On Personality Assessments: A Philosopher’s Perspective

I recently read in a professional journal that employers are increasingly using personality assessments to support recruitment, even when hiring interns.

This surprised me, as I’ve been sceptical about the usefulness of such assessments for years. The human mind remains largely unexplored, and perhaps it always will. Personality assessments, on the other hand, attempt to box human behaviour into specific categories such as ambition, sociability, analytical thinking, and intuition. There can be dozens of these factors, and at times, the results are even contradictory. It’s also possible, as highlighted in the journal’s example, that today’s test deems you unsuitable for leadership, yet a month later, you are found to possess excellent leadership qualities.

You might argue, of course, that suitability depends on the environment in question. While that’s true to an extent, but if the criteria involve fundamental leadership skills — claiming your space, showing others the way, thinking strategically, and having the courage to make and justify decisions — then the ability shouldn’t vary by industry.

Perhaps the comparison is flawed, but one might also view personality assessments as a form of instrumentalisation: in this world of specialisation, you are valuable only if you possess certain traits. One of the core ideas of Immanuel Kant, one of Europe’s greatest philosophers, is that a person is an end in themselves and should not be used merely as a means to an end. In modern philosophy, this principle has been extended to other animals than humans, also.

Having conducted these assessments for years, albeit with a sceptical outlook, I feel they reduce individuals to instruments for specific purposes. Another significant issue is that no one can definitively prove your test result to be either correct or incorrect. If you challenge the result, the assessor may simply point out that the outcome is based on your own answers and their professional interpretation of how you align with certain personality dimensions compared to others.

What I find puzzling is how poorly employers understand the role of expectations in performance. Expectations shape our ability to succeed. The so-called Pygmalion effect (or Rosenthal effect) describes a psychological phenomenon where higher expectations lead to better performance.

If your personality assessment yields “positive” results and the employer hires you based on these, you’re likely to succeed. Your "positive" results my well be incorrect, but it usually does not matter because of the expectation effect. Conversely, if you’re hired “for a lack of a better option” and some of your traits are categorised as “negative”, "poor" or "risky", you can be sure those traits will frame how your employer perceives you — even if the test result was “wrong.” Terms like “good”, “bad”, "negative", and “wrong” are in quotation marks here because there is no universally valid method to classify people in such absolute terms. Many approaches can lead to a successful outcome. A classic piece of anthropological wisdom reminds us that things can be done differently and still be done correctly.

Lastly, wouldn’t it only be fair for candidates, before signing their employment contract, to know the test results of their prospective manager? This might seem paradoxical for someone sc

eptical of assessments, but why should employers have the right to classify you based on your personality traits while you’re expected to blindly work under someone whose traits are unknown? The counterargument, of course, is that managers have been tested and deemed competent. Well then.

If you’re interested in learning more about the role of expectations, check out David Robson’s book The Expectation Effect (2021, Canongate Books). He begins with a verse from 17th-century poet-philosopher John Milton:

"The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven."