character traits; rather, they exist on a spectrum which ranges from normal personality styles to their counterpart personality disorders.

The book is a popular one, and its intended audience is laypeople and not medical professionals. It provides a simple view on personality styles and to some people, might appear to be lacking the technical sophistication which more rigorously developed and standardized personality inventories might contain.