Blogging as I Read

I'm thinking I may experiment and try blogging as I read. It would just be some thoughts on what I read for the day and doing this would give me some experience developing my writing, as well as keep me on track with reading more regularly. I don't read nearly as much as I should; I think the last two or three books I read I dragged out to a year or more- just because I don't get around to it that often or, when I do read, I find myself stopping and pondering. So it would also be good for my focus to make more of a discipline out of it. Maybe I'll give it a shot and either get on track well enough to where I can just finish a whole book and do book reviews, or I'll keep it up and see how it develops, and people who are just interested in reading book reviews can use the blog tags to filter for just those.

The Norton Psychology Reader edited by Gary Marcus; Ch. 14, "Personality Plus" by Malcolm Gladwell

Overview

"Personality Plus" is an article about personality testing, particularly in regard to assessing its usefulness and validity. Gladwell attempts to show particular shortcomings in both by showing limitations of personality testing in predicting certain behavior, and by discussing difficulties within the testing process.

He starts off by talking about a man who displayed bold, courageous behavior in war but who otherwise prior didn't seem to display any obvious signs of these personality traits. So the question Gladwell poses regarding the usefulness of personality tests is whether they could be used to identify such behavioral capacity in someone; he basically comes to the conclusion that in this respect personality tests are limited, partly because, in the beginning example, the person's behavior in consideration is so different, and seemingly contrary, from their usual behavior that even people who knew that person, as well as that person himself, wouldn't have come to the conclusion that he was someone who could display such behavior; and I guess the implication would be that personality tests don't do any better at getting past those appearances, so as to sufficiently be useful in the way considered.

Gladwell looks at Myers-Briggs testing but challenges it's usefulness in answering the question that the article is based on- whether personality testing could be used to find someone who could display behavior such as that given in the example. One, he challenges the way Jung's work was utilized by showing some ways in which its use was contrary to some of his thoughts; two, that in some estimates more than half the people who retest their Myers-Briggs typology get a different type. Then Gladwell goes on to look at another method of testing which attempts to get insight into someone's personality by stories that they construct from images they're given. The idea is that the insight gained isn't even something that the person in question is consciously aware of; but Gladwell challenges this form of testing because of the ambiguity of the interpretation process- that one could come up with interpretations that are just as seemingly consistent to the story but that are contrary to other possible interpretations.

To be clear- it seems that the thrust of his challenges to these personality assessments are not so much in their ability to come up with anything useful and accurate, but rather in their ability to be used in such a way as to address certain important questions such as whether we can determine by them whether someone would have the bold, courageous behavior as displayed by the man in the example, especially given that such behavior seems so contrary to their normal behavior. In this regard Gladwell is a man-on-a-mission, at least in the way he presents the information, and so is focused on what he finds to be the extent to which personality tests don't seem capable of doing that- which is basically the sentiment with which he ends the article.

Thoughts

(To be continued w/ some personal reflections and possible editing . . . )